Television and hyperdistribution

This week we are talking about television and how the digital world is effecting the world of television. One of the key things which has come up is the idea of the "tyranny of digital distance" which was presented by Tama Leaver in his paper Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the tyranny of digital distance.

In a nutshell, Leaver is arguing that in this day and age there is no reason for broadcast delays between first run in the US or UK and Australia, which can sometimes be up to 18 months. While I agree with Leaver, there is a lot of questions that need to be answered before we will get to a model where globally we will all be watching first run shows together.

Of course to get to this point we need to work out ways to fund high quality shows that we will be happy to watch. To this point, I think Mark Pesce's brilliant talk on the idea of hyperdistribution goes a long way in attempting to answer this issue. While it's not the whole solution, it does start us thinking down the path of how we can start bringing the industry properly into the digital age and start reducing the digital distance that Leaver talks about.