How to Become a TV Broadcaster

Bill Burke's biography of Ted Turner, "Call Me Ted" details how difficult, expensive and time consuming it was for Ted Turner to become a TV broadcaster.  To launch CNN, Turner needed to use a proprietary satellite network and had to convince MSOs to syndicate his new TV channel. The figure below shows the complex path that CNN video had to traverse from the CNN Studios to a viewer's TV.  First the video is sent from the CNN Studio to a CNN uplink satellite.  It then is forwarded to an MSO's head-end on the ground.  From there it travels via cable to a set-top box in the viewer's home and to the TV.

To launch a new TV channel today, Turner only needs to create an (iLook-enabled) iPhone App and store his TV content on the Internet "cloud".  To view the CNN channel on their TVs, TV viewers simply download the CNN app from the iPhone app store, start the CNN app, select the TV as the target screen and, using the iPhone's touch screen, select the program to watch.  The figure below shows the greatly simplified path that the video needs to traverse by using the Internet.

A much simplified Internet-based path from CNN to the TV set.

An iLook-enabled App is able to stream video from CNN's Internet cloud, directly to any screen.  A "Screen" button (shown below) is touched to direct the video to the mobile device's touchscreen or to a any TV in the house. To make it's app iLook-enabled, CNN simply imports the iLook Library to it's app.  The iLook Library provides API functions to display the Screen button and to perform video redirection.

The Screen button displays a list of available screens.

The iLook Library also provides API functions for displaying landing pages (called SidePages) on the touchscreen that are triggered by associated TV commercials playing on the TV screen (more about this in a future article, "How to Make Your TV Commercials Interactive").