We're close. Very close to something interesting happening. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could watch a huge range of on-demand TV as easily as we could flick channels on a normal telly? What if we could regain some of the social aspects of watching TV in the process? This is what I'm calling Simple Social Broadcasting.

There's lots of talk about clips, YouTube etc etc. But I still believe in sitting back and watching 30, 40 or 60 minutes of telly. We just need to update the experience a bit.

For this to happen we need a wide range of content to be available on demand and easily from a remote control. For early adoptors this is already a reality:

On demand content is widely available

It's looking much better in the U.K. than elsewhere; on our little islands we have:

• Many channels of free, high-quality digital content, via Freeview: We can record, store and reuse this content for our own personal use, without restriction
• Online services from broadcasters: If you could, frankly, you'd record it via Freeview. But what if you forget? There's a place for services like the BBC iPlayer and 4 on demand. It's just a shame that rights owners have forced the broadcasters to encumber their services with pointless DRM [1].
• Free downloads, e.g. via BitTorrent: Note, not all these are illegal. I just downloaded a fascinating feature film called Before The Music Dies, which the producers are distributing for free

The network to PC connection is already a reality

Apple TV, MS Media Centre, tens of other devices and software. Maybe just a laptop on the coffee table. If you're a geek your TV is connected to the Internet. Most people will get there too, eventually.

The gap: metadata

So, I watch a show. I like it. I know you'd like it too. What do I do? I tell you, or send you details of the show. You then search. Depending on your preferences and equipment you search a TV guide, your PVR, something like iPlayer or 4oD. Maybe Google, maybe a BitTorrent search engine.

What if you read about the show in a magazine, or you caught the last episode and want to see the next one? Or you saw the actor, director, cameraman, catering firm before, and want to see their next work. If you want to watch a specific show you have to search, and the search is painful. Most people will just watch whatever is on. Make the search easier and on-demand becomes a reality.

In more technical terms, the metadata that describes the shows, and the links to them are not well organised.

A solution: the wikipedia of TV

What do we need? It's pretty simple. For each episode we need a list of links where we can get the content.

Some other likely requirements:

1. A description of the data at the end of each link, in terms of format, quality, availability (country, time period), revenue model and rights situation for each link
2. A permanent, preferably human readable, URL for each episode
3. Data in a machine-readable format, so that our computers, rather than us, can do the searching
4. A representation of a series (more generally, a programme group), with links to the episodes
5. A basic description of each episode, so we're sure we are pointing to the right one

Ideally the broadcasters or content producers would do this, since they have the facts to hand. But that's not likely to happen fast. Therefore, I propose:

1. A simple data standard, probably a subset of, and conventions around, something like TV Anytime
2. A reference implementation designed to encourage crowd-sourcing of the data
3. A community effort to scrape, squeeze and stick together the data from various sources
4. The ability to link to a broadcaster's definitive version of the data, as and when they provide it in a usable format

Of course, there's rather more to it than this. In the coming weeks I'll be posting thoughts on how such a service might be designed, its benefits for users, and the effect on the wider industry.

[1] But they do kinda work on a Mac