Google sees TV’s future in online video distribution

by Jan Harris

Vincent Dureau, the head of television technology at Google, believes that the future of television lies in online video distribution.

Speaking at the IPTV World Forum event in London, Dureau argued that IPTV is already deployed on a very large scale on the Internet, in the form of online video delivered over broadband. He argues that the term IPTV can be used to include services such as NetFlix and BitTorrent.

Dureau said that the deployment of broadband is making it viable to distribute television point to point, as opposed to broadcast. This removes the limitations of spectrum availability.

He suggested that there is a virtually indefinite appetite for television, as evidenced by the millions of short clips now available on YouTube.

According to Dureau, the world’s largest IPTV deployment is BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing system, which has caused concern because it enables the illegal downloading of copyright protected material.

Dureau suggested that online video rental library, NetFlix, is the largest legal IPTV deployment. NetFlix offers a catalogue of 90,000 titles and has 8 million members.

Dureau also highlighted the need to consider devices such as games consoles and BluRay players as distribution channels for television content to the home.

Such devices make it possible for studios to distribute television content directly to the home without the need to go through a broadcaster.

Dureau concluded his speech with a call to “embrace the web and understand that IPTV is not ahead of us — it is already behind us”.

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