Content is King
Continuing on the TV theme, Intel CTO, Justin Rattner gave his key note about the innovations Intel hoped to bring to the tube over the next few years, including the challenges full Internet could bring to broadcast networks.
In a slightly creepy and unsettling vision, Rattner announced that TV wasn't TV anymore. "TV will be everywhere, on all your devices. TV will be whatever you, the developers, want it to be," he declared. The Intel CTO said his vision was to make the TV experience more visual, more personal and more interactive; although we cynically assume Intel will also want to make a few bob off the whole thing too.
In between talk about "blurring the lines between various devices," and "developers gravitating towards a standard environment," Rattner also claimed Intel knew for a fact that TV was what the unwashed masses craved, because Intel had hired an army of social scientists to say so. In fact, such is the power of ethnography at the firm that Intel's hippies seem to have convinced the firm to throw its weight behind something it calls "Informative, ubiquitous, personal and social TV," whatever that actually means.
On paper, the numbers are there, with Rattner noting that "by the year 2015, you can expect 15 billion consumer devices capable of delivering TV content with billions of hours of video available." Now all Intel has to do to milk the cash cow is to find more sophisticated ways to organize content and provide it on demand in a way that will make punters want to pay for it. According to Rattner, this research is already well under way, with Intel Labs researchers working day and night to evolve technology so people can get the TV content they want, "when they want it and wherever they want it."