Scott Purdie

This is pretty shitty from the consumers point of view. The web will change that, no doubt. I am convinced that Spotify and others are change the game in music. They are managing to get the people who are used to getting free music to pay for it. Its all about gathering a lot of great content and using a clever subscription model.

I think that subscription TV over the web will change the game. The problem is that it has to be easily accessed by people in their living room. Ideally it should be as easy as it is now, except you can manage it better.

My ideal situation is that:

• I can choose what i watch and only pay for that. I could pay for a whole channel for £1 per month or watch individual episodes for £0.25. It could work like the Itunes account where they store our payment details and we click a few buttons to purchase content.

• I could go back and watch what i pay for any time i want, without saving it to a hard drive.

• I could pay extra to remove ads.

• It includes applications. For example people could open up a small app while the football is on to send a Facebook message. It would also work well for viewing YouTube, Flickr and News.
  

However, its really about the networks "getting it" and getting on board.

In the US people are using the Apple TV and a cool service called Hulu to watch the content they want. I have played with the Apple TV and once it adds more content and moves Itunes to the cloud, i will get one. In fact, they could be the guys to nail this.

The effects of this are that people would simply downgrade to their most basic options to get the content they cant get on the web yet. Eventually, it will all be streamed through the web.