This years CES was all about Internet and TV (and Phone). In a report related to what was announced at this show, John Markoff wrote in NYT
They are companies like Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others, with all of them beginning to make available an ever-widening array of video content that looks more like a world of five million channels rather than 50 or even 500.
No wonder that search companies — Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft — want to play big role in this space and Intel will provide a new chip to enable this technology to come to your family room.
This was coming and this will open many new frontiers. On one hand video search becomes big, on the other hand this is also going to start beginning of folkTV. People are going to start putting more amateur video on the Web. One can anticipate similar thing happen to start in Document space (on on DocumentWeb) in 1993. That was the time that democratization of production took place on the Web — any body has as much right to put material on the web as New York Times. SO you should not be surprised to see videos produced by Ram Singh using his mobile phone capturing monkeys playing in Ramtek on the Web.
ANd yes, let’s not forget the Webcams bringing you the real reality shows.