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:
One of my favorite CES moments. I'm 1/4 of the way to winning an EGOT!
Over a dozen CESes later (is that how you pluralize CES?), my tips for attending CES have shifted a bit, but not too much. But for a personal first, my tips aren’t changing at all since 2011’s CES Tips list. So, here’s that list, copied and pasted for your convenience.
Oh, and if you missed it, here’s a video of myself and Robert Scoble talking about whats in store this year. Have fun at the show!
A week ago I announced that Jim Schaff would be taking over active duties at Stage Two, and that I’d be focusing on “other stuff.” Today I’m excited to share the stuff: I am joining the management team of Dijit Media as Chief Product Officer, where I’m responsible for product and marketing (here’s the official update). Not only that, my virtually common law married colleague (business partners for much of the past 14 years) and very close friend Adam Burg is the company’s VP of Business Development.
What???
Last Fall, I gave a presentation at the Set-Top Box Conference in San Jose, and the entire drive back I had a feeling of near elation. Not that I had said anything extremely profound, but it was wrapped up in the feeling of doing something I had a lot of passion for – in this case, discussing the future of television. Over the next few months, I spent a lot of time doing research in the Smart TV (also called Connected TV or Internet TV) space, and started seeing some trends emerge, and realized there were some very interesting business opportunities on the horizon.
Adam and I spent months developing a prototype concept of the vision we had, and went to meet with some of the brightest folks we know in the convergence field. One such bright folk was well-known VC Stewart Alsop, who I’ve known since the late 1990s, who introduced us to Maksim Ioffe, CEO of Dijit. In our very first meeting with Maksim it was clear he shared much of the same industry and product vision and philosophy with Adam and me. I’ll keep this part of the story short, as we’ve all seen this movie before – we ended up agreeing to join the company. And there was much rejoicing (yay).
Why Dijit?
The grand vision of Dijit is to create the ultimate “four screen” (phone, tablet, computer, TV) social entertainment experience, one which seamlessly merges disparate products and platforms and content into one single, easy to use, consumer offering. The company is well on its way, and its first product is an iPhone app that enables a really sophisticated, yet elegantly simple control experience for home media centers. As Maksim put it, “Consumers have 21st-century home entertainment experiences but are stuck with remote controls that haven’t been updated since the 1980s.” The company partnered with Griffin to produce the Beacon, a clever take on the “IR blaster” product, and one that’s already receiving solid reviews (and I haven’t even done anything yet!). This is going to be a very exciting company to be a part of, and I’m thrilled to have such an opportunity.
Reminiscing.
I still recall the early days at Mediabolic, where we enabled networked home entertainment solutions that interfaced with legacy, analog consumer electronics devices (yes, we were networking the living room in an era where there were virtually no HDTVs, no YouTube, no Pandora, and no… iPod!). At Mediabolic I learned what it takes to design and build embedded entertainment devices, to work with consumer electronics manufacturers, and the deep set of challenges surrounding the connected home industry (fun trivia: I heard the phrase “this is THE year of the digital home” every single year starting in 2001 – possibly earlier). It was a great experience, and key people from that team now work at amazing companies like Netflix, Rovi Corp (Rovi acquired Mediabolic in 2007), etc.
At Sling Media I had the unique opportunity to work for and with some outstanding individuals, not to mention the position of being tasked with figuring out how to deliver the perfect “living room experience” – only over the Internet. The company’s CEO, Blake Krikorian, taught me the meaning of focusing on every detail and nuance, remaining truly innovative, and keeping the consumer’s wants and needs in the forefront of every product decision. I also had to learn the ins and outs of social media, back in the era before it was called “social media,” where “the bloggers” were a special, hard to understand subset of humanity (or, as I rapidly learned, just cool people). We accomplished a great success building the Slingbox, and I’m proud of the product, the team, and the experience.
Over the past four years at Stage Two, I’ve had tremendous exposure to startups, big companies, CEOs, visionaries, the media, and managing a great team. We literally put companies like Boxee, Bug Labs, and Pogoplug on the map, and have also had the chance to work for well-established firms like Electronic Arts, Best Buy, and VUDU (now Wal-Mart). I’ve learned from entrepreneurs like Jim Lanzone (now president of CBS Interactive), Peter Semmelhack (Bug Labs), David McIntosh (Redux), Rahim Fazal (Involver) and so many others (I’ll write another post in the next little while chock full of shout-outs). I’ve redesigned product experiences for dozens of products, and created marketing/PR/social media campaigns for dozens more, and had the pleasure to work with great teams along the way.
The Future.
And now I’m taking all of the above, and putting it to work at one place. Welcome to Dijit.
Over at Mashable there’s a post entitled “3 Issues Hindering the Spread of Connected TV” and I couldn’t help but read it and say “well that most certainly needs a counterpoint.” Actually I said something more dramatic but I tend not to type in pottymouth. Anyhow, I couldn’t disagree more with the concept that Connected TV (aka Smart TV) is doing anything other than growing in a massive way. Counterpoint begins… Now!
1. The Guts.
An HDTV set is much like a computer, with a “brain” inside that does HD decoding, processing, etc. Only a few companies make said guts, topped by ATI, Broadcom, and to a lesser degree, Intel. And all of those companies have effectively put WiFi inside the guts. And, the WiFi components are inconsequential to the COGS of making a TV (as opposed to 3D, which is actually costly to include). In other words – virtually every TV manufactured in the future will have WiFi built in, much like cell phones with bluetooth or laptops with webcams.
2. The Content.
I’m not even going to bother finding a link to substantiate the following statement: literally every day the amount of online content made available and consumed increases. Since content is king (and queen, knight, and even rook), and the offering of content directly to Connected TVs (aka Over-The-Top or OTT) is increasing, the inherent value of having a Connected TV is increasing constantly. And, unlike 3D where title availability can be measured in numbers that my 4-year-old can count, even non-techie folks know there’s a ton of stuff to watch online.
3. The Infrastructure.
Let me phrase this bluntly: every single player involved in the TV space is pushing for Connected TVs. Cable companies, TV manufacturers, content owners, startups, advertisers, retailers, game consoles, etc are all betting on it, and betting big. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all have platform offerings for manufacturers to use. Intel, Best Buy, Netflix, and Amazon are putting amazing resources out there to get consumers aware of the products. Apple? Yes. In fact, I’d be hard-pressed to find a major player in the (roughly) Two Hundred Billion Dollar industry that we call television who is not playing ball in some way, even if just in trials.
Since this post is a rebuttal, I’ve kept my list to three. I’m pretty sure it could go to twelve (thought I was going to say eleven, didn’t you?), but that’d be unfair. I will acknowledge it may take a decent amount of time to get consumers to actually go through the hurdles of connecting these devices, but that’s not going to slow down the products themselves. In fact, that piece alone is just one of the many, many opportunities ahead in Connected TV. That and fixing some of the amazingly terrible interfaces virtually all the companies are offering consumers. And better control. And better content. And improved social. And… well, maybe there’s a few good startups left to build, eh? 🙂
ps – blogging feels good, glad to stretch the muscles. I’m back baby!
Peter Kafka has a new
article up at AllThingsD that proclaims Netflix is “crushing the digital movie competition.” In fact, according to new market research, Netflix controls 61% of the digital movie space. That means 6 out of every ten movies streamed is via Netflix.
The next closest competitor, Comcast, controls only 8% of the market.
As NPR reported yesterday, companies such as Amazon and Facebook are looking for ways to compete in online video. Quoting from that article:
“You know, it’s pretty unusual for the world to let you run away with a couple of billion dollars of revenue and a large market cap without testing the waters,” says Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer at Netflix.
Netflix showed astounding growth last year, and has over 20 million customers. As more people stream content, expect competition in this space to intensify in the coming months.
Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the Over-The-Top TV Conference and wanted to quickly share some of my experiences at OTTCON.
Overall, it was an enjoyable experience with many knowledgeable industry experts in attendance. My talk on how the Connected TV space has changed in the last 6 months went well and was written up by Ken Pyle at the Viodi View. His article is worth a read, and discusses many trends in the Smart TV space, including the rise of the second screen. Quoting from his piece:
There are kinks with two-screen interactions that need to be ironed out, as pointed out by Jeremy Toeman of Stage Two. He cited the example of the use-case where multiple people are watching television and the one, whose smart phone is controlling the program, goes to the bathroom, effectively taking the remote control with him. Similarly, who is the master, when multiple people are trying to control the second screen from their respective personal media devices? This could portend a new generation of “remote control wars”.
Jeremy Toeman also gave designers some good tips, including:
* Lean back means “passive experience”.
* 2nd screen should have all the text heavy comments.
* People don’t want to log-in or have passwords on their televisions.Toeman’s updated his predictions for losers and winners in his session. He cited the big service providers, TV manufacturers and content owners as being among the winners. He suggested that the biggest winner would be the consumer, provided the new features that the over-the-top approach unleashes are not overwhelming.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thanks to everyone who attended the Over-The-Top TV Conference and shared their passion for the next generation of TV.
A recent bipartisan survey 
found that “69 Percent of Voters Oppose Congressional Elimination of Government Funding for Public Broadcasting.” Even those voters who support general budget cuts believe that PBS has value and should still be funded.
Voters across the political spectrum [are] opposed to such a cut, including 83% of Democrats, 69% of Independents, and 56% of Republicans. More than two-thirds (68%) of voters say that Congressional budget cutters should “find other places in the budget to save money.”
I support and enjoy PBS and believe that there is a place in our budget for quality, public broadcasting. After all, the company that brought us Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers deserves our tax dollars. No matter what your politics are, I think we can agree that PBS is really smart TV.
I recently had the opportunity to critique the Logitech Revue’s ten foot UI for Nikkei Electronics, a Japanese trade magazine that “offers prompt reports, to-the-point commentaries and in-depth analysis on advanced technologies.”
Phil Keys, US Correspondent for NE, approached me for this project. He wanted an expert opinion on how to build a better interactive user experience for the home theater. I have known Phil since my days at Sling and Mediabolic and working with him was a real honor and privilege.
I applied user-centric design principles to grade the Logitech Revue and point out its strengths and weaknesses. My review was then translated and printed up, along with photos of the Logitech UI. Here is a small sample of the article.
Thanks to Nikkei Electronics for the opportunity to deliver Smart TV best practices to a global audience.
Starting today, 
Amazon Prime customers can take advantage of the company’s new, unlimited video streaming service. Amazon Prime Instant Video is free, with a few caveats. Quoting from Engadget:
This is only for paid Prime subscribers, so if you’re a college student or the like with a free membership you’re sadly out of luck. Also it’s US only at this point.
Of course, comparisons to Netflix are inevitable here. Early reports say that Amazon’s catalog of titles is comparable to Netflix, while the quality of Prime’s video has been so-so. Prime Instant Video will have some ground to make up if it wants to compete toe-to-toe with the market leader.
Amazon streaming is missing from a few key set-top boxes, including video game consoles and TiVo.
There are 180 million current generation video game consoles on the market, and they all offer Netflix. So that means that Netflix is in more components, has a larger content library and offers higher quality video.
Which is not to say that Amazon is DOA. Not by a long shot.
It would be interesting to know what the goal of Prime Instant Video is. Do Bezos and company want more people to pay for Prime shipping, or is this offer aimed at getting people used to watching videos on Amazon and – later – purchasing media from their ecosystem?
Amazon can assemble a formidable library of content. They don’t need the same titles as Netflix, but the shows and movies need to be compelling. To win here they need to offer a blend of new releases and older classics (think TNT shows and the kind of programming you chill out with on a Sunday afternoon). Expect the library to mature as the service does.
Amazon could also white label Prime Instant Video and let other content providers offer their videos over the Prime streaming media center. The troubled Blockbuster brand could find new life here as a streaming only service (although at this point we’re not even sure if Blockbuster knows what streaming video is).
Finally, Amazon needs to get on as many pieces of hardware as they can. If people can only use Prime Instant Video on their desktop, it will have limited value. One of the first goals needs to be getting on gaming consoles, mobile devices and televisions. Again, this is an attainable goal, especially for Amazon.
I have always maintained that there can be more than one “winner” in the streaming media wars and there is certainly room for Amazon’s service to grow alongside Netflix. While the two services will probably compete for some customers, one does not have to lose for the other to win. It is clear, though, that the stakes of the online distribution game have just been raised.
For the third straight season, I signed up for NHL GameCenter to watch Montreal Canadiens games and so far the experience is a good one ($160 for 82 games is a pretty great deal, although offering 40% off a season that is 60% over is certainly questionable). I also have the sports channel Versus through my cable subscription, and they broadcast around 8 Habs games per season, which should mean more hockey for me (yay!).
But unfortunately, that isn’t what winds up happening. In fact, I get less hockey. Because Versus has the rights to air certain Habs games in my local area, they are blocked out on NHL GameCenter for two days (see above, infuriating pic). What that means, then, is that if I forget to DVR the Versus game at my home, the footage is unavailable to me for 48 hours, even though I have paid to watch the game on two distinct platforms. And I don’t always remember to set a recording, given state of the art hockey schedule on the Versus site (so easy to read!). There is nowhere to go on Versus or on NHL GameCenter to watch the game while it is blacked out. This makes no sense. I can sort of understand blacking out the NHL GameCenter footage during live play (sort of), but once the game is over, the online version should be available to everyone who paid into it. In my opinion, the best way to grow the sport is to show more hockey, not less.
These media blackouts need to go the way of rabbit ear antennas. In an era of streaming online content, DVRs and smart, mobile media players, locking paying customers out of content for any length of time is silly. Someone needs to figure out a way to deliver out of market games in a timely manner so that “blackouts” become a thing of the past. These antiquated media restrictions show that cord cutting is far from a reality at this time. This is an issue facing technology and media companies, as well as the sports world.
Blackout rules were a bad idea when they were first conceived in an effort to make people go to the stadium and they are even more ludicrous now.
I keep running into a problem with Gmail. Every so often – without warning or good cause – it rejects one of my emails as undeliverable spam.
These aren’t mass email blasts or creepy solicitations. These are emails addressed to my coworkers and colleagues getting bounced back for no discernible reason.
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <mailer-daemon@googlemail.com>
Date: December 2, 2010 3:16:09 PM PST
Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
Ugh. There are two main problems here. The first is that an email between two people who work together and know one another in real life is getting marked as undeliverable spam. This should be a “solved problem”, but apparently it isn’t. Bummer.
The second, far worse, problem is that I have no (reasonable) way to correct to this error message. There is no one to contact in person. Literally not one customer service professional at Google to call and fix this situation. The only recourse I have is a help forum. Which is ridiculous.
Sure, I could pay Google $50 per year and get phone support, but this seems outrageous. And I am not the only person who feels this way. Quoting from Krish Subramanian’s excellent post on this same topic:
I fully understand that Google cannot offer support for free users. However, there should be some other option for me to get in touch with Google (say, an email support for an one time fee of $10). It is important to recognize that Google Apps Standard Edition users not only help Google monetize through Google Ads, they also serve as a “testbed at scale” for Google so that they can serve their paid customers better. Also, many free users eventually become paid users too. In short, these free users are not freeloaders and Google should offer some way to escalate those issues that are not getting solved in the forums.
That last point is especially salient. I support Google in other ways. I search, I click ads, and I use and evangelize their apps. They should be invested in my well being and satisfaction.
But this issue is larger than Gmail’s nonexistent customer service. The bigger picture is a lack of humans in charge on the internet. In order to flourish, the internet can’t be all bots and algorithms. There needs to be a personal touch influencing (or at least checking) high level decisions.
Now, humans can’t run the entire web, but certainly we can do better than this scenario recently published on the RAAK blog. This social media firm set up a few Twitter bots in order to see how klout measured their influence.
The four bots Tweet[ed funny non sequiturs] once every minute, once every five minutes, once every fifteen minutes and once every thirty minutes respectively. They are completely anonymous, have no avatars or custom user profiles set, and do not follow anyone.
The results weren’t pretty. Here are the klout scores for the once a minute bot.
It should not really be possible for a bot to reach a Klout Score of 50 within 80 days merely by Tweeting random (yet entertaining) rubbish every minute, should it?
No, it shouldn’t. And even though the CEO of klout jumped in to the comments to participate in this discussion, the real issue here is a lack of humanity making key decisions online.
I would look back at Rand Fishkin’s post which we wrote up last month:
Why does a page rank first in Google for a particular query? Why does one link stay on Reddit’s homepage for hours while another, with a similar number of votes, fall off in just a few minutes? Why does Facebook show me ads for customer service jobs at Comcast? Why did Amazon recommend buying whole milk with this Badonkadonk Land Cruiser?
If we don’t understand why these suggestions were made, couldn’t that bias us against trusting future recommendations from these services?
As a closing example of the frustrating state of the machine-run internet, Google once marked my personal blog as Spam. And there was literally nothing I could do about it other than fill in some form and hope (I also tried doing the blinky-thing like in I Dream of Jeannie, not sure which was more effective). Not one person to call. No one to follow up with face to face. A machine blindly made a (wrong) decision and I couldn’t contact a human being to talk about why this happened and how we could prevent it from happening in the future. For all the talk about “connecting people,” the internet – as it is set up today – actually does a poor job of allowing humans to interact with one another when they need to most. When things break or don’t turn out as expected.
This isn’t just an problem with Google. It’s Facebook. It’s Yelp. The system we have all agreed to online is callous, demoralizing and broken. And it’s getting worse. Yes there are help forums and FAQ sections and Customer Service email addresses on Help Pages. But what I am arguing for here- and what the internet should be – is a network that unifies and empowers people. A place where all are welcomed and made to feel welcome by people who care about getting things right all of the time. And for that to happen, the way things work online will take a more human touch.
In other words, make the Internet more like Soylent Green.
Warning: Spoilers Ahead (for real).
For a time, twist endings, surprise cameos or cliff hangers were shocking secrets that were not discussed in the media. Psycho ads even asked movie goers to “not give away the ending.” Ah, that was nice.
Then, around the time of “The Crying Game” and later “The Sixth Sense,” people and media began to publicize clever plot twists (in my opinion the “big secret” of The Crying Game was that it was a pretty lousy movie). This lead to an environment where viewers went in to movies aware that there was going to be a “shocking twist ending.” On the small screen, virtually every show seems to end with “scenes from the next episode” as if we viewers need some teaser just to watch the following week’s episode (heightened to its worst moment ever by having Heroes show a preview of a scene later in the same episode during a commercial break – like I was about to change the channel, but ooh, cool, now I won’t just to see that little gem. come on.).
Now, with the rise of real time media, it seems that no secret is safe anymore. CNN Showbiz recently tweeted that Ricky Gervais will make a surprise cameo in “The Office” later this season. The blog post mentions a “top-secret cameo, which was shot in September.”
Awesome. Now I know it’s coming. No spoiler warning. Nothing in the headline that hints at a secret that is getting ruined. Just a leaked secret that can not be unseen.
If I am already an Office fan, viewing that tweet, blog post or headline made my experience with that show worse. I know that the “secret” cameo is coming so the surprise and delight that would accompany an uncredited, unspoiled cameo by Gervais is gone. If I am not a fan of the show then I have no reaction to the headline. It is just news (sort of), as opposed to a leaked secret.
The bottom line is that there is no upside to broadcasting spoilers as news with no warnings attached that tell people what is coming. Sure, some small segment of fans or potential viewers will be gratified by the news, but the large majority of other fans and casual observers will either be spoiled, upset or indifferent. In my opinion, treating audiences this way is, in a word, disrespectful, as if we are just so flippant that the only way we can possibly like your content is by knowing what’s coming. Some of us just like you for what you are, not what you will be.
Another example of real time media and spoilers comes up frequently in sports. Readers of this blog know that I am a big hockey fan and support the Montreal Canadiens (Go Habs!). Living on the West coast means I watch all games timeshifted, and have done so for over a decade. At first I just had to ignore my family calling me after/during big games – that was easy. Over the past couple of years they’ve learned (somewhat) not to text me either until the next day. But between the terrible UX surrounding the otherwise awesome NHL Gamecenter Live (Web and iPad app both default to showing scores, not hiding them) and the official Twitter accounts for the teams and sports services, I have to close multiple windows just to avoid getting score updates!
It is easy to point fingers at Twitter and say that real time media and 24-7 micro-broadcasting has erased our right to be surprised by films, television and sports. But I don’t see this as a technology issue. This is a personal issue. Why do so many people have the desire to spoil things? We all should reexamine our Netiquette in this regard. How can we live spoiler free in a media saturated world? The answer is not more tech (a top of mind easy solution is the creation of spoiler accounts (ex: @CanadiensMTL and @CanadiensMTLScores) and spoiler free accounts for social TV clients, or splitting up fans by time zones). The answer, for me, at least, is more conscientious communication when it comes to disclosing spoilers, secrets and plot twists (the first rule of Fight Club is…).
I think this issue is sure to grow and gain more media attention with the rise of social TV. For instance, how do you avoid a twist ending or a season-finale cliff hanger on the west coast if all of Twitter is sending out the the ending as soon as it airs back east? Expect even more on this topic as Connected TVs take off and “Social TV” heads toward the mainstream.