The Dream of Web 2.0

I’m all for more choice in media, but when Al Jazeera International was “jilted” by all major US broadcasters (Comcast, Cablevision, Dish Network, DirecTV), it found home on two steadily-growing IPTV collectives, one being Fision, soon to be available in Houston, Texas, and the existing VDC, a 10,000 subscriber-strong entity that’s all web-based and nothing not. While most news outlets focused on why AJI was snubbed (for now) by the bigwigs in the media milieu, so did the rest of us.

And then some of us considered the bylines of new stories published the week of Nov 15. The parts of the stories that mentioned their IPTV move. And some thought: “this could get interesting.” It will get interesting. But not because the US is going to get to know a 24-hour news and talk channel headquartered in Doha, Qatar. It’ll be because they’ll be one the key protagonists in the push for wider adoption of IPTV in the States.

Web 2.0 is often looked at as the social side of the Web taking stage center. It’s tagging. It’s live bookmarking. It’s Myspace. But I view it differently. I don’t find it to be the Web, revamped. It’s an entirely new generation. It’s limits being taken out of the backbone so that the dreams of the ‘90s could be made reality. So that a digital download store like iTunes would be capable of bumping down Amazon.com to become the #4 most profitable music retailer in the US. So that, in essence, we’d be able to connect in ways that weren’t possible before.

That is what makes media distribution over the Web such a significant topic of today. What could be a huge market has been put square in the sights of media conglomerates around the world. IPTV has been strictly a niche item in America. In 2007 and 2008, it will become the fastest growing sector in online commerce and advertising. We already see large investments being made in startups and established companies like Apple specializing in delivering better quality and more options to consumers. Apple’s code-named iTV product will no doubt help boost awareness.

We’ve had countless inventions and innovations sprout forth since the days of The Bubble, some notable, some not. But we have only seen the birth of Web 2.0 as of yet. Soon we’ll enter the main stretch, where the limits will only be those we place on ourselves.