Apple and TiVo are definitely out in front in trying new approaches to “living room” TV viewing. Google is also doing a lot trying new (internet-like) approaches to ad-serving in the living room, though those are in the form of trials that most of us can’t experience directly. I’m sure that HBO’s decision to seed “In Treatment” is an effort to build demand and buzz for the series. It’s become common wisdom among the networks to push out episodes in the first year or so of a series to build interest, demand, and buzz, then to pull back content once a show finds an audience, sometimes excepting the last few episodes in the case of serial dramas where viewers need to ‘catch up’.

There are definitely interesting scenarios about how things will play out in the living room (and mobile too), which range from carrier-driven (telco, cable) interactive “walled gardens” on the one extreme to fully open environements where the carriers just provide transport and aggregators ranging from dominant to niche deliver content, to points in between.

It’s interesting to note as well that Google has to invest heavily in infrastructure just to maintain growth in its core business, content search and content / application delivery, which is incredibly computationally and network-intensive. Think about all the processing and communications it takes to crawl the entire web every few days, deliver search results and stream video and other content with millisecond response times!

Just a quick note to say how much I enjoyed your thoughtful and well presented article “The Battle at Kruger: A Tale of Two Media.”

Two minor but related examples that your article quickly brought to mind: (1) The approach and “progress” that both Apple and TIVO have maintained in trying (as many others have) to integrate internet feeds with television viewing in order to create a new viewer experience; (2) The recent decision by HBO to “seed” the complete high definition versions online of the first 15 shows of their new hit series “In Treatment,” at the very same time that they premiered the series natiionally on their cable network. HBO has since precipitously removed those shows which had been offered by iTunes.

It’s hard to figure out where it’s all going to end up, especially as data line capacities to the home in the form of fiber optics and now much newer and probably even more significant technologies, (i.e. the recent vast and secret hardware communication investments by Google) race ahead in tandem with the laying down of fiber optics.

Again, nice work!