Mark Cuban is quick to point out that Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology, said “The Web infrastructure, and even Google’s [infrastructure] doesn’t scale. It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect.”

What I don’t think Cuban understands, and what Vincent has left unsaid, is that people are willing to suffer a lack of quality in exchange for greater flexibility. The quality of television shows downloaded via peer-to-peer are about as good as video. Sure they’re not HD quality, like Cuban’s HDNet video (in other words, read everything Cuban says knowing that he is heavily invested in high definition video). However, when you’re deeply engrossed in a show you don’t notice how crystal clear an image is, or isn’t. Even YouTube viewers are willing to forgive crappy quality for the flexibility of seeing a hugely diverse range of content.

In the case of peer-to-peer the shows are also not streamed, but then they can be watched whenever the consumer wants. If a one hour show takes several hours to download, it really doesn’t matter, because you can download it when you want–like in the middle of the night–and watch it at your leisure. In other words, bandwidth doesn’t have to keep up with video “streaming.”

So unless new technologies improve bandwidth or video compression, we’ll not be “streaming” high definition video. But I’d argue that we don’t necessarily need to stream anything. When you can subscribe to a video service–a la videocasts–and watch whenever and wherever, it still offers much more flexibility than broadcast: like HDNet.

I’ve also got to wonder why Google has a “head of TV technology” if they don’t think they can jump into the video business.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 2:55 am by Richard and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.