The birth of broadband TV

Three years ago, author Malcolm Gladwell had a bestseller on his hands with The Tipping Point. In it, he contends that ideas spread like viruses, until a new notion is embraced by culture. If that piece of amateur sociology is true, we may be looking back on January's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) as the tipping point for broadband broadcasting - as the confluence of ideas and technology that finally made the medium practical.

In the same sudden way HD televisions went from a distant eventuality to available at your local RadioShack, in the last few months broadband broadcasting seems to have taken on a substance and viability it lacked only a few seasons ago. And the field is wide open. Broadband is attracting the interest of established networks eager to hold on to their dominance, as well as new premium services and internet search engines keen for a piece of the action. What the future will look like is still uncertain, but it can no longer be doubted that the scales have begun an inevitable tip towards broadband broadcasting.

The search for cold, hard cash
Whether it's due to their ubiquity or their marketing budgets, it's the major search engines that have generated the most press when it comes to online video content. And the innovations just keep coming.

Yahoo! chose the CES to announce the pending launch of Yahoo! Go TV, an initiative that will blend the company's search capabilities with new video initiatives, and target pc-connected TV screens rather than computer monitors. The Go TV platform includes Yahoo! TV (which mimics a PVR), as well as a host of other capabilities. It has huge promise, but too little information is currently available for rights holders to fully understand how the platform will play out.

More immediately exciting is the latest from Google. First came Google Video - the video search engine that didn't actually play any video - which launched in Beta form about a year ago. Next came the Google Upload Program, a platform that allowed rights holders to upload content and have Google supply the bandwidth, but that didn't have a system in place to charge users.

At the CES, however, Google unveiled the final piece of the puzzle: the Google Video Marketplace. The Marketplace adds the ability to monetize and sell content to the Upload Program, and will finally make Google a platform professionals might consider. Video can be uploaded in MPEG-2 or -4 (among other formats), with applicable audio encoding, and then be downloaded for viewing on computers, portable video devices such as iPods and Sony PSPs, or be burned onto disk - whatever the rights holder allows. (Until the system is cracked.)

The Video Marketplace launched with several invited partners, including the NBA, CBS and Sony, but also includes significant non-fiction content, namely feature docs from filmmakers such as Ted Bonnitt (Mau Mau Sex Sex), Caveh Zahedi (In the Bathtub of the World) and Lerone Wilson (Aardvvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks). It also features hours of footage from the ITN Archive, Getty Images' Archive Film Collection and numerous Charlie Rose interviews with famous names like Henry Kissinger and Steve Jobs. Rights holders can set whatever value they want for viewings and downloads, although prices currently range from US$.50 to a few bucks.

Google meets Boondoggle
One of the docs on offer, Aardvvark'd, is a new 77-minute HD project from ny's Boondoggle Films. With a budget of about $12,000, the film follows the travails of four interns who are brought into the ny offices of Fog Creek Software to create a new program in 12 weeks. Fog Creek brought in Boondoggle principal Lerone Wilson to make a film that captured the drama and humor of their task, the end goal being a dvd that could be sold online.

The initial order to the manufacturer was 1,000 DVDs, but thanks to word-of-mouth on blogs and message boards, pre-orders hit 1,200 before a single disk was delivered. (Sales currently sit at about 4,000.) With new stock taking at least a week to arrive, Wilson says Google's invite to join the Video Marketplace was appealing, if only to relieve stress on the manufacturer. "I agreed to it," says Wilson, "but I did have some hesitation. With anything new, there is a great promise, but you never know if they will actually deliver. E-books were supposed to revolutionize libraries..."

While DVDs sell for $19.95, Aardvvark'd sells on Google for $6.99 (a completely arbitrary figure, observes Wilson), and the filmmaker keeps about $5. Wilson can opt-out at any time, but he notes that since this launch is as imperative to Google as it is to him, and the film is perfectly targeted to the early adopters of the Video Marketplace, he'll likely stick around. Wilson's one concern is quality; Google's current delivery capabilities are still limited.

Download numbers were not available at press time (two days after launch), but what has struck the filmmaker is the immediacy of the feedback. "People are posting while they are watching the film," says Wilson, stressing that he tries not to get worked up about negative posts. "From the beginning, we had guys tracking the project. Before there was even a trailer, and before the paperwork was done, there were people saying, 'This is going to be more boring than church. How can you make a movie about computer programming?'"