Geoff Fox has an interesting blog entry about TV and the Internet. He says a lot of interesting things that I want to comment on:

I hate to say something good about a competitor, but… Personally, I think it is good to say good things about competitors. It is part of being the good sport we were always told to be in gym back in elementary school.

It is interesting to watch the direction of TV news and the Internet. This gets to the crux of the post that I want to talk about. He has several points that I want to comment on.

Broadband speed is available in enough places that we've reached a sweet spot for video. This looks at the ability to receive broadcasts. An interesting question is, what is necessary to make it so smaller broadcasters can transmit? The other day, ‘coolstreaming’ was a top topic on technorati. I went out and searched what was going on. Coolstreaming is similar to Bit Torrent as a way that people can share in the broadcasting of a video stream. It appears to have gotten a lot of attention recently as a good way for people to watch Italian soccer matches. As I looked around, I also found Pplive. PPLive transmits Chinese television.

Geoff talks about how the people leading the way are classicly trained in the art of television and how it is being fedas a serial medium. A follows B follows C... and everyone gets the same content in the same order.

This made me think of the book ‘Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace’ by Janet H. Murray. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in how the Internet is changing storytelling, including what gets broadcast on television. We are moving in a direction of more interactive storytelling, and it will be interesting how this changes peoples video viewing habits.

One final point that he makes. Brian comments: I do know a TV station can not discern who is watching and from where. An Internet broadcaster can!. In his footnote he talks about how how Internet hits can be physically located..

I am very interested in the physical mapping of cyberspace. My site has the Meta tags:
<meta name="ICBM" content="41.1499 , -73.59">
<meta name="geo.position" content="41.15;-73.59">

With this, you can find my site through various location services like a2b and GeoURL. One site that I particularly like is Feedmap for finding local blogs.

In terms of finding where people are coming from, I used Hitmaps for a while. However, sites like that can slow down a website and I turned it off. I see that they are now suggesting people use Cluster Maps, so I’ve turned that on for testing.

It will be interesting to watch the way television and the Internet continue to converge. Are there other themes out there that I should be aware of?