Vint Cerf Predicts the End of TV as We Know It

Vint Cerf — one of the handful of researchers who helped build the internet in the 1970s — said that the television industry would change rapidly as it approached its iPod moment. The 64-year-old, who is now a vice-president of the web giant Google and chairman of the organisation that administrates the internet, told an audience of media moguls that TV was rapidly approaching the same kind of crunch moment that the music industry faced with the arrival of the MP3 player. 85% of all video we watch is pre-recorded, so you can set your system to download it all the time, he said. You’re still going to need live television for certain things — like news, sporting events and emergencies — but increasingly it is going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later