I was cruising through my daily dose of FierceCable the other day when I happened upon this piece about a Las Vegas company that’s launching what it calls the “first ever worldwide broadband cable television network.”
Actually, there was a little language disconnect on the whole thing. The company was not creating a new cable network; it was creating a method by which its subscribers would have access to every cable network in every language available in the world.
Now that, I thought, is an ambitious goal. How exactly are they going to do that?
Seems that the company is doing something that smacks of the familiar. To gather all this programming and deliver it to all these subscribers worldwide the company is using what it calls CloudDVR, which it said in a news release that accompanied the FierceCable piece would “provide online storage for up to 180 days for every channel on the service, making a multi-million-hour home DVR available to members with active subscriptions to the content.”
I thought I’d heard that idea before and it only took me a second to figure out where: it’s what I’ve been talking about, railing about, cajoling about since I started writing this thing. Content in the cloud that can be pulled down and used by cable subscribers.
The difference is, while these folks are talking about putting some kind of 180-day storage limit on their content, the stuff I’ve been talking about would be virtually limitless because it would be stored and ready for the picking whenever a subscriber wants.
That Internet cloud really has no limits because content can be prepared, stored, retrieved and distributed from it in almost infinite ways. In the case of interactivity, the content can be delivered when subscribers want to do something other than sit back and watch television or it can be delivered when subscribers want to sit back and watch television… and do something else. It doesn’t have to be downloaded and stored on premise; it doesn’t have to be erased to make room for new content; and it doesn’t have to be watched by the consumer. It’s just there.
So, while I applaud these newcomers for their enthusiasm and I wish them well in their quest to get vendors to build equipment and programmers to provide the content to make their dream come true, I have to remind them their idea is not new. Over here at ActiveVideo, we’ve been talking about it for years.
[...] Content in the Cloud! What a Great Idea! [...]