Why TV Just Won’t Die… But Will Live an Eternally Damned Life
Posted on | July 16, 2008
Today I woke up into a sunny day and a twitt from Andrej pointing to an interesting article in Wired - Why TV Just Won’t Die. It made me re-think about a lot of stuff I already thought about during the last year or so.
Image via Wikipedia
Before sharing my thoughts with you I would just like to summarize the article, so you will (hopefully) understand the context, even if you are not to familiar with Web TV, IPTV, Interactive TV… Summarized in one sentence the article says that plain old school TV works just fine for most people in “Middle America”, but that most analysts agree that the TV will be cannibalized by Web TV, Interactive TV and other types of new channels which will deliver video content.
So why I agree that plain old TV still is good enough, for most people?
It is very simple to use!
Maybe because you just press a button and it works. Don’t like what you see? Just press the next button.
Yes, I can watch most video content on my PC, I just have to find (2 min), download (1h), (transcode (20 min)) and watch the content. That is if you already found (2 min) and downloaded the subtitles (1 min) and already have tons of codecs installed. Not so friendly for Joe user is it? Try to teach your grandmother how to do it :) I am sure she knows how to turn on the TV and switch the channels.
Did you ever hear about YouTube, you might ask? Sure, but did you ever notice that the longest video is 10 minutes long. And where are the live events? Besides the web experience is not a lean back and enjoy experience.
On the other hand good old TV is missing the flexibility of web based services, it does not support on demand content and has limited data collection and sharing possibilities. Putting it in perspective - you can not reliably measure anything and you can not build any social applications on top of it.
I would predict that the concept of the big screen in the living room will stay there for the time being - it just is a cultural thing for 80% of the population (geeks excluded). What will change is the way content is delivered (all over IP) and the way it is consumed (everything on demand, except for big sports events). But this will still take a long time, mainly because the IPTV industry is a big elephant moving in closed gardens, Set top-boxes are crappy and the standards are obsolete.
On the other hand a new set of web services will emerge which will serve the same content (over IP) - live or on demand - to the people in front of computers in a way as simple as good old TV. What I would really like see is a service that would play me content I like using a recommendation system similar to Last.fm’s one.
But there are other open questions regarding generating revenue for the production and serving of quality content. The plain old TV formula is well known and there are huge budgets for ads production. What about the web? Did we see a sustainable business model in this field so far? Maybe Hulu has the potential to survive in the long run by offering a premium serivce. YouTube? Maybe, because it is too big to fail.
Let’s wait and see, maybe we will see an answer soon :)
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