Local Storage Changes Everything

Those in the television industry tend to think of audio and video as always being real time. In part this is due to the need for the listener / viewer to see and hear the content in real time, and in part due to the legacy of the traditional devices the industry has had at its disposal to store and manipulate images. One area where real time treatment of television persists is in transmission, and it appears that this may be ripe for change. The reason is a combination of digital content that can be treated as a file, and the ever-increasing pervasiveness of local storage. This advent of local storage ever closer “changes everything.” — One only need look at the home PC to see the impact of 60, 80, and 160 GB drives and the ubiquitous presence of CD-ROMs and MP-3 music storage. All this local storage has transformed home computer use. For the Internet, companies like Akamai and Digital Island have transformed the speed and accessibility by placing literally thousands of servers at the edge of the 'net. Within TV stations the introduction of servers has transformed the infrastructure, workflow and maintenance requirements, much to the dismay of VTR manufacturers. Now, the ability to trickle or send content at non-realtime speeds to “local” storage that is close to the point of use has the potential to revolutionize distribution methodology. — This paper focuses on delivery of content for applications that can be grouped as “Narrowcasting” and that offer opportunities to both the traditional content delivery entities as well as to nontraditional new entities. The use of Narrowcasting to provide a new advertising venue, to create a consumer retail “environment” or to supply a corporate communications network for things like employee training will all hinge on the cost-effectiveness and control brought about by a nontraditional delivery and storage model. While it remains largely to others to talk about how this might affect the delivery of television programming from a television Network to affiliates or commercials to stations, one should recognize that such work is underway at least by PBS and perhaps by others. This could form the basis of a transformation of the infrastructure of network broadcasting as we know it, wherein program delivery need not be done in “lock-step real time” but rather delivered as a file to be executed by the local affiliate at the appropriate time. This holds the potential to get better quality to the affiliates at lower cost, eliminate the need for largely redundant multiple time zone feeds, and improve the security of prime time program content as well.

Published

2003-02

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M001008

ISBN

978-1-61482-949-2