News that trickled through yesterday... TiVO is now bringing youtube videos on TV... One of those many "over the top" services that cable and telco providers have been extremely wary off...
While Apple TV has had this for a while, this announcement I thought was significant since TiVO has a much larger user base in the US. Google has been able to do very little in terms turning the youtube acquisition to hard revenue except the standard web ads and hence, this presents a much more viable avenue for Google to monetize Youtube. If this takes off, I can see a Youtube version or APIs for providers who have a active link to the internet from their deployed set top boxes. This could include IPTV providers in the US, Europe, Japan or even those satellite providers who have deployed hybrid boxes with a port at the back for connecting the box to the user's broadband line. It could even include the likes of SlingBox and Hava.
The concern though is going to be picture quality. As it is, the likes of Youtube downconvert the video to lower resolutions to fit within a 10MB size limit to save storage space. Having been part of an experiment myself where this video was played on TV using a Set Top Box, I can say that on TV screen, these videos look pretty bad. Given the compression of video affects video with a lot of motion a lot more, sports clips and action movies look especially very poor on TV. Youtube and other such website may have to spend more on storing higher quality video to improve viewer experience, which is going to be critical since High Definition is beginning to set new benchmarks in video quality.
That said, the price of storage will be a small price to pay for if the business model affords video sharing websites to make money out of all this content. With recent news about Youtube sharing ad revenue with the uploader of the video, opening up the living room TV for those ADs will get a lot in the user community excited. This has the potential to get to the point where one day, you may be able to create you own channel and broadcast it around the world to everyone's TV (and even possibly make ad/subscription revenue out of the same).
