SILICON
SILIC
CHIP
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Editorial Viewpoint
Streaming will make
broadcast television obsolete
A “crystal set” radio would have been the first electronic device that most hobbyists built in the 50s and
60s, back when Electronics Australia was known as
Radio & Hobbies. They changed their name to Radio,
TV & Hobbies in February 1955, to reflect the increasing popularity of television, then again in April 1965
to Electronics Australia.
Radio was pretty amazing technology when it was first introduced and had
little competition for home entertainment until television came along. While
TV has never had the same DIY culture as radio (building a TV is hard!), it
was still a very widely used technology from the 60s to the digital age.
But the march of technology is relentless and these days, notebooks and
smartphones have replaced TV for many younger people. When you have
24/7 access to a device which gives you instant access to a huge amount of
content on a broad range of topics, why would you want to watch whatever
happens to be on TV?
That is why I believe that many free-to-air television channels are going
to disappear over the next couple of decades. There will probably still be
news and sport broadcasts, at least for a while, but most other entertainment
programs will be streamed on-demand. Streaming makes it much easier to
cater to niche interests.
If you want access to mainstream movies and TV shows, services like
Netflix, Amazon Prime and Stan are pretty cheap, at around $10 per month.
That’s small change in most budgets and is good value when you consider
that you can watch a wide range of programs at your convenience. And as
the NBN is completed (eventually!), the average person will have enough
bandwidth for HD streaming.
I particularly like free streaming services such as YouTube. Now that we
have a proper “Smart TV” at home, which can browse and view YouTube
videos, my family rarely bothers with broadcast TV any more. We go straight
to YouTube to watch videos that interest us; programs which the free-to-air
broadcasters would never broadcast.
For example, there are hundreds of videos suitable for very young children on YouTube, which is much more suitable than the programming on
the ABC Children’s TV channel. And my wife likes cooking but she usually
finds the programs on the SBS Food Network uninteresting. By comparison,
there are plenty of great food and cooking shows on YouTube.
YouTube videos do not always have the best production values (you may be
surprised!) but we find them more interesting and entertaining and that’s what
really matters. The ad breaks are shorter and we also have the convenience
of being able to pause the show, or turn the TV off and finish watching later.
And YouTube has plenty of electronics-related videos; something you will
not find on broadcast TV. One popular channel is EEVBlog by Sydneysider David L. Jones, a past contributor to SILICON CHIP. He has more than half
a million subscribers and some of his videos are really interesting. If you
haven’t seen them, you should take a look.
While “Freeview” does offer some streaming of broadcast TV content, I
find it quite glitchy and the content is limited. I am not sure it will be enough
to save the networks. They are going to have a hard time as younger generations will not watch TV like their parents.
Like the music and newspaper industries, TV broadcasters will need to
adapt to the new technology to survive.
Nicholas Vinen
Derby Street, Silverwater, NSW 2148.
2
Silicon Chip
Australia’s electronics magazine
siliconchip.com.au
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