Wired or Wireless: Television Delivery Today

David Lowe – President & General Manager, KVIE, Sacramento PBS

When I came in I was told we were going to go through the biggest technological change that television had ever seen, bigger than the advent of color television. And that was of course the change to digital. And we thought it was going to be just a few years into my tenure, and of course that just kept changing and changing. And then finally the digital conversion happened last year.

It gave us the ability to provide more KVIE than ever before. We had one programming stream 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And now we have three. And soon we'll have mobile digital television as well where people can be untethered from their television set at home and they can take public television with them, or any other local broadcaster who is on the airwaves, onto their capable mobile device.

Richard Campbell – Author, Media and Culture

And so if you look at the history of media technology, it's usually been this transition from wired to wireless. And a lot of times the wired works really well because, you know, television was wireless too. And then we had the invention of cable because cable improved the signals. When you put them in wires you actually sort of improve the signal quality. And that's still true today. We have a lot of sort of fiber-optic cables where the signal quality, whether it's a telephone signal or a TV image, is really…can be really digitally moved fast on a fiber-optic cable wire. But even then we have the shift to wireless, to Wi-Fi. And the idea that, you know, we have a DirectTV or dish TV where you can get television brought into your house through a direct signal or on cell phones. I mean, the way a lot of us are able to pick up digital images off our cell phones and our BlackBerrys and completely sort of bypass the traditional distribution systems that we've had in place for years and years.

David Lowe

Mobile digital television we think is the next killer app. And what that is is someone with a phone much like this will have a built-in TV receiver. People can get video right now on their phones, but what they're doing is they're getting that over the Wi-Fi or they're getting it over their 3G connection. This is actually getting it over the airwaves. Mobile digital television will use a built-in TV receiver and they will get it for free without having to use their data plan and they will not have to go and search for videos. They're not going to have to get prepackaged. They're going to be able to get what we are broadcasting live.

Richard Campbell

Paying attention to this shift from wires to wireless to back to wires, that's an interesting story to follow. And I think it's, as we sort of argue about the new delivery systems and the new ways that people are getting television images, for instance, we're calling it the sort of "third screen technologies," the way that we can now watch TV shows on our computers or on our cell phones. This is sort of transformative, and we're right in the middle of it. And we don't know again how much of this stuff's really going to catch on and what it's going to do to sort of the traditional television set that we all sit around in our living rooms.

Bedford/St. Martin's Video Transcript