I had the honor to present on a “disruptive” topic at the Grow2012 conference last month in Vancouver, and, big surprise, I opted to talk about TV. I decided to take a bit of a departure from many of my typical presentations and focus on the myths and truths (or at least truthiness) about disruption in the TV industry, with a focus on how our mobile lifestyles are changing the way we think about television. Here’s the video (and slides):
Slides:
As one could imagine, I end up in a lot of conversations about second screen TV apps, companion apps, social TV, etc. Virtually every discussion takes some long varied road to get to a point where all involved agree that the only rule in building next generation TV platforms and products is this: not all TV shows are alike, and experiences must be built with this rule in mind.
Let’s start with #SocialTV – broadly defined in current terms as “people tweeting, checking in, and liking TV shows on social media platforms.” While I’m pretty jaded in my belief that this is resoundingly uninteresting as a topic, it’s important to think of it on a per-genre basis, and in fact, a per show basis. One could state that “dramas” for example won’t garner much social TV activity – who really cares about checking in to shows like CSI or House? Then along comes Game of Thrones, rule broken. Then you could use Game of Thrones data to claim people don’t tweet while watching live TV. And along comes sports and reality shows.
When it comes to planning and thinking about how users may/will behave regarding social TV and shows, I recommend thinking about it from two perspectives: (1) live interaction and (2) cultural impact. The personal drivers for a lot of these activities have to do with the social perspective. People are interested in “connecting” with others, which drives the interactions (tweeting about your team, someone getting voted off the island, etc). People are also interested in being part of the cultural zeitgeist – Game of Thrones is “in” and “cool” to tweet about, whereas CSI and House are not.
Next up are companion apps – smartphone and/or iPad apps designed for use during a TV show. As above, the potential value creation here is entirely about the content. Do users really want to pull out their phones and read trivia while watching an intense or immersive show like Game of Thrones or The Good Wife? Doubtful. Am I going to look away from a visually-rich experience such as Planet Earth? Or how about Family Guy, where half the show is visual gags? Seems unlikely. But during any reality show, game show, talk show, or sports? I’d guess there’s a huge opportunity here.
Same moral as above, the right companion apps keep the content in mind. First, we really don’t need (or want) a dedicated companion experience for every single show that airs – it’s just plain unnecessary. But regardless of that, the experiences should think about the audience and how they want to interact. Sports is all about real-time and stats. Cooking shows, on the other hand, don’t need a real-time experience, but yet offering recipes, how-to, pictures, etc that can be bookmarked, archived, and viewed in the future is quite handy. Complicated plot-driven shows can offer complementary experiences that supply background or other pertinent information to help audiences keep up with whatever’s going on.
Enhanced content offerings – featurettes, behind-the-scenes, and other options that plunge the user in a further immersive landscape blah blah blah. Now, speaking as the guy who watched all 3 Lord of the Rings movies, extended cut, with director’s commentary on, there’s no question a marketplace exists for extra content. Blooper reels. Making-of’s. Interviews with Cast & Crew. The key focus again is identifying the right content for the right show and deploying it in the right place.
Do I really need a dedicated app for my iPad just to get extra content for each show I like? Do I need to subscribe to something? I think, fundamentally, content creators and technologists need to really spend time crafting the right offering for each individual show. For example, having the “webisodes” of The Office available openly via Facebook each week is a great solution to enhance that offering. But if I needed an Office app, with a new Office username and password, would it be worth the investment beyond the “Like”? Doubtful.
Overall, the time has come for TV technologists, creators, producers, etc to work together to avoid one-size-fits-all approaches to TV experiences. Every show, every network, every device, and every platform should be regarded as a unique opportunity to engage an audience and tell a story. Except, of course, for reality shows about celebutantes, which should just go away. Please folks, just do the right thing here. We can find a cure, we can make it happen. We can do it!
Over the past 30 years we’ve evolved the television experience from something where everybody watched the same shows on the same channels on the same devices in the same rooms at the same time to a world where that’s almost never the case. Today, with the exception of appointment TV, it’s such a fragmented landscape that it’s almost a challenge to find other people watching the same stuff you do. But with all the variance in content, services, devices, location, price, etc, there’s still really only two ways people choose to watch TV. This is a subtle, but extremely important concept to anyone in the business of changing television.
Deliberate viewing: you go to the TV with a specific piece of content in mind. This includes live TV (“let’s watch Idol at 8pm tonight”), your DVR (“I need to watch last night’s 30 Rock”), and any VOD/OTT platform such as Comcast OnDemand, Netflix, Hulu, etc (“I’m going to watch the first season of Breaking Bad”). We could also include a deliberate type of content in this category (“I’m going to watch a comedy” – not necessarily something you’d say out loud, but if you are in the mood for something funny, that’s a pretty deliberate concept). I also refer to deliberate viewing as “search mode” for TV, since you will specifically search for the piece of content you want, whether by changing the channel, navigating your OnDemand menu, or going to your DVR library.
Random viewing: you go to the TV with no idea what you want to watch. This includes simple channel surfing (“nope, next!”) as well as direct channel changing (“I wonder if anything good is on TNT now. Maybe Shawshank or Blues Brothers??”). It also includes browsing the OnDemand options (“I wonder if there’s anything new on Netflix?”) and even your DVR (“Maybe we recorded something we haven’t watched yet?”). I also refer to random viewing as “browse mode” for TV, since you are just perusing lists of stuff until you find something you are content to watch. Note the last phrasing here, as random viewing is less about the “excitement” factor of watching something deliberately, and more about the “good enough to pass the time” factor, with the potential for excitement.
Now for the cold, hard fact: any “future TV” service or product which doesn’t account for both types of TV viewing, will fail. This includes OTT services, smart TV apps, second screen apps, third screen apps, eighth screen apps, widgets, websites, gadgets, platforms, and everything else under the hood. Again, if you cannot service both primary needs of a viewing audience, your system is a goner – unless, that is, you are specifically aiming to replace an existing component of those services (in other words – if your live TV service is designed to replace another live TV service, that’s viable, since the consumer’s ecosystem will still include whatever else it had before).
How do I back this up without cold, hard facts? Because people don’t really change much, and TV, specifically, is not merely “another” activity up there with Angry Birds, Facebook, Pinterest, reading books, etc. Watching TV is a very specific type of activity, one about entertainment and more importantly, escape. Life is hard, TV lets you escape for a period of your day – why on earth would Americans spend 4-8 HOURS per day in front of it otherwise?
So if people don’t change, and people need escape (especially as they age – I’m not talking about 13 year olds here, for the most part), they need some version of deliberate and random lean back TV watching. Could this include YouTube videos? Sure. How about an all-on demand lineup? Doubtful. How about a “TV is just an app” concept? Doubtful. It’s why most cord-cutting theories aren’t holding water. It’s why #SocialTV is still mostly just a fad. It’s why most “second screen” apps are just barely gaining traction. It’s why Google TV is such a mess right now. It’s why Apple TV is still a hobby. Sure, these things work absolutely great for some, but absolutely don’t for most.
The future of TV involves a lot of change. And the more things change, the more they stay the same. Long live TV.
This is the image you get if you do a google image search for "world record".
So the Grammy’s unsurprisingly (I will explain why I say it that way in a moment) set all sorts of records for social TV. Just like the Superbowl did a few weeks ago. Just like the ___ did a few weeks before that. I call this a big yawner, but first, some definitions:
So why do I say things like “unsurprisingly” and “yawner”? Because this is a burgeoning activity. We are at the very earliest stage of people using second screens whilst (yup, whilst) watching TV. I myself tweeted a couple of times during the Superbowl (really during the ads):
This is an infinite increase over last year’s SuperBowl. I didn’t watch the Grammy’s, but had I, I likely would’ve tweeted. And this isn’t just about me, it’s a pretty universal trend. Why? Because Twitter, the platform we are using to measure Social TV as a concept, is still growing. So anything measuring a growing service with growing use and calling the outcome “record-setting” is really just fulfilling an exercise in redundancy. Every new instance of appointment TV tweeting will outpace all previous instances, until Twitter stops growing.
But really, that’s all just a sidepoint. My issue, concern, and question, is whether or not there’s any value whatsoever in any of this for catch-up TV. Do I care about tweets someone sent during an episode of House from last year? Or last week? Or even 10 minutes ago? I don’t, and I don’t understand why someone else would either. Nor do I care about what someone is watching right now unless I too can (and should) watch the same thing, at the same time. Heck, I hate seeing the promos to text in my vote (to Top Chef, my guilty pleasure show) when I’m seeing an episode 4 months after it aired.
I don’t see a solution to this conundrum. To be clear, I’m not questioning will social media impact TV behaviors – that will certainly happen. Further, as evidence is mounting that catch-up TV is growing steadily and will inevitably outpace real-time/appointment TV, I see the window somewhat shrinking for what’s currently called “Social TV.” But that shouldn’t really surprise anyone, as it’s such an early stage in the evolution of TV. And if you think about it in evolutionary terms, TV is just learning about making fire now, and the wheel is probably a few years away…
Please don’t look at the following images on a full stomach:
Ok, sorry I had to do that, but it’s important. And to my friends on the TV manufacturing side of the world – it’s not your fault! It’s not your fault! Most “Smart TV” user interfaces, suck, and you’re doing your best. But fundamentally they violate so many rules of user experience design. But why are they so bad? In a nutshell, its for the same reason you don’t expect loggers to sell fancy high-end furniture (think about that one for a second). The products are being built from the wrong end of the production team.
For the dining room table, what do you think, arrow foot or ball foot?
Let’s agree that user experience design is a challenge to begin with. Apple does it great, everyone else, not so much – and even Apple products have flaws. Further, virtually everything about a “ten foot” user interface (the terminology we use to describe what happens on-screen on your TV) is a broken interaction model, so this is going to be crippled no matter what. I’ll write about this more in the future, but I believe there’s a fundamental breakdown on the limitations of what you can do with any 10′ UI and a remote control, regardless of gestures, speech, etc.
Next, per my logger analogy, effectively the teams building these products have absolutely no experience nor expertise at this kind of design. The world of consumer electronics has (barely) evolved from dials, knobs, and switches to doing highly complicated interfaces on screens. Not only that, every year the requirements are changing!
And since this is a new field (despite almost 20 years worth of ten-foot UIs), there are very very few folks out there who have dived deeply into this problem (the Wikipedia page on the topic barely even requires a scrollbar to read everything). So the same people who are used to just getting the TV to work right, are now also in charge of creating “an experience”. I think this is a guaranteed to fail situation, and it’s unfortunate for everyone involved.
The last "easy" TV user interface.
I do have some tips and thoughts for these UIs, since I can’t effectively get everyone to just up and stop making them (pretty please?). First, you can read my comments a while back on designing better Boxee and Google TV apps. Now, here’s three more things to think about:
Now in beautiful Full 1080p HD
Ultimately, this again reinforces my belief that anything new coming from Apple will be highly based on AirPlay concepts, and the 10-foot UI will one day be a thing of the past. And what will replace it? This.
Seems like Apple has news coming later this month. Regardless of your feelings about Apple, it’s safe to say they have mastered the art of the product launch like none other. Even when virtually every detail of a new product gets leaked due to it being stolen lost at a bar, they still master the news cycle and generally enchant and entertain. Some might argue they simply do things whenever they want, others would surmise they do it entirely calculated on a spreadsheet based on maximizing sales. My guess is they do it “when they can” – the moment they are done with the first production line and have the shipments queued up, the media invites go out, a few semi-leaks pop up here and there, then off to the races.
This works great when you can fit a few hundred phones into every crate and airdrop ’em over the US at the same day/time with ease. Sure it’s costly, but in the grand scheme of things, no big deal. The boat’s left the harbor at the same time, and within 3 weeks the full distribution cycle is up and running.
But now we’re not talking about a gadget that fits in your pocket, it’s an Apple Television (right? right?). And despite what self-aggrandizing promoters some analysts say, it’d be my guess that they ship them in more sizes than just 32″ and 37″ (seriously, how did anyone actually believe that?). Unless they’re about to pour forth with statements about how those are actually the ideal sizes for a display, I don’t think they’re about to exist in a market where size really does matter and play on the small front. I’d guess we see one at ~32″, ~40″, ~50″, and ~60″ – those are the main categories of TVs sold today.
Yeah, I'm on a truck. Life's just that good. I have a keg back here too.
And now is where we face our hurdle: these TVs are big. The box for my Samsung 63″ plasma barely fit into a pickup truck! You can’t exactly airdrop hundreds of each model to Apple stores. In fact, every aspect of the logistics to pull off Apple’s typical surprise & delight maneuvers is quite tricky here. So that’s problem number one – in my guess they solve this via the “and you’ll all be able to receive your units 30 days from today” type of solution. But there’s no way you’ll hear “and you can go get them in Apple stores nationwide this afternoon.”
Second, unlike phones and iPads, and even computers, TV buying has a lot more seasonality to it. And other than a core set of fanatics (nope, I’m not at that level yet), most people aren’t about to pick up new expensive living room gear for any given reason. This is actually one of the trickiest nuances of the TV world (on the hardware front) – it’s really hard to get someone out of their buying cycles. Sure, if someone was already planning to get a new set next holiday season they’ll consider getting one in June or August or whenever. But if not, (question mark).
So, they can’t announce too soon. Or too late. They can’t announce in the first half of the year. But if they wait til too late, they’ll impact supply chain in a painful way and potentially affect sales.
My money’s on a late Spring announcement, shipping in the Summer. Even though it’s traditionally a terrible time to introduce a TV set to the market, it’ll give them more time to get the logistic down, the stores reformatted, and everything else into full swing in advance of the Q4 buying season.
But then again, it’s Apple, so “the rules” just don’t apply.
This is a guest post by Anil Podduturi, you can find his bio below.
Gary Myer, who helped found DirectTV, recently penned a guest post for Wired on the future of TV. It comes with a provocative headline: Why Nobody is Challenging the Pay‐TV Providers.
Myer covers a lot of ground in the post, but it’s mostly familiar territory for readers of this blog: Unbundling, linear vs. VOD, social, device ecosystems. After setting the scene with the 40k-foot industry landscape, Myer makes some bold claims about what’s gating television innovation that dramatically oversimplify industry dynamics.
The biggest problem with Myer’s argument is that it ignores the major impediments to progress for both newcomers and incumbents – these include product design in all of its various incarnations, but let’s not forget content rights, content cost structures, and the economic realities of unbundling. It’s not as simple as cracking a new navigational paradigm for on-demand video or acquiring more content.
(For more on the nuances of this industry quagmire, see my Storify from last week capturing a Twitter conversation between Dennis Crowley, Dan Frommer, Hunter Walk, and others, that all started when Dennis’s grandmother couldn’t watch the Pats game in Florida without a $350 DirectTV Sunday Ticket subscription.)
At the end of the day, video services of the future must increase the value of the monthly subscription through a mixture of distribution, content, and user experience, but getting there will require a data-driven approach to the business that embraces platform dynamics and wedges the economics of content in favor of consumers.
This approach should extend to every dimension of the business, including content acquisition. Myer acknowledges that content acquisition is one of the biggest challenges for would-be disruptors. In fact, it’s his hypothesis for why nobody is challenging the pay-TV incumbency:
What’s the Problem
To seriously compete with existing pay‐TV providers, new providers need to offer at least what the existing providers offer, plus added benefits (more content, lower price, superior user experience, etc).
Successful internet‐video providers will offer a comprehensive catalog of à la carte/on‐demand content –- with an intuitive user experience. Existing internet video players are offering only a fraction of the programming of pay‐TV providers and they are securing new content rights haphazardly. If you’re going to compete with the incumbents, why guess what programming is important to your customer by only acquiring rights to selected programs?
Myer says that newcomers shouldn’t guess what programming is important to the customer, and he’s right. But that doesn’t mean the video service of the future should strive for parity in programming. We now live in a world where the best consumer web products have iterated in part because of data – usage data if your product has traction, but how about general industry research like this Nielsen study that tells us the average US home with a cable package receives about 118 channels, but only watches 17 of them.
The way to increase subscription value isn’t by embracing the same content library, but rather by extending the value of the ~14% of content that consumers do access regularly and augmenting that offering with other relevant content and services. To do that, newcomers should leverage actual consumer data signals if they’re fortunate enough to have built a product that can capture them.
"Let me just write em an email, I can explain it all in a simple email!"
Netflix has built a data-driven product, and this is why Reed Hastings got on stage earlier this month at the UBS Media conference to proclaim that he’s the Billy Beane of digital media. “We’re very much the ‘moneyball’ content buyers. We’ll look at, OK, we paid X for something, so how many people watched it?” Netflix is collecting and analyzing viewing data that then informs their content acquisition strategy.
Netflix, like the Oakland A’s, must apply a data-driven approach because they simply can’t afford to acquire everything they think consumers might want. It’s been reported that Netflix’s streaming content licensing costs will rise from $180 million in 2010 to $2 billion in 2012. Netflix can’t afford to spend another dime or another million on content that doesn’t directly add measurable value to the service.
But at least Netflix is in position to measure value and apply data-driven learning to its product strategy. This brings us to the supply chain of internet-age content distribution, an ecosystem within which Myer says, “companies need to control at least the device and the service.”
It remains to be scene whether this level of control will prove to be a categorical business imperative. Apple and Amazon seem to think so, and have demonstrated success owning their respective hardware and software stacks.
Netflix, on the other hand, is a service provider that understands platform dynamics and how to extract value and meaningful consumption data at the service layer. Netflix not only operates its service across PCs, tablets, gaming consoles, connected TVs, and phones, but has also developed the technical proficiency to optimize that cross-platform device distribution. This allows Netflix to maintain a direct relationship with the consumer and refine its user experience across platforms.
Incumbents like HBO and Showtime have begun to recognize the value of the direct-to-consumer model with their HBO Go and Showtime Anytime streaming services. Competitors like Hulu and YouTube keep investing in direct-to-consumer efforts to drive greater engagement (Hulu Latino, YouTube Channels). Microsoft redesigned the XBox Live Dashboard as a platform for content providers to go direct-to-consumer. Just this past week, we saw the comedian Louis CK pull off an experiment in content distribution, going direct-to-consumer to the tune of $200k and counting in profit.
These direct relationships, and how service providers leverage them to extract data that in turn informs product development, content distribution, and content acquisition will help shape the real future of television at the service layer. No single service will be able to provide a comprehensive offering so long as there is still exclusive, marquee programming and healthy competition in the device ecosystem. However the dust settles, content must stay accessible and affordable for the consumer.
About Anil: Anil Podduturi was most recently VP of Product Strategy at NBCUniversal. Prior to NBC, he led product management at Daylife, MTV Networks, and Microsoft. On Twitter: @anilpodI first met Robert back in my Slingbox days, and now we get together a few times a year to chat tech in general, kid stuff, but especially gadgetry. He sat down with myself and Maksim (the CEO of Dijit) this past summer, and a couple of weeks ago I went to see him and his new digs at Rackspace HQ. Here’s the video:
A quick summary of what we discussed:
And for a fun flashback, here’s the video from our chat right before CES 2009:
good times, Robert, thanks!
With the latest updates, the XBOX 360 is able to show live TV via Verizon’s FIOS service. For Kinect owners, this enables a vision of a fully gesture controlled TV. Swipe your hand left/right to change channels, up/down to change volume, and do a backflip to return to the channel you were previously watching. Wonderful.
Well, wonderful in theory, that is. But in reality, I’m not so sure. First, I’ll get past the concern of my TV randomly changing channels when I gesticulate wildly during a hockey game (Go Habs!) and just assume it only does it when I want it to. I’m going to move to the part of the conversation of “how much does this help me as a TV watcher?”
How does it help?
If I don’t need a remote control, at all, I’d say it’s a nice improvement (though as you’ll read below, this is pretty close to impossible). With a caveat: it needs to work in such a way that every “command” is completely memorable. If there’s a risk that I’ll forget how to Pause, Record, or access my DVR menu, and I’ll ever need to reach for that remote, it’s a done deal. From my experience ranging from Siri on the iPhone to early gesture technology (my first ever was the original Black & White game), the moment the technology becomes semi-reliable it is functionally equivalent to unreliable. And, dropped calls not withstanding, people for the most part do not regularly use unreliable technology.
How doesn’t it help?
Well, since there’s no way the gestures can replace on-screen menus (the dreaded 10′ UI), ultimately all the gesture does is replace a physical remote (in other words – there’s no gesture for “I want to watch The Office from my DVR” or “change to channel 704”). So the user still has to deal with their sluggish, painful to use EPG (electronic program guide), navigate the tedious DVR menus, etc etc etc. Which begs the question – is waving your hand “up” really a “Great” improvement to pushing “up” on a remote? I’d file this under the “not-so-much” category.
There’s a lot to be said for the transformation of TV. There’s a lot of new functionality coming. There’s a lot of new services coming. This is about the most exciting time for innovation and change in the television industry that I’ve ever seen. This also directly implies we’re going to see a lot of gimmickry, under which gesture controls firmly sits in my opinion (though ZDNet thinks it’s the bomb – but hey, to each their own).
But then again, if it lets people put down their poop-laden remotes, I guess that does make the world a better place.
Budapest Parliament Hall. This would be an awesome place for a smart TV conference!
Just like my Future of TV Newsletter (thanks to all the subscribers – wow!), I thought it would be helpful for all my peers to create a list of all the events I’m tracking this Fall that have anything to do with Smart, Social, or Connected TV. That said, I’m sure I’m missing some (please email, tweet, or comment if you know of any!). The list below also includes some of the speakers that are presenting, though is incomplete (I only had so much room on the page, sorry to anyone I cut – it wasn’t personal. Well, mostly.).
Speakers include:
Demos by:
Speakers include:
Speakers include:
Speakers include:
Speakers include:
Speakers include:
Speakers include:
Speakers include:
Speaker list not yet finalized
Speakers include:
Now that I’m “back in the game” so to speak, I’ve spent the past few months creating a few tools to help me find industry relevant content. A few of my peers have asked to take a glance “at my tools”, which I found shocking at first, but soon realized what they were talking about. As such, here they are:
1 – the Future of TV newsletter
Inspired by my colleague Jason Hirschhorn‘s excellent “MediaReDEFined” newsletter, I’ve set up a newsletter that’s just me curating news in the “Future of TV” space. Topics include Social TV, Connected TV, SmartTV, Second Screen, Four Screens, OTT (Over-the-Top), Cord Cutting and just about anything else that comes along that way. It’s a fully manually curated production, so you should expect anywhere from 2-20 or so article per day (substantially less on the weekend).
Sample excerpt:
The Difference Between Connected TV, Social TV and Expanded TV (TribecaFilm) | Talk NYC Posted: 19 Aug 2011 01:39 PM PDT
With television moving onto different platforms, it seems like nowadays we can watch TV everywhere. What is the ultimate future for television in a world that expects more from their
The Cable Customer’s Bill of Rights Posted: 19 Aug 2011 01:39 PM PDT
Over the past few days, we’ve received more than 1,000 horror stories about bad cable experiences: tales of bad techs, terrible service, and troubling billing practices. We used those to build a cable customer’s bill of rights.
Hope you find this useful, click here to subscribe. And don’t forget to tell all your friends!
2 – the Future of TV Twitter list
The best way to really *use* Twitter (other than pure self-promotion, narcissism, and stalking purposes that is), is to organize people into “lists” that tend to tweet about a given topic. Even then, it’s an easy bet that said list will still contain it’s fair share of lunch-related discussion and reality TV show spoilers, but it’s still better than the pure noise of your regular Twitter stream. I’ve culled a list of people who tend to be more likely than not to tweet about something having to do with the future of TV. It’s not perfect, and it’s probably still missing some folks. Here’s a sample:
Note that this is *not* a list of all companies or people in the Future of TV industry, and Twitter accounts from companies such as Miso and GetGlue are conspicuously absent – but this is because they aren’t really tweeting about TV, and are tweeting about TV shows themselves (not to pick on either company – and if there are Twitter accounts from them, or others, that are more germaine to this topic, I’d be happy to include them here).
I’ve also embedded this list into the sidebar of the blog, so you can follow along from here if that’s easier. Or click here to see the whole list in action.
Hope either of these are useful tools to anyone in this very fun, very fast-moving industry. Happy to take any feedback or suggestions as well!
I’ve been in “Future of TV” startups directly and indirectly since 1999, yet haven’t once made it to SXSW Interactive (I was even supposed to speak this year, but my third child arrived way too close to the conference for me to make it unfortunately). For 2012 I’ve proposed a talk entitled “Why the Future of TV has Four Screens” and hopefully the conference organizers will find it interesting to include. This is obviously a space I have a lot of passion about, so I decided to go peek around at what other interesting and related presentations and panels are in the “PanelPicker”.
Here’s the ones I’ve found, in no particular order:
Title: Why the Future of TV has Four Screens
Speaker: Jeremy Toeman, Dijit Media
Studies have shown that over 70% of TV watching happens with a second screen in hand, whether it’s a phone, tablet or laptop, people are no longer just watching TV. They are tweeting, checking-in, Facebooking, searching the web for information and more. The rise of this social TV trend is causing companies across the entire TV industry, including content providers, TV manufacturers and startups in the convergence space to take notice. They are now trying to blend content, social and additional screen interaction in a variety of ways, from social networking on your TV screen to controlling your TV with your phone. However this is causing more confusion, not more entertainment. In this panel, we will explore: How are consumers using the second (or third or fourth) screens? Why are the additional screens important? How do those additional screens affect the way consumers interact with TV? And how are the additional screens are changing the entertainment landscape for the next decade?
Title: Why Digital May Forever Alter TV As We Know It
Speakers: Michael Aragon (Sony Network Entertainment), Jason Spivak (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment)
With 24/7 internet access on our mobile phones, Blu-ray players, HDTVs, laptops and gaming consoles, the ability to easily stream movies, TV shows, and other digital content has forever changed the way we consume film and video. People older than 50 are more likely to tune into TV broadcasts, while people younger than 25 are actively watching online video. The revolution in business models and digital distribution that disrupted the music industry has turned the TV and film industry on its head. As a result we are seeing a paradigm shift where producers, TV execs, gaming publishers, and print authors are paving new roads to build business models around on-demand video that is accessible across multiple devices. This presentation will discuss where the present round of convergence is leading, what the opportunity is for monetizing content beyond ad-based revenue, and what forms of new interactive media we can expect to see on network-enabled devices
Title: The Future of TV: Bigger, Brighter and Greener
Speaker: Amit Jain, Prysm
The way we interact with our television is changing. Submissive TV watching is a thing of the past. What does the demand for larger, interactive video displays mean for the future of in-home entertainment? The days of passive television viewing are gone. Today’s audiences are savvier and more engaged in the technology around them and expect more from their television screen than simple 2-D moving pictures. Television screens continue to get bigger and deliver a more immersive viewing experience accompanied by high-def picture quality and 3-D capabilities. As these technologies continue to improve, in-home entertainment is getting more and more life-like. Unfortunately, the current television market cannot keep up with the consumer demand for a bigger, better viewing experience at home. While 55” plasma screens seem like the next best thing, they offer a logistical nightmare. From the transportation between store to home, to the installation and additional infrastructure needed to support them, to the mass quantities of power they consume, it seems the larger the screen the bigger the headache. In this session, Prysm CEO, Amit Jain, will explore the future of television and discuss the changes in technology needed to make this a reality.
Title: Brave New World of Smart TV: Myths & Misperception
Speaker: Mario Queiroz, Google TV
The age of convergence is finally here, but the landscape remains complex and confusing. In this session, Mario Queiroz will work to address the common myths and misperceptions around smart TVs and the promise the category holds for consumer electronics manufacturers, content owners, and consumers. Like the smart phone before it, the smart TV will bring a new layer of functionality to your existing home entertainment experiences. Mario will explore the value the web will bring to your living room experience. This platform will be targeted, personal, and discoverable with a touch of the button, and it will be integrated across multiple screens, from mobile phones to tablets to TVs. The developer transformed the world of smart phones and is doing the same for tablets. Mario will also address why smart TV is the next frontier for application development and why the prospects for killer apps that will fundamentally change the way we view and engage with television look promising.
Title: Second Screen and Social TV: Which way from here?
Speakers: Carlton Cuse (Carlton Cuse Productions), Brad Pelo (i.TV), Lisa Hsia (Bravo Digital Media), Alex Iskold (GetGlue)
For years we’ve debated the promise of interactive TV. Until now, the promise has not been realized but with the advent of real-time social services like Twitter and TV-specific social apps, we seem to be on the cusp of a sea change when it comes to how people watch and engage with television. This session will discuss the state of the second screen, why it’s important and what it will take to finally make interactive TV a reality.
Title: Can a Social Web of Things keep TV cords connected
Speaker: Alison Moore, HBO
It’s 2015 and over half of the devices in your home are connected to the Internet. On the drive home you consider taking a longer route, but when you ask for directions the GPS system reminds you that you need to get home soon – you have a viewing party. The television recognizes you when you walk in the door and suggests that you pour a glass of wine since everyone else is online and waiting for you to join the Game of Thrones premier party. In response, the wine cooler switches on, illuminating the last bottle of red – a 2007 Scarecrow. You cringe but open it anyway. Your HBO app automatically loads a summary of last season’s characters since you still seem to have them confused, and then asks if you’d like to join the group video chat. “Go ahead”, you say, “I will catch up as we go.” Join Rhonda and Allison as they think aloud about the future of media immersed in a world where everything is connected, and television becomes something that you live instead of just watch.
Title: Power Shift: Gadgets Rock Entertainment Ecosystem
Speaker: Richard Bullwinkle (Rovi Corporation)
We love our gadgets — all three, four, or even five of them. Daily, we constantly use our iPad, smart phone, laptop, iTouch, and devices that interact with our TV. Research confirms that we love to multi-task with our media — while watching TV, we surf the web, text and instant message. Generation Y may not have grown up with electronic gadgets but they face it full on as corporate America is grappling with how to use the iPad as a business tool while for many Generation Z ankle-biters, the iPad is their Fisher-Price busy-box. Today, technologists and content owners struggle to make content flow freely from one device to another, but we all know that day will come. This session will take a look at our fascination with being connected anytime, anywhere as it weaves itself into the very fabric of society, forever changing how we live, work and play. It will address how touch screen, connected, and high-resolution technologies are shaping consumer and social behavior, and defining what consumers expect their gadgets to do for them tomorrow.
Title: #futureoftv: Breaking through the noise
Speaker: Maureen Costello (Little Cannonballs)
New TV technologies are being launched at a breakneck pace, yet, right now it is all noise until some standards are set. Our industry is poised for a future of innovation, but the landscape still looks like a jumble of wires. Who are the current players breaking through the noise? What intellectual capital have we netted from the world’s investment in the Internet and its standards? What have we learned from the mistakes of the music industry? How can industry players—new and old—work together to define standards for success? Can we predict who will be left standing in the greatest reality competition ever—for TV’s digital future? Let’s break through the noise and get with the program folks!
Title: Enriching TV experience with companion apps
Speaker: Perry Cooper, NHL
As TV audiences age, marketers are challenged to appeal to their prime demographic of 18-to-49-year-olds. The younger demographic is definitely watching TV, but they now require a second screen to enhance their viewing and steer away from the traditional TV experience. The second screen of choice, being the mobile device, is now accessed by 86% of mobile Internet users simultaneously while watching TV to browse the web, social network, and text, according to a recent Yahoo! study. To appeal to this younger, more tech-savvy demographic, the NHL will be offering an in-game experience for the mobile users that will stimulate behavior and keep fans engaged throughout the entirety of every game. What will be referred to as “predictive gaming” will combine the attraction of fantasy sports to live games where users can compete with friends to predict what their favorite player or team will do next in real-time, adding a new layer of excitement to the game. The proposed presentation will examine how the second screen will become the virtual requirement for future TV programming.
Title: Convergent iTV Apps: Factors for Great Products
Speaker: Wes Williams, Scripps Networks
Many factors distinguish great apps from coulda-been-a-contender apps. We’ll do a deep dive into questions you should ask when producing convergent apps for connected TVs, smartphones and tablets. The framework will be an unbiased review of apps in the real world, balancing user-oriented thinking with business needs. This will reveal factors to consider when building interactive apps related to TV viewing. Learn how to determine which features you need to reach marketing, advertising and audience goals, whether on just the TV screen or multiple platforms.
Title: Tablets & TV – Building Second Screens Experiences
Speaker: Klemens Wengert, Turner Broadcasting
Creating phone and tablet companion applications for television shows presents a unique opportunity for content providers. By linking the two screens together we have a new way to engage and deliver content to the users, integrate advertising and enhance the experience of watching television. This presentation is going to focus on how to create a second screen experience that makes sense for your audience, for your brand and your advertisers through case studies from Turner Broadcasting as well as some best practises and lessons learned.
Title: 3 Screen Minimum: Convergence of TV & Social Media
Speakers: Fred Harner (SportsNet New York (SNY)), Stephanie Agresta (Weber Shandwick.com), Eric Bruno (Verizon), Soraya Darabi (Foodspotting)
A full 70 percent of US tablet owners say they use their devices while watching TV. Companies like Verizon are baking social into their products and enabling users to tweet, watch online videos and update Facebook directly from their TVs. Channels like Bravo capitalize on this by weaving emerging tech like Foursquare, Foodspotting and Shazam into their TV output, as well as having personalities engage actively with fans and critics on Twitter and other social media. Google Hangouts allows people to watch web video together online. Join as forward thinkers from Verizon, Foodspotting, SportsNet NY (SNY) discuss what’s next for the convergence of social media and TV.