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Why It’s a Great Time to Start a TV Startup, part 2: It’s Time For Change

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2015-03-04_1049As I asserted in Part 1,  I believe we are entering a “fourth generation” of television, one in which the rigid walls that have previously defined the industry are fundamentally disrupted. In the post-1.0 era, not only have consumers lived within “walled gardens” of content, but the industry itself has remained mostly closed to outsiders. When even companies as powerful as Intel and Google have tremendous struggles dealing with Hollywood, gaining access to content, etc, it’s almost comical to think of the startups who tried the same. Aereo’s $96 million in funding became about $1M in auction to TiVo this week.

This is mostly due to the incredible entanglement of contracts and legal issues pertaining to content ownership, distribution rights, release windows, playback, etc. Heck, even TV-related companies trying to change struggle with the mess. For context: We live in a world today that lets me buy NHL Gamecenter (directly from the NHL) yet not watch my hometown team (Montreal Canadiens, FTW) play “blacked out” games that air on, wait for it, the NHL Network.

The way I’ve always tried to describe the complexity to people is to think of taking a few dozen cables, neatly wound up, then throw em in a backpack and go for a quick jog. Then try to extract a single cable – good luck (for off-topic reading, here’s why that happens).

But we, today, are seeing important catalysts of change, and the catalysts are strong enough to make the powers that be look at how they can un-entangle their own mess. Here are the factors that I believe contribute strongest to a looming shift:

  • Netflix, Hulu, SlingTV, HBOGO, and TVE services break down the barriers to making content available through live and near-real-time streaming options. They also “train” content owners to think differently about distribution options.
  • iTunes, Google Play, and VOD services enable a la carte alternatives that are truly viable options to many consumers.
  • Pervasive 4G access, inexpensive smartphones, and tablets train consumers to demand anything/everything on all devices everywhere and all the time.
  • Bittorrent, Popcorn Time, and other piracy options have made finding and accessing high quality content for free far too easy for far too many people.
  • YouTube, Vimeo, and the suite of multichannel networks like Fullscreen are providing infinite entertainment alternatives to younger audiences, who may be losing the “attachment” to broadcast-quality television. This should be particularly scary to all sorts of companies – if the zeitgeist of pop culture shifts away from TV, we can expect to see more change, faster, than anyone can predict.
  • Cord cutting and dropping TV ratings are at the cusp of causing dramatic impact to advertisers, the unquestionable lifeblood of the industry.

As my colleague Adam Flomembaum, Editor at Lost Remote, shared with me yesterday:

“… we have seen in the last year that control of high quality content is being wrested from the hands of cable and satellite providers. Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of other great options for accessing their favorite content, and TV startups that make this process more seamless – or at the very least, more consumer friendly – have a great chance to thrive.”

"What do you mean 'Lets get rid of the middlemen' we are the middle men!"Fundamentally the thing that’s made the TV industry “work” is the requirement and dependency on the two-tiered “middlemen” between content production and audiences.  But if the audiences are shifting patterns, quickly, and the producers are able to find new methods of profitable content distribution, change will come. I can’t say it’s a “this year” thing or a “10 years from now” thing – but I do believe we’ve entered the phase wherein there’s industry awareness of changing times, and reactiveness is following.

I’d also argue that this was not the case over the past decade, and is directly attributable to why so many TV startups crashed and burned. As Eric Elia, Managing Director of Cainkade, puts it:

“The technology has been here for a while, but we’ve been waiting for 10 years for the TV industry dynamics to shift. The table is now set with [hundreds of millions of] streaming devices worldwide, the unbundling boom (HBO, CBS, Sling TV, etc), and a Netflix clone for every taste and geography.  It’s going to be a fun few years for tools companies, programmers, ad tech. But I would not want to be a commodity content owner that can’t flap its wings outside the bundle.”

Now with any change we’ll see some mega-corporations begin their slow road to the deadpool, while others seize opportunities. We’ll see startups rise seemingly out of nowhere and become household names. Even five years ago cable and broadcast execs could easily keep their eyes on the distant horizon fearlessly – today, they’re building survival plans.

Next up: defining “TV 4.0”, identifying short-to-long-term opportunities, and other thoughts on why I think it’s a great time to be riding the wave of change in television.

Guest Post: the Broken Golden Age of Television

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This is a guest post by TV industry thought leader Erik Schwartz:

broken golden tv

It’s broken. But in 4K!

“Television is dead.” 

“It’s the golden age of television.”  

Here at the NATPE conference in Miami Beach this week, I’m hearing both of these arguments being argued repeatedly.  I think there’s truth in both positions.

This is the golden age of television. Programs like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, HOC, Hannibal, Fargo, The Americans, are as good or better than anything that has ever been produced. The current MVPD model is optimized around every network having a blockbuster show that makes that network a “must carry” for cable and satellite providers, and then filling up the rest of its schedule as cheaply as possible. As the number of networks has grown, the number of these tent-pole programs has swelled.  

Television is dead. Fewer consumers are watching this programming in a linear fashion, as the network airs it. It is DVR’ed, viewed on demand through TV Everywhere or Hulu, or purchased from iTunes or Amazon. It’s a generational shift. This is making it more difficult to monetize via traditional TV advertising channels. (My kids barely know what commercials are.) If this trend continues, will networks continue to invest in the funding of premium programming?

Will the SVODs like Netflix pick up the slack by funding even more new programming? To a certain extent, yes. But SVOD growth was fueled by buying archives of existing high-quality content, for much less than it would cost to produce new quality programming. This content is cheaper because it is already monetized.  It is found money for the rights holder. At market saturation (and Netflix is almost there in the US), if the SVODs have enough programming (original and archive) to prevent subscriber churn, is there incremental ROI in making more premium shows? Their profit is maximized by offering just enough content to keep a viewer subscribed — everything over that threshold eats into profit margins. A viewer consuming more SVOD is an incremental expense that does not increase revenue.

Yes, it is the golden age of programming. But the existing models for monetization are flawed given today’s consumer’s preferred consumption channels. Flat-rate SVOD incentivizes “just enough” great programming. For decades, advertising made revenue directly proportional to consumption. That changed when retransmission fees started accounting for more network revenue, and then it changed more with SVOD. For this golden age to continue, we need a new model in which revenue for all stakeholders is correlated with audience size.

– Erik Schwartz



NextGuide, now with Amazon and more awesomeness

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NextGuide, my personal favorite TV Guide app (that I built at the company I run), is now updated to include Amazon Prime and Amazon Instant Video alongside live TV, Hulu Plus, iTunes, and Netflix.  It’s really a great experience to browse all providers simultaneously and to search for shows and actually know where they are watchable. You can get the update here on the App Store.

That’s the “big” news (yes, adding a streaming provider with tens of thousands of hours of streamable shows and movies is a big deal IMHO), but we also took the time for a lot of across the board improvements to the app.  Here are some of the highlights:

>> New Gestures – two-finger swipe within showcards, pinch to hide, fullscreen media gallery, and more!

One of my favorite things about a great iPad experience is gestures. One of my favorite favorite things about any app is hidden features. While it’d be fun to document them everywhere, we’ve loaded up the NextGuide experience with many new gestures.  Explore around, let us know what you find and think of them!

>> Enhanced Cast & Crew with 1-click saved searches and Wikipedia biography lookups.

File this under “finally!”  When we shipped the 1.0 version, the cast and crew view just wasn’t that useful.  Now, go to the cast and crew tab for any movie or show, and tap on a person you are interested in.  Want to find more stuff from them?  Tap “add to interests.”

>> New Category Editor with easy drag & drop category setup

While we made removing/hiding categories really easy in the app, it’s always been a pain to add them. Now, push and hold on anywhere in the “Category Bar” to get a slick interface to add genres, custom genres, and trending topics.

>> Channel Setup now part of Initial Setup Wizard

The customer is always right, and lots of ours told us they didn’t like the fact they couldn’t customize their channel lineups until after launching the app.  Now you can.

>> Improved “Your Picks” algorithms

Let’s face it, recommending content is a very hard thing to get right. Our focus is to get beyond the baseline concept of “if you like this then you’ll like that.”  We’re constantly working to improve it, and I think our users will see a lot of progress in this department.

>> Lots of other little new features for you to explore throughout the app

Thanks again to every one of our users, even the 1-star reviews in the App Store – its the best way to learn, and learning is what we’re doing!

ps – sorry about not blogging much, just been working on, you know, everything you just read about.

Introducing NextGuide

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It’s my pleasure to unveil my newest product, NextGuide.  NextGuide is a hyper-personalized TV listings guide designed specifically for the iPad™.  It’s been a six month labor of lots and lots of love, and I’m extremely excited to tell you about it.  In a nutshell?  We went to the drawing board and utterly reinvented the concept of the TV program guide.

If you think about the concept of a “guide” it’s something that’s evolved over 60 years from supporting 3 to 13 to 80 to 500+ channels.  But that’s really all it does, and let’s face it, we no longer live in a 500-channel world.  We live in a 500 channel, plus tens of thousands of hours of streaming content on services like Netflix, huge libraries of video on demand from our cable and satellite companies, as well as iTunes itself.  It’s effectively an infinite content landscape, and having so much content has crippled the formerly easy process of discovering shows to watch.

As an example, in my house at night, we start by browsing our DVR library, don’t see anything we’re in the mood for, then switch over to live TV.  After browsing (painfully) the grid for a while, we give up, turn on the Apple TV, and head to Netflix.  Netflix is great, but I have a tendency to see stuff I already know about – Mad Men, Dexter, Weeds, Breaking Bad, etc – all great shows, but not really anything new that I’m ready to consume.  Part of the problem here is catch-up TV: if I’ve never watched Mad Men before then I’m a good 80+ hours away from catching up to live, and that sounds painful.  Anyhow, after an unsuccessful attempt to find something to stream, I generally end up watching whatever’s on (either Cops, the Shawshank Redemption, or an infomercial), then go to sleep.  Sound familiar at all?

So we invented NextGuide, designed to actually help me discover things I *want* to watch. We do that by tilting the concept of Channels, Times, and Genres on its head a little, and instead focus on Shows, People, and Interests.

Shows – we believe people care more about the show they watch than the channel number or time it airs.  So NextGuide uses beautiful show cover art to make it easy to find things and “escape” the grid view of numbers and times.

People – we believe TV remains a central zeitgeist component to modern society. When was the last time you chatted with any friend about a show you like (or love)?  Probably in the past day or so.  NextGuide makes it ridiculously easy to turn conversations, not to mention Facebook Likes, into easily discoverable shows.

Interests – we believe people care about finding things of interest to them, personally.  We all have interests, from bands to sports, from cities to hobbies, and these interests define so much of our lives. NextGuide connects you to your interests, and finds them all on TV and streaming services, in a seamless, organic way.  Examples of what NextGuide’s found for me over the past few weeks: Bill Murray’s guest appearance on Letterman (seriously, how would I even have known that unless I watch every night??), a live Coldplay concert on Palladium (I didn’t even know the channel was in my lineup), and Bizarre Foods goes to San Francisco (not a show I normally care for, but had to see what Andrew found in my city).

That’s enough writing already, this is one of those apps you just have to experience to get a sense of what we’ve done. It’s a complete paradigm shift for TV viewing, and I’m happy to share it with you.  You can download it from the App Store, or watch our quick intro video below.

Introducing NextGuide from Dijit Media on Vimeo.

I can’t wait for your feedback, thanks so much for trying out the app.  Thanks to Apple for inventing the iPad so we could have such a cool platform to bring something like this to life. Extra special thanks to my family, friends, coworkers and investors who have made the process of inventing something disruptive more fun than I think I really deserve.

We are getting some amazing press so far today, here are some great pieces:

Oh, and here’s the actual announcement on our newly revised site!

Thanks, Steve!

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Apple is one of those companies that tends to polarize people. Some hate them for “closed” systems.  Others love them for beautiful products.  Some call them evil and bullying.  Others say they open markets.  I’m not one to debate, so I’ll just cut to the chase by saying Apple, in the past decade, has contributed more to consumer technology than most other companies combined.  And it’s fairly hard to argue that the Apple of today is entirely the company Steve built.

Steve Jobs’ resignation hits hard, but the only thing that comes as a surprise is the seeming suddenness of it (Yeah, but I mean the very end, when he actually resigned. That was extremely sudden).  Here’s a list of some of the things, love em or hate em, that we should all be thankful of Jobs/Apple for (and yes, I’m sure some dude in some lab somewhere invented all these things about 300 years ago, but if it weren’t for Apple, we all wouldn’t know about them):

  • Internet-based music distribution: from iTunes to Pandora to Spotify to Turntable, had it not been for Apple creating the iPod+iTunes ecosystem, it’s unlikely the music industry would’ve had sufficient motivation to enable “digital” as fast as they did.  The MP3 market would’ve grown much slower, resulting in less buy-in from the industry, resulting in a lack of streaming and on-demand services.  Would we have something like it today?  Probably.  Would it all be priced the way it is today?  Doubtful.  It took the muscle of the iPod’s dominance to enable Apple to negotiate the entire music industry into the $0.99 pricing schema we have today.  It’s likely that companies such as Amazon and Sony would’ve ended up much strong in this space, but we’d probably be paying more for the same content, and I’d wager services like Pandora would never have gotten off the ground.
  • “Real” smartphones: Unquestionably smartphones predate the iPhone.  Blackberries had some “smartness” and earlier generation Windows Mobile devices actually provided quite a bit of functionality, not to mention the granddaddy of them all, the Palm/Treo lines.  But let’s face it, the iPhone really changed everything.  Capacitive touchscreens (remember the stylus? nope, me neither), app stores (more on that to come), and more, all thanks to the iPhone’s success.  I think Nokia and RIM would still be considered the leaders in the mobile space if Apple had never shipped an iPhone, and team Android should be exceptionally grateful for its existence.
  • Gestures: Pinch + Zoom? Swipe? Multi-finger scroll?  One could argue this is just a subset of the smartphone, but it’s not, as gesture support has improved the computing experience overall.  Prior to the “two finger scroll” feature on MacBooks, the only thing even close was the variety of PC manufacturers who enabled the right-side scroll region on their inputs.  Once again, an area where numerous companies could’ve beaten Apple to the punch, but simply didn’t.
  • The Internet: Just kidding.
  • That's a Vaio?

    Nice Macbook, er, Vaio.

    Bringing Sexy Back: From the moment Steve rejoined Apple through to today, the company’s products have set the standard for technology aesthetics.  Whether it’s the sleek industrial design, the minimalistic approach, the amazing attention to detail, or the use of aluminium, it’s as if Apple showed up in a Porsche while everyone around them were driving Volvos (boxy, but good).  As a result, there’s been an almost frenetic rush to make distinctive, beautiful technology.  And some of it’s even been pretty good!

  • Changing Retail: When Apple first announced they’d open their own retail stores, they were literally laughed at. There’s now over 300 of them, and they are unbelievably successful.  They are considered the best retail customer experience overall. They are wildly profitable.  Consumers enjoy going there even when they don’t buy things.  In fact, my only surprise here is the lack of copycats – nobody’s even close to creating a similar experience at such a grand level.  Well, maybe in China…
  • The App Economy: Yes, my PalmPilot had installable apps, and so did my Windows Mobile phone.  But it took Apple to create a nearly $4-BILLION app economy and marketplace.  My hunch here is without Apple revolutionizing the concept (by, again, creating a full end-to-end experience regarding discovery, installation, and most importantly, payment, for apps), we’d have nothing even as advanced as the Android market is today, which I still consider to be floundering in the dust relatively (simple tip to radically improve said experience: sort all apps AND reviews by device – will fix 80% of fragmentation problems in one fell swoop).
  • The iPad: Remember when tablets really sucked?  Guess what, they still do.  But what doesn’t suck is the iPad.  Other than speculation and conjecture, the reality check is the only successful “tablet-like product” on the market is the iPad, all others pale in comparison.  I could write a dozen or so blog posts on what everybody else is doing wrong, but the thing that matters here is all the things Apple did right.  They made something that perfectly fits into a few dozen million peoples’ lives.  Flash? Nobody cares.  USB?  Nobody cares.  “Closed system”?  Nobody cares.  The iPad, as if by magic, navigated through the waters of touch-input devices to create the admittedly-not-perfect product, but so far beyond “good enough” that it’s changed computing as we know it.

I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of things that the company did that I can’t even recall at this moment, but these were the ones that hit me as most important.  How did they do it?  The comfort in saying “no, we can’t ship that yet, it’s just not ready.”  The comfort in saying “it’s okay if we aren’t providing every feature known to man, just so long as our features are great.”  The comfort in saying “we don’t have to be perfectly compatible with all other technologies that have come before us, if we make a strong ecosystem ourselves.”  The comfort in saying “we believe this is what people really want, and we’re going to give it to them.”

These are statements that no other technology manufacturer or provider make, so far as I’ve seen in my career (with brief exceptions, such as Sling, Flip, and a handful of others).

When Steve Jobs rejoined Apple in the late 90s, it’s well known that he rapidly ripped apart products, cut staff, and trimmed down the entire operation to get radically focused.  Since then, beyond all the technology and products, what Steve’s done the most is built the very DNA of the Apple that we know today.  The real contribution Steve made, in my opinion, was creating a culture of building to perfection, and understanding what that means as a core essence.

As I commented on TechCrunch, “Much like when a pitcher walks from the mound, the entire tech industry should stand and give a round of applause for one who has contributed so much.”

Time to call it a day

When a pitcher takes that walk, sometimes it’s because they’re pulled.  But every now and then, that pitcher gave his all, kicked some amazing ass, and it’s just time for him to take a rest.  But along the way he carried or maybe even made the game.  And his spirit carries the team even further.  And for those of us watching on the sidelines, we rise with applause, out of thanks and respect.

You rocked our world!

And then the game carries on.

New TEDTalks iPad app is good – here's how to make it great

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I was thrilled to discover the new TEDTalks app for my iPad this morning, and quickly installed and liked much of the experience.  There they are, over 700 amazing Talks to listen to.  This is particularly sweet for me as I watch a TEDTalk on my iPad virtually every morning whilst on the bus to the office, currently obtained through the suboptimal process of subscribing to the podcast in iTunes, and syncing to the iPad.  And if I may slide for a moment here, I can’t believe in 2010 there’s still anything that has to “sync” via a wire.  But I digress, back to TED.

In just a few minutes of use I quickly realized the app was content-rich, but not feature-rich.  While the “Inspire Me” feature is extremely well done (it’s all about length of video – this is a key realization most entertainment/content people need to clue in on), I felt it was otherwise a little flat. In fact, it’s not going to be very useful for my personal needs, and I’m concerned that’ll be true for others as well.  So in my support of TED, and by the way – I genuinely believe that if all people watched TED Talks the world would actually be a better place – I thought I’d quickly jot out the notes to make it better for users such as myself.

  1. Add search
    The browse works great, but there’s no search.  So when I see a tweet from a friend about a given TED Talk, I can’t find it without browsing for it.  And, to boot, I need to know the category/tag that applies to the talk to find it.  While we’re at it, make search by keyword and author too.
  2. Add alphabetical browsing
    Per above, at present you need to know how the Talk is categorized to find it.  Personally, I’d like to find something just by browsing a list of titles.
  3. Add sharing features
    At the end of virtually every TEDTalk, I want to share it with someone, whether a peer, my team, a friend or family member, or the entire world on Twitter.  Add simple “tweet this” and “like this” and “email a link to this” TEDTalk to every clip.  Also, the link should probably share the YouTube or TED.com version of the clip.
  4. Add a history/watched list
    Once I’ve watched a few dozen videos, I find it hard to remember if I’ve seen one, or hard to remember the exact title of one if I want to reshare it.  A simple history feature is essential.  And in the would-be-nice category?  Show me “You Watched this on MMDDYY” on the video preview page if I come back to it.  Also, add a “mark viewed” feature along the way, in case I’ve watched the Talk on another platform.
  5. Incorporate social features
    Since everyone’s busy “liking” everything else via Facebook these days, would be great to see in a video profile page that friends of mine have liked something.
  6. Add download controls
    Once I begin a download, there appears no way to delete the download, queue for later, or otherwise manage whats going on.
  7. Add more “cool views”
    Timelines. Maps. Duration.  etc.
  8. Integrate with other platforms
    There’s the TED site, YouTube, the iPad app, a forthcoming iPhone app, a Boxee app, the iTunes podcast, and I’m sure more to come.  Assume I am using more than one method to consume the content, then allow me to integrate from one to the other.  In other words, let me favorite something on your site, then see that on my iPad app.

I think the “1.0” version of the app is probably pretty decent for most people.  If you have even a few free minutes and an Internet connection and want to get inspired, this app will certainly do the trick.  Hopefully these ideas can help inspire team TED to take it just a bit further!

Predictions for Apple event, Sept 1 2010

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Watch live video from Jeremy Toeman on Justin.tv

In a nutshell:
– iPad iOS 4.0
– refreshed iPods, with wifi
– no 3x3cm iPod touch
– adding “touch” to iPod classic
– iTunes with internet streaming & sync
– no iTV announcement today
– iBeatles

Very Curious: My First Real iTunes Sync Experience (on the iPad)

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I’m willing to place a small wager that I represent less than 1% of iPad pre-order customers when I say: “I have never owned an iPod/iPhone, nor used iTunes to sync a media file/collection.”  Yup, I’ve never dealt with the library, App Store, syncing, or anything else before.  Sure, I’ve used my friends’ iPods to browse and play music, but that’s about it.  In candor, my one experience with buying and playing content from iTunes was quite unpleasant, but I recognize it was a bit of an anomaly.

My expectations are fairly straightforward, or so I think they are.  And while I suppose there’s probably videos or web pages that already explain it all, I am looking forward to a fresh, unbiased out of the box experience (OOBE).  Here’s some of what I expect:

  • I can go to iTunes, pick stuff I like/bookmark/purchase, and it will automatically download to my iPad over WiFi.  Now I have a hunch the auto-sync part may not work like I hope, and I may need to sync over USB, which wouldn’t be terrible, but disappointing.
  • I can browse and search the app store from the iPad, find stuff, purchase & download directly
  • I can (fairly easily) sync media files (music, photos, videos) from my iMac/MacBook to my iPad
  • I can sync from one iPad to more than one Mac computer (home MacBook, office iMac)
  • On the iPad, Web links to apps enable direct download & installs (with no intervening steps)
  • On the iPad, I can browse music on my local iTunes server, and sync them (with no intervening steps)

My biggest concern is the ability to use the iPad, find content on the local network, and browse it there.  I mean this specifically with iPhoto, but general file browsing & playback is also a desire.  I’ve got close to 10K photos on my NAS and my MacBook, and would like to view them whenever I’m on the home network.  Further, I’m hoping to be able to do so while away from home, though I’m not sure if that’s possible (even with MobileMe – a service I do not currently subscribe to).  The mere idea of “use my iPad as a remote photo viewer” reaches “killer feature” category for me.

I’ll check back in on this topic once I’ve played more with the iPad + iTunes and taken enough time to sit down and write something.  Which may or may not occur via my iPad.  I’m sure there’s an app for that.