01 Sept 2005

I was on holiday in America last month and wanted a little injection of British entertainment and news. So I switched on my computer and listened to a recent episode of Just A Minute followed by a Channel 4 News report about the latest development in the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. A bit later I began to write this column about Sky's new electronic programme guide. And yet I had just demonstrated to myself its non-essential nature by using Google to find entertainment and TV news. The question is: in the future, will we even need EPGs?

Of course we will definitely need good navigation tools in a crowded content universe, but what they will they look like and who will control them is still up for grabs.

This autumn Sky will unveil its latest EPG with more genre categories and parental controls. The new version will separate quiz and gaming channels from the bloated Entertainment section to a new section called Gaming and Dating. Three of the current genre groups - News and Documentaries; Music and Radio; Specialist - will be broken up into up into more distinct areas - News; Documentaries; Music; Radio; Shopping; Religion; International; Specialist; Adult. Adult entertainment has been corralled and separated from other programming. New parental controls will allow users to lock or even excise the adult channel listings from the on-screen listings altogether.

All this is well and good and although Sky certainly claims its pound of flesh - the cost of an EPG listing has risen from £28,000 (€41,000) last year to upwards of £77,000 this year - the guide was clearly in need of a re-vamp. Quiz channels are grumbling that that they will be ghettoised in the new Gaming and Dating section, thereby missing out on the passing trade attracted by their position in the popular Entertainment section, but the new EPG will be clearer to follow for viewers and they, after all, are the customers Sky most wants to please.

There will continue to be a bit of jiggery-pokery as broadcasters try to beat the system. For instance, Bad Movies will likely remain in the Movies section even though it screens more hours of shopping than it does films, a strategy known as grabbing shelf space.

And yet the EPG might already be yesterday's thing. Ironically just as Sky is making a song and dance about its new one, its most influential shareholder, News Corp, is looking well beyond its confines.

Just as young James Murdoch announced all the changes last month in London, old Rupert Murdoch was talking about buying a company with the expertise to replace the TV EPG altogether. The TV world is on the cusp of a bigger change than just chopping the EPG up into more genres. The online search engine is already a powerful tool for the PC and as the likes of Google and Microsoft jockey to be the principle tool on desktops, they are threatening the traditional control that pay-TV companies like Sky have over how and what people watch on TV.

The growing power of the search engines is illustrated by the value Google has on the stock market. The entertainment PC is the future - and it's not only Microsoft that is taking it seriously. Any phone company interested in living beyond the declining revenues of the phone call is ramping up its network to offer broadband services including TV, VOD and any other content it can get its hands on. In this broadband-connected world, Yahoo, Google, Blinkx, ShadowTV and a growing number of others are developing tools for consumers to locate and watch video online. They are also looking to bridge the gap between the web and the TV set so that consumers eventually will be able to search for and watch digital video via TV set-top boxes, PCs or mobile devices.

This month, Murdoch Sr is reportedly talking to Blinkx, one of the smaller and still privately owned video search companies. Given the large number of web-related deals he has done since announcing the creation of Fox Interactive Media earlier this year he is unlikely to hesitate before adding it or something like it to his empire.

The TV viewer on broadband will have the whole of the internet at his or her fingertips and the search tool will have to be fast and effective. TV programmes, movies, sports clips, blogs, i-photos - who knows what the customer might want? But they won't find it with James's newly re-vamped EPG alone, that's for sure. The best of all possible worlds in this case would be for a well-designed EPG to have the power and reach of a web searching tool. I note that even the new Sky EPG still will not have a search feature.

So it's back to my PC. Even now with a good video search engine I can find plenty of non-EPG listed entertainment, news and blogs. It won't even take me just a minute.