encoded notions

Bittorrent + Television = BTV: a liberating television viewing experience.

With this interesting mix of technologies, technologically-inclined people are seeing a decoupling of time and television that goes even further than what is possible with a TiVo. With a TiVo, you can time-shift new shows. With BTV you can watch virtually anything that is worth watching that has been on ever.

You can find old series that are no longer (or are infrequently) on the air such as:

• Brisco County Jr.
• Monty Python’s Flying Circus
• Farscape
• MacGyver
• etc…

With the current setup, if you forget to record a show and you miss it, you have maybe one or two chances to see it again before it disappears until syndication sets in. You are at the mercy of the broadcasters. For extremely linear plotlines, missing a single show can mean a great loss to the viewers.

What I think a lot of these BTV proponents (file sharers) really want is a way to watch any show that has ever aired whenever they want. I think that if the television networks created a service that allowed you to buy a box (like a cable box today) and pay per download or per month to watch any show ever made.

Think of it like a TiVo with a direct connection a very large storage house of video. Of course, there are engineering problems to overcome first. First you have to probably digitize everything and get them into reasonably-sized files of decent quality; typical file types used internally for the TiVo would probably do rather well. The next issue is the bandwidth.

This one is the hard bullet to dodge. No one doubts that video files are larger than music, photos, or even text. That’s probably why standard BTV consumes such a large fraction of the Internet’s traffic already. If you’re going to provide every file at the fingertips of everybody, you need a massive data pipe and an infrastructure that Google would approve of.

Or do you?

If the service were priced well enough, then they might be able to leverage a modified bittorrent to their advantage. Whatever price you set on this service, you’d have to realize that the free alternative of BTV will always exist no matter how hard you try to crush it. That’s why you need a price that is reasonable, but not eye-gougingly high.

All of the client boxes would have local caches of recently-viewed materials and a connection to the Internet. The network servers would provide a browsable index and the interface would bear a striking resemblance to TiVo’s browsing features. Browse by genre, year, keywords, producers, actors, episode guides, titles. Incorporate data from TV Tome and IMDB and use them to your advantage. Heck, this would probably be better than even the UK’s attempt at something similar regarding licencing their old BBC materials for British citizens to download.

As for bandwidth, each box could talk to the main server which could be running as a specialized bittorrent tracker. Each client would be “sharing” local copies of anything recently watched and then the entire distributed system could just manage itself: shifting copies of more popular files around the network to turn the entire viewing audience into a distributed caching system.

If something like this existed I would pay for it just to be able to watch things like VR5 and Centurions again. I think that many of the people out there would crave the nostalgia hidden in the backlog of shows of the past. This would have the potential to become very popular.

If a few files leak out into the bittorrent community, would it really be that big of a deal? The thing you’d be selling is ease of use and utility. A service. A user interface experience; Apple did it by wrapping BSD with a nice interface and selling it in a nice little hardware box…why should television viewing be any different?

Humanity has done a fairly good job of trying to understand Nature with science. The scientific method of isolating relationships between variables. You change one thing and see how it affects something else.

Cause and effect.

Every action can be broken down into constituents, components, atomic units. For every effect there is a cause. We discover truths about the world by presupposing that it should make sense.

If you know what you want to look for, you’re more likely to find it. If you look for something that isn’t there, but you want it to be, you still have a chance of “finding” it.

The further you climb up that giant ladder of Knowledge, the smaller and smaller our focal point on the magnifying lens of Truth becomes. How much do we really know about the world around us? With all of our models, we can predict outcomes up until someone suggests a better theory.

The world was flat until we widened our view of the world was. Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation was accepted as truth until Einstein changed it all with General Relativity. Biology was all about animals until we discovered cells and then DNA. Computing was all about doing math until someone thought it would be neat to store text with numbers.

We assume what we know is true until we discover otherwise. Until that moment it clouds our view of the world. A model of the universe is just that, only a model. The real universe doesn’t always follow our crappy models, no matter how many digits of precision and accuracy you verify.

Somehow, I don’t think Nature is running the numbers, calculating the inverse squares of distances between particles. I don’t think it’s determining Boltzmann factors just to chill a gas. There is something else at work. Something that we’re not seeing because we’re not looking for it. If we don’t know to look for it, we’ll only find it by dumb luck.

But isn’t that how most of the real science happens anyway?