Online Media Cultist

Starting on Tuesday, people who own a TiVo DVR (digital video recorder) will be able to order and download movies from Amazon.com and watch them on their television set.

This is the kind of thing that changes everything.

What I mean: the ability to seamlessly deliver video content from the Internet to the television is a huge game changer.

Watching videos on the Internet tends to be a solo experience: you’re at work, you’re bored, someone sends you a link, or you’re just fiddling around on YouTube while you should be doing something else. In other words, the family doesn’t tend to gather around the hearth of the PC to watch the latest episode of Desperate Housewives that you bought on iTunes.

A computer monitor also tends to do best with short attention spans. Thus, people tend to like short and sweet articles, and they tend to prefer short videos (how often will you sit through a YouTube video that’s longer than seven or eight minutes?) online. Of course, there’s download time and bandwidth considerations as well. The longer the video and the higher the video quality, the better your pipes and machine have to be to handle it.

The television, a relatively more ancient piece of hardware, is a fully different beast. You’ve sat in front of the thing for a marathon session of cathode ray-binging at least once or twice, and more likely (me: guilty!) on a regular basis. And social time in the home, like it or not from a cultural perspective, is often spent in front of the set. Add in home theaters, flat screens, surround sound, and all the rest of it, and you have a pretty sweet place to watch a show or a film.

Now, until very recently, the television was a highly limited distribution mechanism. The few television networks got to choose what they thought the TV masses would like. The advent of cable television, and later VCRs, DVD players, pay-per-view, and on demand greatly expanded viewer options.

But the ability for the Internet to directly pry its way onto the TV set is absolutely huge. It will continue to make brick-and-mortar video stores irrelevant, for instance. Why take the time and effort when you can do everything from your couch with a remote control? Why bother paying Netflix – a service I love dearly – $20 a month?

But the greatest implications are in terms of the nearly infinite number of options people now have to get high quality video content in their homes. The limitations of a set number of cable channels or shelf space in a video store no longer exist. What’s coming next is the ability for online video content distributors to directly compete with broadcast and cable networks for people’s attention. And that’s when things will really get interesting.

It should be noted that Amazon’s move is just another step down a long path. It was already possible to purchase movies online and watch them on television via Amazon’s Unbox service. And you can also do so via Apple TV and Xbox 360. But the TiVo-Amazon connection and the freedom to not have to go to a computer to dial up and watch movies and shows could prove to be a tipping point in how video is distributed and watched from now on.

Maybe record labels are finally starting to get it. Well, they have to start getting it pretty soon, because there’s nothing like the prospect of extinction to get those innovation-juices flowing.

The latest indication that record labels are starting to meet the demands of today’s marketplace is Amazon’s announcement that it is launching a digital music store later this year that will sell millions of songs from more than 12,000 record labels, all DRM-free.

DRM, or Digital Rights Management, refers to technology that restricts the use of purchased digital content. In English that means that when you purchase an MP3 with DRM attached to it, you don’t actually own the music, you just have some right to use it. So DRM could restrict you from burning an MP3 that you purchased to CD, for example, or downloading it more than once.

So going DRM-free lifts all of these restrictions, including one that annoys many music lovers: restricting playback to one type of music device. Apple, a company that is often accused of imposing too many restrictions on its users, opened the door to a new era of DRM-free digital content when CEO Steve Jobs issued a passionate and intelligent analysis called “Thoughts on Music” back in February.

The key, of course, is getting major record labels to agree to DRM-free and it looks like that is finally beginning to happen. EMI, for one, is willing to sell DRM-free music at a “premium price” of $1.29 per song versus the standard $.99 that iTunes songs usually go for. The higher pricing, in my view, is somewhat irrelevant as prices will be adjusted to meet market demand. EMI is also signed on with Amazon’s new venture.

David Card notes that Amazon is in a solid position to compete with major digital music stores: “Amazon’s a master of upselling, and has zero customer acquisition costs. It should do just as well as any other store, likely better.” And hypebot notes “exclusively” that while it was announced that the new Amazon store is slated to launch later this year, that Amazon is pushing to get it rolled as early as this summer.

After the seventh and final Harry Potter epic, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is released on July 21st, millions around the world will be thrilled and subsequently saddened that there will be no further Potter adventures to look forward to. No one will be sadder, of course, than Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury, who will have to find ways to replace a cash cow the likes of which the publishing world has never seen before.

The UK’s Independent reports now that Bloomsbury will take the lead in developing a “literary version” of MySpace, a social networking site for book lovers. As Mashable points out, there are already several players in this space (and in social networking-ville, every space has players, and many are lousy with them), including GoodReads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing.

LibraryThing has been around for some time, and has a low budget yet functional and organic feel to it. Shelfari, which is backed by Amazon, has a higher gloss sheen and kind of feels like a Flickr of books, using large thumbnails of book jackets to help people identify their literary selves.

Speaking of Amazon, I think they’re the company who really has the biggest opportunity to claim this space. All the pieces are there: they have the audience and the site is packed to the rafters with social networking-style features such as recommended items, wish lists, friending, reviews (i.e. journaling or blogging), and so on.

I looked at a user profile on Amazon this morning and was surprised at how robust the feature set already is. I think the real challenge is to make this profile experience – the core of any social networking site – more prominent and relevant to Amazon visitors, who are mostly there to browse for books, DVDs, or other items.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch reports that the social networking sprawl is spilling over to the browser itself, with new Mozilla product The Coop bringing friending and media-sharing right into the Firefox browser. Next stop: the desktop.