July 25, 2005 | Filed under: Internet TV

The Beeb was already in my ultra-with-it category because of IMP . IMP means that BBC 'users' will be able to download high quality versions of BBC TV shows using Bittorrent directly from the Beeb. This is wise because users will go to the Beeb for their convenient, on-demand downloads and not un-official sites. The Beeb stays in control of their stuff, stays relevant with their internet-savvy audience and more popular than ever because of cool new features. I have to wonder what commercial networks would have to lose in a strategy like this. They could bundle ads or indeed charge a subscription like cable.

The Beeb just became more with-it...

One of the biggest absurdities in our world is the lack of innovation of electronic program guides for TV. This is not because it is technically difficuly, in fact it is extremely easy. Innovation simply does not occur because innovators would be sued by TV networks claiming that they own the copyright for the list of what's on.

EPGs are the bridge that will make TV relevant in a world that is dominated by broadband services. TV stations that do not act wisely (and liberally?) with an EPG strategy may find themselves becoming irrelevant and feature-poor to consumers.

The Beeb recently released a site called Backstage which provides developers with APIs and tools to 'remix' their online services. They have just announced a project to remix their EPG.

"We want people to innovate and come up with prototypes to demonstrate new ways of exploring the BBC's TV schedule," backstage.bbc.co.uk project leader Ben Metcalfe told the BBC News website.

"We have some ideas: people might want to combine schedules with web search services, like del.icio.us."

So already we see TV morphing to allow distributed downloads (presumably its a matter of time before these mean TV is no longer only available in specific regions but internationally), EPGs that link to value-add web services (and possibly reccomendation tools, etc)... what else is happening?

The old models start to augment (fall away?) even more when considering search and syndication.

Google Video is letting us search inside video content. Vimeo allows us to tag video content and dynamically build video playlists from similar content.zxcxcz

Services such as Vimeo and Blinkx are demonstrating powerful new modes of viewing video. Blinkx already works really well as a kind of video clipping service. Just watch the video news you want via an RSS feed. At one stage Vimeo auto montaged video clips based on the file's tag. Never mind the 'Nine o'Clock News' on BBC. What about 'Phil's News' from all news sources globally, pulled together and automontaged by the service based on metadata... It's super cool.

Given that all the powerful footage (such as planes flying into buildings, smoking trains on the London Underground, etc) is shot by ordinary people and not by the media, this indicates an interesting possibilty for fundamental shifts in the TV landscape.

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