The last year has seen a bitter war raging between manufacturers, movie studios and retailers over what would become the high definition format of choice for the future of DVD.

But with Direct Downloads from the Internet growing at a massive rate over the same time period, is there actually a future for physical discs to be fought over in the first place?

Here, Gigi Sohn discusses how yet again Hollywood seems to be missing the bigger picture, and failing to grasp how new mediums are making the old guard obsolete.

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The BBC iPlayer is seemingly proving more popular than anyone could have predicted, with its success even prompting estimates for total UK online viewing to be scaled dramatically upwards.

When the iPlayer was originally announced and released in a public beta last year, the BBC were criticised for only offering the service to people using Windows based operating systems.

Public Dissatisfaction Worked

As a public broadcaster, with a duty to provide content for all, this is a valid complaint as it immediately stopped anyone using an Apple Mac or Linux based computer from accessing the service.

The BBC listened to the arguments, and took on board the views of the 16,000 people who felt angry enough to sign an online petition, and the service was relaunched over Christmas with Mac and Linux support, albeit offering just streaming content rather than downloads.

This, coupled with a marketing campaign over the holiday season has seen the iPlayer grow vastly in popularity, and the service saw over 1 million downloads in the first 20 days out of beta.

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Are you still doubting that the business of television is changing at an incredible rate?

The role of traditional TV is being altered on a daily basis, as consumers ready themselves for a dramatic changing of the goalposts.

The interactive television company Ensequence has recently announced the results of an Harris Interactive online survey which shows that consumers are more than ready to change the way they interact with their televisions in 2008. 

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A lot of people have recently been discussing the video advertising outlook for 2008. 

Most sites which provide some kind of streaming television, or video on demand, are rapidly changing their business model to an in-video advertising funded one.

Research by Yankee Group suggests that revenue attributed to downloads and in-streaming advertising is forecasted to grow significantly over next five years.  

By 2011, in-stream advertising revenue is expected to reach $3.89 billion dollars and revenue for downloads will contribute $850 million.

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It’s 2008, and time to take a look in to the old crystal ball.

Hopefully we’ll be able to see in to the future, and predict the outlook for IPTV over the next year.

NewTeeVee has already came out with their list of online video predictions for 2008 and GigaOm has their list of the top five trends for the forthcoming year. 

And of course there is all of the product news around mobile and IPTV as well as content deals coming out of the CES show in Las Vegas, leaving us to ponder and wonder what’s in store for 2008?

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The BBC iPlayer relaunched at the end of last year, with the British Broadcasting Corporation trying to iron out some of the bugs, and make the service available for all.

After 20 days out of beta, the BBC announced that the iPlayer has racked up 1 million viewers, and more than 3.5 million programmes have been viewed using the television on demand service.

That’s an average of over 250,000 programmes either streamed or downloaded every day since the Christmas Day launch. Quite impressive for a UK based operation showing just BBC programmes.

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With the writers strike still in almost full effect, people are starting to wonder whether it’s actively affected people’s viewing habits.

Two pieces of reliable data are now pointing very clearly to the fact that it has, and that online video has increased its market share since the strike started.

Traffic To Video Sites Has Doubled

Number one: According to the BBC, Nielsen says that traffic to some online video sites has doubled since the Hollywood writers’ strike in October turned the TV into a wasteland of reruns and unfunny late-night talk shows (although it may be stretching things to call the Nielsen figure a data point, since I can’t find a report that has those numbers in it).

Number two: A report from the Pew Internet Research project, a reliable and independent research group, indicates that almost 50 per cent of those surveyed had been to video-sharing sites such as YouTube (up from 38 per cent last year) and daily traffic to such sites has doubled in the past year. The number of people who said they had been to such a site within a day of being asked almost doubled to 15 per cent.

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