A few years ago, news stories were filled with predictions of the death of television. Yet, according to Nielsen figures, the number of homes watching television has actually gone up, with the number of homes using digital video recorders (DVR’s) shooting up by 56 percent between 2007 and 2008 alone. Television is experiencing a resurgence. So what’s going on? Did television suddenly get better? Maybe. Did access to television shows streaming on demand, twenty-four seven, in hi-definition, suddenly become more than a viable option? Absolutely.
And sites like these are still on the rise. In June 2009, Lionsgate, MGM, and Paramount/Viacom announced they were teaming up to launch EpixHD which aims to provide a cable on demand service and an online stream service at the same time, to compete with the likes of HBO, Showtime and Cinemax.
The need for server and processing farms to “feed the cloud” has led to a boom in unlimited scalable server farms. Amazon’s EC2 already offers storage and processing capacity on a metered service as a utility, and Apple recently announced plans to build an additional one billion dollar server farm.
The impact has been as unexpected as it is dramatic. The easy access to TV through DVR recordings, on demand cable, and online programming has allowed viewers to catch up on shows they otherwise would have missed. It has even allowed viewers to join shows that are already a season or two old because episodes from previous seasons are just a click away.
Some analysts predict that at some point the Internet and television will merge into one entity, and that may be true. However, the prediction was made based on an old paradigm, and technology is changing every day. But what’s already clear is that the resulting hybrid will be nothing like either one because the possibilities inherent in cloud computing are only just starting to be realized.
By Shahana ID 1139740
