Last week I attended a rare event - the GarageGeeks get together/conference/party hosted under the title “A peak into the future of TV”. Talk about a hard core event - as you can see from the short vids and photos, it’s a real junky (but funky) garage, in a real industrial zone, with very little space, plastic chairs, no real food, coffee or toilets but it GOD DAMN WORKED! Something about the surreal surroundings made it feel like we are are actually talking about a real revolution (which it is). The fact Jeff Pulver pulled a surprised appearance added to the hyped but underground ambience and left me with some very good impressions, albeit, like I said, offbeat surroundings.

All the photos and the video you are about to see were taken with my digital companion, the Nokia N73. There is a case in point about the revolution of broadcasting already - I created over a 100Mb worth of video with my mobile phone, posted it on the net, blogged about it and now you can watch it.

Below is a link to Pulver’s presentation (10+8 minutes - I had to split into two because of YouTube’s limits). In it, he articulated his vision in a very succinct and sensible manner. I think that anyone interested in this space should spend the time to watch what this down-to-earth thought leader has to say. My ‘fished’ headline out of the video would be “Pulver says - RSS to lead future of TV distribution” the rest I leave up to you [Another case in point is that I’m no Tarantino of the mobile video world but I hope you appreciate the art].

Pulver on Future of TV - Part 1

Pulver on Future of TV - Part 2

My own take in the whole “Future of TV” symposium is more about “Future of Marketing”. Current global spending on advertising tops half a trillion (yes trillion) dollars - funneled towards TV, newspapers, billboards and magazines. Within five years, once the internet will establish itself as THE bearer of entertainment - with its innate capabilities of micro filtering, geotargeting and dynamic personalization - the dumb tube (I mean TV) and the recycled paper held together using glue (I mean magazine) will not be able to compete.

I see a huge and I mean HUGE tsunami of ad dollars racing towards this space. And guess what (and this is a big WHAT) there is no existing eco-system, service or technology that can handle that!

I predict that in within five years we will witness a whirlwind of startups trying to come up with services, technologies, protocols and whole eco-systems to help solve this problem. I am not predicting the death of the magazines… I’ll keep reading them as well as my morning newspaper but where and how I watch TV is a whole different story. And since most of that half a trillion is spent there… don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Having focused on Pulver (and my blah blah) kind of took the thunder away from the rest of the presenters at the GarageGeek event who all did a great job. Amit Or, a colleague of mine and Co-Founder of InLive blew us all away by embedding live graphs that were the result of us calling InLive’s IVR system - into his power-point…in real time! a whole magic show by itself.

Lastly, kudos to Yuval Tal and Dror Gil (and anyone else I missed) for organizing such a COOL event.