Google stock is now valued higher, in fact much higher, than any other media company in the world. They are worth more than Time-Warner, Viacom, or any other company.

And let me tell you why... Google Video. More specifically Google Video Upload. Google Video allows you to upload movies that you have the right to distribute and optionally charge people to watch those movies. Google Video will also allow you to search through freeze frames of key moments in all programs and read the closed captioning. Right now the video subscription service is not publicly accessible. But if this reaches full potential then TV will be dead. Maybe not right away or even soon. But eventually TV will be dead. And Google owns it. Google's not just thinking outside the box. Google invented the box, put all the other media companies into the box, and are throwing the box away.

Envision 5 years down the road. You have a slightly faster broadband service than you do now. You have a HDTV. But instead of a digital cable or satellite TV box you have a Google Media Center. It would be some sort of Linux-based media player like TiVo or the D-Link DSM-320. It knows what types of shows you like and spends 24 hours a day searching Google.com for the types of shows it knows you like and downloading them. Instead of having a rigid TV guide you can ask it for specific types of programming.

But this programming isn't just big movie and TV studio productions. You and your closest friends can download and watch the video of your wedding that you uploaded to Google Video service. Or you could watch your nephew's baseball game from last week that cousin Lou recorded on his DV camera. Lou might even be syndicated by some local sports news agency because he's the only person who bothered to record the game. You will be able to subscribe to Podcast-type video productions and video-blogs. Cool, eh?

In fact, there may be no big movie or TV studio productions in the Google system for quite a long time. But that doesn't even matter, really. Right now there are some absolutely outstanding HDTV-quality weekly TV shows being produced under Creative Commons licenses and distributed via systems like BitTorrent. Particularly technical shows about computer technology but also other tyes of shows. You may soon find yourself watching programs that are streamed out to the world with something like Broadcast Machine.

Here are just a few examples of excellent quality "independent" films and programs legally being distributed by their authors via BitTorrent and similar means:

1. Star Wars: Revelations
2. Systm
3. The Broken
4. From the Shadows

There are also some outstanding Podcast (Radio-style) programs that I like:

1. This Week in Tech (Former cast of The Screensavers on TechTV)
2. LUG Radio (Linux Questions/Answers, Interviews)
3. And literally thousands more in the Podcast.net directory...

Labels: technology