We need RSS for TV

The ability to subscribe to and monitor the web's "channels" (all 1 billion of them) has been greatly enhanced by Really Simple Syndication or RSS. While TV consumers are being wooed by digital services around the world, why hasn't the paradigm of TV consumption been altered or challenged by some of the same innovation we're seeing with Web 2.0?

Why just TV? Why not radio too? How would it affect the way we consume entertainment, or get our information?

The little box that could help…

My friend Dave Watson over at the Georgia Straight argues that Apple TV is helping to force a paradigm change in media consumption. He's right, whether it is Apple's innovative little box or not, people want the ability to consume media on demand. RSS can and should be a part of this change.

My Lost viewing habits are a great example of this. A late starter on catching this series, my wife and I began watching season one on DVD. Season 2 had already begun, so we waited for the next release of DVDs. Regrettably, the downloadable versions of the series are blocked to Canadians online, so we couldn't catch up after season 3 began.

Our solution to catch the first six episodes of season three was to use the surprisingly effective BitTorrent protocol. I downloaded 6 one-hour episodes of Lost off a BitTorrent stream, burned them to a disc and we watched them at our leisure.

Bizarrely iTunes does not allow me to buy the episodes for 2 bucks each like they do stateside, otherwise we might have paid to watch. Like the arcane taxing of recordable media as a subsidy to Nickelback and Avril Lavigne records, Canadian authorities have their heads buried in a pre-internet age.

RSS, popularized by blogs, is an underused innovation. It's time to take it to a new level beyond paying attention to web channels.

UPDATE: Globe and Mail makes some good points about Apple TV's negatives. Over to you, Apple, to make it better.