Editor’s note: Josh Beil recently sent us a rather interesting piece digging into IPTV, and how the application of the wikinomics principles are required to make it successful (which you can read below). Of note for other potential guest bloggers, I (this is Denis by the way) want to highlight that this is a meritocracy – if you have a good, well-written, wikinomics-related story to tell, we are interested in sharing it with our readers. (Mid-afternoon addition: I’ve included Josh’s more complete bio at the end).

After a long day of work, you plop down on the couch after dinner and turn on the television. Your myTV channel pops up and you begin to scan your customized start channel, which shows you what shows have recorded on your DVR, what shows on network TV you might like based on your recent viewing habits as well as what your social network is watching, the top UGC clips of the day from YouTube and other video sharing sites, as well as a robust search engine that will allow you to find and download virtually any TV show or movie every published, at costs ranging from free to $19.99 per download. Furthermore, with a couple clicks on this page through your remote, you can send content to your wireless device or your car’s hard drive over your home network – a virtual digital content consumption utopia.

The reality, however, is something much different, despite all the technologies needed for this vision being well established and available. A relatively recent article (editor’s note: November 2007) in Business Week has titled I Want My iTV is an excellent read on the forces at play in the royal rumble of media consumption. The article focuses on the battle for the living room, and it highlights how the promise of the convergence of TV and the Internet is long overdue yet continues to be hampered (in the US in particular) by the various stakeholders in the value chain each trying to protect their business and avoid being disintermediated by new technologies or business models.

The author correctly notes that lean-back technologies like DVR and Sling have changed the way in which we watch traditional TV – both time and place can be shifted. Simultaneously, lean-forward technologies like YouTube and other video sharing sites have brought to light the potential long tail impact of UGC and short-form clips, while Move Networks allow us to consume long-form content with amazing picture quality and reliability on our PCs. Nevertheless, the article’s author wants to watch what he wants when he wants it from his couch and points out the present limitations of the living room, particularly around the area of search and discovery of content on demand.

This is a particularly timely problem, and one that startups and industry incumbents are trying to tackle. Furthermore, virtually every player in the value chain is not only trying to protect their current position, but leverage new technologies, viewing behavior, and business models, to expand their sphere of influence and control. Apple is one of the better examples of a company that has capitalized on new technologies and behaviors, and the huge success of its iTunes-iPod-iPhone-AppleTV hardware/software combination has more than one major player feeling Apple has grown too powerful, culminating with NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker’s comments that Apple has “destroyed the music business” and the removal of NBC content from iTunes and the launch of Hulu.com.

The jury is still out on whether IP video is a good or bad thing for broadcast TV, which compiles the hesitancy for big companies to make major commitments one way or another. The music industry faced a similar problem with Napster, and Viacom’s billion dollar lawsuit against GoogTube is oddly reminiscent of simpler, static web page days. Only this time, there is no doubt about the future of the Internet and its role in our lives.

A recent paper by Wharton economist Joel Waldfogel titled “‘Lost on the Web: Does Web Distribution Stimulate or Depress Television Viewing?” tries to measure the effects of online TV clips, both authorized and unauthorized, on television viewing between 2005 and 2007, using a survey of viewers’ tendencies. The study compares 287 young people on the University of Pennsylvania campus and ultimately finds that time spent viewing programming on the Internet – 4 hours per week – far exceeds the reduction in weekly traditional TV viewing of about 25 minutes. Overall time spent on network-controlled viewing (TV plus network websites) increased by 1.5 hours per week, indicating video clips on the Internet likely increase awareness of a show thereby encouraging more viewers to watch the show in its entirety when it airs on a network. However, in many respects, this study is already outdated, considering the new models launched by Hulu.com and abc.com have yet to be broadly studied by economists or researchers.

In order to harness the power of the Internet in the living room throughout the consumption of digital media, whether it’s focused on search and discovery or social networking, to be successful the players involved must embrace the principles of Wikinomics: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally.

Openness: This is a significant challenge given TV’s history as a closed, walled garden system. Nothing says the cable and satellite companies have to give up the garden viewing experience, however they do need to tear down the wall and open this up to web-based content, broader user preferences and eventually third party application development within the garden (e.g. Facebook). If the cable and satellite companies do not move in this direction, it will open the door for a third party appliance like AppleTV, next-generation DVR or Sling, or video gaming console to do so.

Peering: Peer to peer assisted distribution models – if done correctly and with DRM in mind – can help reduce the expenses related to content delivery and consumption for the service proviers as well as the consumers. P2P can be contained to certain geographies or neighborhoods, or one’s social network in order to sharing like-minded content.

Sharing: The prospect of fusing social networking elements into the TV experience has already launched such companies as Joost and Veoh, as it is believed that some of the most engaging and useful features of Web 2.0 like social rating and ranking can be directly applied to watching TV. Nothing says this has to be done on your PC only, although to take place in the living room, it does require a healthy degree of openness (see above) as well as solving some user interface issues caused by the remote control.

Acting Globally: The delivery of studio content, both domestic and foreign, over broadband networks coupled with the on-demand content acquisition consumer mentality, radically changes the economic models for syndication currently used. Additionally, with half the world “flat” as Thomas Friedman has explained, along with place-shifting TV technology, the global media consumer will want to watch more and more international content, if available, and content that was previously considered domestic will quickly find new international audiences.

Cellular phones did not reduce the demand to talk on the phone and by all accounts increased our total talk time. However, the introduction of cell phones caused an erosion of the land-line phone business (along with the death of the pay phone business) as many consumers realized they only need a cell phone. IP video does not reduce the demand for watching short- or long-form content, and as Waldfogel’s study suggests, increases total video consumption time, although in the not-so-distant future, some of us may start to realize the only thing we need from the cable company is broadband service. Stay tuned.

Joshua Beil is the Director of Social Media & Technology at a publicly traded telecommunications company and cofounder of Skywave Broadband, a wireless ISP operating in Honolulu. Josh was named one of Pacific Business News’ “Forty Under 40″ in 2006 and in 2005, he was named a High Tech Leader by the Pacific Technology Foundation. He has been the primary author of numerous industry research reports on the market for small business Web hosting and Internet infrastructure services, holding research analyst positions at Tier 1 Research and IDC. His personal blog is www.beilblog.com and he can be reached at jhbeil@gmail.com.