Billions of net-ready boxes in homes by 2016
Will anyone still watch broadcast TV?
IPTV week
Punters may not be turning to internet-connected smart TVs in their droves, but the near future looks set to be a bumper time for gadgets that bridge the gap between the net and ordinary HD TVs.
US market watcher NPD In-Stat reckons that there were some 256.8m devices - among them set-top boxes, games consoles, Blu-ray Disc players, and IPTV boxes like the Apple TV and Boxee Box - in folks' homes around the world.
By 2016, that total will have jumped to 1.34 billion gadgets, a compound annual growth rate of 52.6 per cent.
The good news for Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo is that their offerings, current and future, are the devices consumers are most likely to use to get internet content onto their tellies. There will be some 36.7m net-connectable consoles in homes come 2016, In-Stat reckons.
UK pollster YouGov reported this week that games console ownership "saw a big uplift" over the Christmas period. All of the current consoles can access one or more net TV services.
There's an interesting corollary to all this. With so many net-connectable gadgets out there, all capable of picking up content from an every wider variety of online streaming and download services, will anyone be watching broadcast TV by then?
If not, shouldn't we consider it time to abolish the UK's telly tax, aka the TV Licence? ®
COMMENTS
given the dross the commercial channels produce
I will happily pay my license fee regardless of how the content is delivered. That comment stands in relation to both TV and radio.
Will anyone still watch broadcast TV?
Yes, I rather suspect they will. There will still be the old fogeys like me who can cope with waiting for next week's exciting episode; who don't want to watch the entire series in one hit; who don't really care about the latest series of whatever, only available in the states. They're the people who in general trust the taste of the programme makers and channel directors; the people (like me!) who listen to 'Radio 4' rather than 'talk radio'.
And they'll probably still prefer to record the commercial channels and skip through the adverts.
Reason for TV tax
Whoever drafted the original legislation back in the days of Lord Reith did a good job. The BBC has a charter which is renewed every ten (?) years, and the money details are agreed with the government of the day.
This time the government made them institute cuts so that the licence fee would be frozen until 2016 when the charter next expires.
If the government decided yearly how much should be given to the BBC, they would have slashed its budget under Thatcher, who was just as much a creature of Murdoch as is Cameron's mob, and the Beeb would probably no longer exist, leaving British television to Sky.
40p a day for Radio 4 is enough justification in my book.
Me too. I really don't understand the last line about abolishing the TV licence. Quality programming costs regardless of the transmission medium.
