Companies Announce Streaming Television Options

Future of Television:  Pay-Per-View – Personalized Streaming Television

Since the advent of streaming video, consumers have been presented with a few options: either they can watch a limited number of shows for free on the internet, pay for video rentals of TV shows after they’ve aired, or pay for an expensive cable/satellite bill that includes the cost of hundreds of shows they’ve never watched nor will care to watch.

One of the lead telecom providers in the US plans to change that. The Wall Street Journal announced recently that Verizon is planning on offering a pay-per-view TV subscription service. The model would allow subscribers to only pay for the television shows that they actually watch, with more popular shows  being offered at a lower rate and more obscure shows costing a bit more. Currently the company is in talks with smaller media companies, according to the WSJ, as the content delivery program would require cooperation across a number of networks.


This sort of customization has only recently become available through the content delivery options that the evolving web has produced in recent years. The telecom giant has already started to merge its TV and internet services with its fiber optic, or FiOS network. Fiber optics allow for not only much more data to pass through to the consumer, but to do so at much faster speeds than traditional copper data lines. The FiOS service includes internet, telephone, and television access, and this combined approach would make it much easier for the company to implement a “metered” usage system such as the one announced.

A similar system is also being developed by Intel, but this project could threaten to “kill the cable industry as we know it,” according to Forbes. But that’s not inherently a bad thing. The service would run through the internet and only charge for the watched shows. In addition to this, it would act as a “Cloud DVR,” allowing users to watch any past TV show without having recorded it, as well as have control over the broadcast, such as pausing and rewinding live TV.

Intel made this decision after GoogleTV and AppleTV failed to spark interest in their microprocessors, judging that they would be able to revolutionize the industry by themselves. The program ships out to selected members this month, and will be tweaked and refined until it is available to all consumers.

Whether or not either of these technologies takes off, it is clear that the consumers have spoken; they want their TV when they want it and they don’t want to pay for anything but their content. The ball is now in the corporation’s court, and these few offerings are the signs of their return volleys. Stay tuned for the future of television!