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YouTube Kids Review – and 10 Ways to Improve it

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Jeremy Toeman

YouTube Kids - main uiWe finally got around to downloading the iPad YouTube Kids app, now that more than half of my children can do things like spell words mostly correctly. And since there’s a bit of a family-wide addiction to Plants vs Zombies (1 and 2), they’ve been watching some gameplay video. Which got me realizing that a 6-year-old should not, at all, accidentally watch most of the results of “zombie” in a YouTube search. Enter YouTube Kids.

Here’s the family consensus of the strengths of the app:

  1. YouTube Kids does an excellent job filtering out anything age-inappropriate. In fact I put a dedicated effort trying to “trick” it with any means possible, and I couldn’t find a video that I considered PG-13, scary/gory, adult-themed, etc. Searching for “zombies” pretty much only showed animated results:
    YouTube Kids - zombie

    On a very special Thomas the Train, …

    and a search for “game of thrones” showed mostly music videos, Minecraft interpretations, and other “safe” versions:

    YouTube Kids - game of thrones

    Good thing nobody has any free time to do anything creative anymore…

    Nothing else that I threw at it, from curse words to Skinemax-level “soft” words, came back with results. I even tried using horror movies, explosions, Michael Bay, etc:

    I hear Night of the Living Pharmacist has some pretty creepy moments

    I hear Night of the Living Pharmacist has some pretty creepy moments

    Considering this is probably the single most important role the app has, I’d call it a win if your goal is to let your kids autonomously search for videos about topics that interest them.

  2. It’s exceptionally easy to find copyrighted materials. A search for Shaun the Sheep (family favorite) instantly provided full episodes:
    It's Shaun the Sheep!

    It’s Shaun the Sheep!

    And pretty much any search for “title of movie full movie” presented exactly that (including Frozen, Lion King, He-Man, etc):

    The illegal copy never really bothered me anyway

    The illegal copy never really bothered me anyway

    Interestingly I couldn’t find PG-13 level movies, so Harry Potter was absent, though the Harry Potter Lego Version was all over the place.

  3. Exploring and discovering learning/educational content actually is interesting. There’s tons of solid channels available, from LEGO to National Geographic and more.YouTube Kids - LEGO channel

I’d certainly call this an acceptable experience, but I’m nowhere near calling it Great. Which is disappointing, because I think it could, and should, be great. It unfortunately falls into the category of what we call “babysitter apps” – which are exactly the ones we try to avoid. We just prefer the apps that really engage our children, or that we want to use along with them. And from our perspective it falls short.

So here’s how I’d improve the YouTube Kids app:

  1. Actually age-restrict Settings. Here’s what it looks like for “adult mode”:
    That's the same combination for my luggage!

    That’s the same combination for my luggage!

    While my 6yo can’t fully read, he’s got the numbers down already. Which makes the above beyond simple. Either enable a PIN-code, or have a math problem, but it needs to be a bit more serious than this.

  2. Enable simultaneous search and playback. Just like in the main YouTube app, it should be easy to have a video playing while searching for the next one you want to watch / queue up.
  3. Enable a queue / playlist. While search results become automatic playlists, as do channels, there’s no way to build your own simple playlist as you go. Maybe my 4yo couldn’t handle that, but the older ones certainly could.
  4. Save a playlist. Would be great for music videos especially.
  5. Mark/save favorite videos. If you are unfamiliar with children, there’s never ever been a video any child has ever watched only one time. More like 300 times.
  6. Add Recently Watched/History. Per the above.
  7. Subscribe to Channels. As you may have gathered by now, there’s virtually no personalization in the entire app. Why can’t I save my favorite channels, and have those appear on “my” home screen? The generic Home view is pretty useless after the kids have browsed it a few times. Also, being able to automatically find “latest episodes” from channels is a pretty core YouTube feature – one that the kids should get too.
  8. Add “Show More Results” to search. Because otherwise you can never, ever, find certain videos!
  9. Add a Web experience. Seems like a pretty natural extension, and my children do use this archaic thing I have called a computer. And once they’ve been using YouTube autonomously on the iPad, I’d like to enable them to do so on the laptop too.
  10. Allow for age ranges. Again, there’s no 8yo who wants to see the same stuff as a 4yo. With a simple range (2-4, 4-6, etc) setting, the experience would be so much better and tailored to the individual.

I’ve tried to keep the feedback fairly “light” here – things that aren’t monumental shifts in the app, but would fundamentally improve it at every level. I could go on at much more length at how to make a truly great Kids experience, but I’ll save that for another time.

Again, it’s a great start at an awesome experience, but still falls short IMHO. Though there’s one total saving grace I may have forgotten to mention. So thank you, very much, Team YouTube Kids, for this:

her?

her?

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Posted in Product Reviews, Video/Music/Media | Tags: apps, Frozen, Harry Potter, ipad, Kardashian, mobile, Product, Shaun the Sheep, UI, ux, youtube, YouTube kids | Leave a comment |

The Dirty Little Secret of The Future of TV: Data [Guest Post]

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Jeremy Toeman

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?

That’s the old Microsoft embrace-and-extend ploy. I’ll save you my personal thoughts on embrace-and-extend as it relates to product development, but assuming some newcomer could actually afford a content acquisition strategy that successfully equalized the traditional channel lineup, what would be the return on such an astronomical investment, and would it even add value for consumers?

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: @anilpod

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Posted in Video/Music/Media | Tags: amazon, anil podduturi, Apple, big data, cable companies, data, directtv, future of tv, HBO, Hulu, MSO, Netflix, pay-TV, reed hastings, showtime, youtube | Leave a comment |

Your Privacy Online: The Internet's Greatest Bait and Switch

Posted on February 10, 2010 by Jeremy Toeman

There was a time when things like decency, self-respect, and privacy mattered, and that time was not too long ago. I’m not going to spend this post lamenting modern society abandoning the concept of self-respect, poise, decency, and other things which seem practically alien in our show-all, tell-all, midriff-sporting, trampstamp-pride (yeah, I hate the word too, but it’s appropriate) oriented culture. I may seem like one heck of an old fogie, but I’m talking about a time I remember that was less than 15, maybe even 10 years ago! With regards to the “living near the bottom” mindset America seems stuck in, I think (hope) it’s just a natural cycle and it will just get better in time. But when it comes to the privacy topic, I’m more than disappointed, I’m near outraged. And I’m going to point some fingers.

It’s hard to say when and where we decided to give up our rights to privacy online. Note that I’m focusing to the online world, and have no commentary regarding people’s ability to do things like steal credit card receipts, dumpster dive, or other methods of specifically targeting an individual, as these take concerted and directed effort. One could argue the entire concept of the “social web” might be in exact defiance of personal privacy. Some of the early players (this is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all things social on the web!), in semi-chronological order:

  • Geocities – instead of, well, not really existing online, you can have a home page! Unquestionably the first time people chose to give up personal privacy for some flirtation with Internet fame – but – it was at a time when there was little “networking” from one site to another, so a given person’s home page actually was it’s own disconnected “island” on the Internet (as opposed to the inherent connected nature of services like Facebook). Geocities deserves special mention for being the first (but far from last) time an individual could not only create their own customized page, but make it extremely ugly and hard to read. Privacy impact: moderate.
  • Delicious – instead of keeping your favorite bookmarks to yourself, share them with the world! The reality of the potential harm here is fairly low, as one still has a local bookmark capability through the Web browser AND one can easily choose not to share a bookmark they don’t want shared. Privacy impact: negligible.
  • MyBlogLog – instead of being able to read a blog post in relative anonymity, a “footprint” is left of the trail you have as you surf various blogs. Again, this is extremely opt-in, however, the mere enablement of this plug-in on a blog meant a third-party could specifically “follow” you as a unique Web surfer. Privacy impact: low.
  • Flickr – instead of having to manually share your photos with your friends/family, automatically upload your photos into the public eye unless you specify otherwise. Flickr represented a massive shift in thinking, and I’d personally argue it ushered in the concept of “live in public” to the masses. Example search for pictures that are probably going online without consent of those who are actually in the pictures. Privacy impact: major.
  • Friendster – technically not the first attempt at social networking, but the first one to bring it to a wide spectrum of users. I honestly don’t even remember what I did on Friendster, other than befriend the fake users others had so much fun creating (except for the management team, who clearly thought using the Internet for anything fun was a bad idea). Friendster marked the first time people really paid attention to “numbers of friends” as a metric of importance (ah, the implacable human ego). Privacy impact: moderate-to-low.
  • YouTube – Take Flickr up a notch, by enabling anyone, no matter how dreary and boring, to have their own special place to upload pirated commercial personal videos. Prior to YouTube one was judged purely on their attractiveness (based on the best-looking picture of themselves ever taken, regardless of how long ago), but now we could take every embarrassing, awkward, and goofy moment we have, and immortalize ourselves online with it. It didn’t take long for YouTube to be the haven for people falling off skateboards, failed catapult launches, or (one of my personal favorites) take the video of your friend accidentally hurting herself and further embarrass her by putting it on the Internet – but don’t worry, she didn’t bleed or anything (now that is a great example of friendship!). Privacy impact: major.
  • MySpace – It’s like GeoCities, but now with 10 times the ugly, and more ways to connect than ever before. Originally started as a way for bands to connect with their fans (and for fans to connect with each other), MySpace evolved (or devolved) into a haven for bizarre methods of self-representation, a lustfulness for comment-writing and a bizarre desire to have as many friends as is humanly possible. Today it’s a bit of a “black sheep” in the social networking world, but still has millions of people sporting the most outrageous color schemes (oh look, it’s red-on-red, hey thanks!) and online “bling” imaginable. Privacy impact: massive.
  • Blogging – While there’s no specific technology at play here, the notion that one and all could have a “web log” aka a public diary became very in vogue in the latter half of the aughts (you know, the decade that just ended?). Blogs were key to creating the illusion that one’s deeper thoughts should be shared, in written form, with the world. Since there’s actually a decent amount of work required in order to blog, and most blogs are rapidly abandoned, on an individualized basis it’s not a big deal – except for those who go overboard. And yes, I do get the irony of this blog post. Privacy impact: minor-to-major (highly self-inflicted!).
  • Zoominfo – You might not have heard of this one, but ZoomInfo.com uses all the content it can find about you to build a profile of who you are (or might be) – screenshot is below. On the plus side, they will allow you to effectively delete your profile, and it’s really focused on your business “identity”, but if you ever needed an example of how scary the concept of being stalked online is, this is the one. To be clear, the company itself is not doing anything wrong, they are simply finding information about you through completely publicly available sources, that’s the scary part. Privacy impact: N/A – they themselves merely aggregate stuff.
  • Twitter – Without analyzing use of the service, Twitter is just a “public update” one can make, in 140 characters or less. Not a big deal. However, the cultural shift one is inclined towards after deep adoption of the use is where the problems show up. For those who actually use the service (which is not the majority of Twitter’s users), there is a sensation wherein it becomes more and more challenging not to share things. And for those with poor critical-moment-decision-making skills AND a lack of extreme discipline, Twitter is the ultimate tool in accidental self-representation online. Self-censorship is a difficult thing, and a tool like Twitter makes it way too easy to accidentally tell a lot of people something you’d rather have kept to yourself (and yes, we can make the argument that people should just be better about how they Tweet, but that’s like blaming bullets for shooting deaths). Privacy impact: massive.
  • Foursquare, Gowalla, and other location-based services – Take Twitter (above), now apply it specifically to enable you to proactively tell the general public where you are at a given moment. This plus the free white pages is about the easiest way in history to explicitly tell thieves when your house will be unoccupied. Granted it’ll take a bit before the average criminal gets quite so sophisticated, but the mere concept of it should be giving you the willies. And if it doesn’t, check out Blippy. Privacy impact: so high it’s amazing anybody uses it.
  • Facebook – The grand-daddy of them all. Over 300 million people use Facebook today, one could call it an individual’s “hub” of personality on the Internet, not to mention the best place to buy fake farm animals and even throw sheep at each other – awesome. Now when Facebook first launched, it was for (and from) college kids only – us old folks couldn’t even see what crazy fun was ensuing inside the closed doors. They then opened it up for anyone to use, however all activities were “private” within Facebook – only your “friends” (a term the service has effectively destroyed) could see your activities. This notion of privacy is what got people really using Facebook to share personal moments en masse. Facebook then, and this is the worst part, threw that precedent out the window. Facebook not only shares your content, updates, photos, friend lists, and everything else in public, it does so with the entire world! Privacy impact: words don’t describe.

I want to make sure I explain my premise again properly, as by now I’m sure some people just think I’m a loony laggard who doesn’t “get it”. I get it. I get how we’ve been tricked. I see it very clearly. Let’s face it, Friendster was clearly the “gateway drug” which led us down the path to sharing crazy intimate details in the public eye, and thinking how it’s expected. Heck, it was an easy path to follow, and it played into so many people’s desires to feed egos – finally it could be done unilaterally! The Internet basically enabled the individual to be famous. And if it’s not clear, fame sells – and sells well. But it’s at a cost – simple google searches showed me information like prominent bloggers’ home addresses, birthdays, and other data that makes identity theft (an actual real crime) something so easy that a clever hacker could probably write a web program to do it automatically.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg even went so far as to say something to the equivalent of “that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years” (source). Guess what Mark – you might not be at the helms of a huge company had you made that choice. I hear a lot of industries afraid to make certain decisions because of the “slippery slope” they lead to. Well, it’s happened, and there’s really no one company to blame. Sure, each played their part, and some more aggressively/offensively than others, but let’s face it – we all got suckered in.

Please note and be aware – your privacy has been in violation for a long time. Public records show home ownership details, birth certificates, licenses, and much more. These have been available to the lowest bidder for quite a while. I view this as a different (albeit serious) issue, as none of these are opt-in privacy flaws. But just because someone can do things like dumpster dive to find your most recent credit cards statements does not by default imply that one should sign up to Blippy and voluntarily throw this information info the public eye. Further, I’ll completely acknowledge that I am just as guilty as many others for living in oversharing mode – but I guess the first step is being aware that there is a problem.

I read today (I’ve been working on this post for a while, so the timing is a little ironic coincidental) that people are starting to give up social networking for a variety of reasons – privacy being one of them. I don’t know if that’s necessary, but I think it’s certainly understandable. What I think is more important is for people to make certain choices about the public scrutiny they choose to live their lives under.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?

  • Make sure you are personally aware of the various nuances and ramifications of each of the services you use (for example, did you know that your status updates on Facebook will, by default, be seen not only by your network, but by their networks as well? – here are some tips for improving your Facebook privacy settings – go do them immediately upon finishing this reading).
  • Think about how your choices to proactively share can impact not only yourself, but your family, coworkers, and friends. Take into consideration that you might think it’s adorable to put up a photo of your kid in some embarrassing moment now, but they might not appreciate it when they are an adult and it’s still on the Internet (and it will be)!
  • Don’t forget about the future you – who may not want to have the world know about some incident better left in private.
  • Finally, consider your real objectives. Do you actually care about Twitter followers? Does it matter to be the Mayor of your local Starbucks? Of course not, and there’s nothing wrong with having some fun and frivolity – but remember that it all comes with a cost. When you proactively give up free information, companies are profiting from it.

Your privacy is an asset. Take care of it.

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Posted in That's Janky, Web/Internet | Tags: blogging, delicious, facebook, flickr, foursquare, friendster, geocities, illusion, internet, mybloglog, myspace, privacy, twitter, youtube, zoominfo | 4 Comments |

15 vs 50: The Battle of the Future of Television

Posted on January 18, 2010 by Jeremy Toeman

When you look at the stats for video consumed on computer screens, it’s fairly staggering.  Literally hundreds of millions of videos per day on YouTube alone, 26 billion videos online in the month of September, averaging about 10 hours per month per person.  From one perspective, this could be considered inconsequential relative to the estimated 8 hours per day on the old fashioned TV set (though that stat is open to some interpretation).  However, considering this is still the early days of quality content being available online, it’s pretty safe to say that the computer (and of course Internet) is a successful media playback device.  So is the future of entertainment going to live on the 50″ HDTV display or the 15″ laptop?

The old argument: the PC is a terrible entertainment platform
At my job a decade ago I used to travel around the world meeting with virtually every company who built PCs, phones, and other gadgets.  At the time the focus was on the emerging “digital home”, a wonderful place where we envisioned the PC (for sake of typing, when I say “PC” I mean “computer” and include Macs in this generalization) as the “server” device, providing media to enjoy on connected TVs and stereos. We used to talk about how terrible a laptop or desktop was as a media consumption device, and how nobody would really want to sit around a small screen to watch any kind of premium content.  Other than the time I thought Amazon wouldn’t get anywhere selling books online, I can’t think of a time I was more wrong about something.  In reality PCs are now phenomenal media devices.  Laptops are unbelievably convenient when it comes to portable entertainment, and you can readily purchase surround sound setups for desktops.

All the ways the PC rules
The computer is unquestionably the most versatile product since the invention of the wheel, and when it comes to entertainment offerings, there’s no shortage of tools and services to enhance one’s experience.  With a computer and a high-speed Internet connection, we are a hair’s width away from a true all-content on-demand any-time lifestyle (and for those willing to skirt some pesky laws, they are already living that way).  Whether it’s Pandora or last.fm, Hulu or Windows Media Center (or even the remote possibility that TV Everywhere actually delivers as promised), you can have truly personalized media experience, all the time.

The kids today…
As a youth I distinctly remember our home’s expansion to a few dozen channels and our fancy remote control (which was actually wired to the cable box).  By the time I was in college, we had a couple of hundred channels, pay-per-view content, and premium cable offerings.  The living room was the only real place in the home for entertainment, with our CRT TV, video game console, cable box, and VCR.  College-age kids today have a very different perspective.  Paying for content (other than video games) is a generally foreign concept, as they’ve been surrounded by free for a long, long time.  And this is nothing compared with young children who are growing up in the post-DVR, on-demand world, where programming schedules seem utterly arbitrary.  People under 25 (and some above, of course) are used to taking their entertainment with them, and the only reason to bother going into the living room is to use their game console for gaming, chatting with friends, or watching movies – all activities they’d prefer to do in their own space anyway.

So is my $4000 (2000 1000 500!) high definition set with surround sound a dinosaur?
Ask me that after I watch Dark Knight in 1080p for the 3rd time. Or during the Stanley Cup Finals. Or even for an episode of Glee (yeah, I watch it, but I offset it with Man vs Wild, so back off). There’s just some content that, if given the option, I’d rather watch on a humongo-screen with amazing sound.  And no matter how much time we spend watching content on our laptops or phones, it’s just a different type of experience.  Further, the TV industry isn’t about to go quietly into any goodnight – innovation in televisions is probably moving faster than we’ve seen in the past 3 decades.  Today you can already buy TVs with built-in Internet streaming from a variety of sources, and we’re seeing numerous experiments with 2-way interactivity and 3d displays.  So the era of “making em bigger and cheaper” seems to be fading into the era of “making em do more”.

Some infallible predictions:

  • The popular categories of TV sizes will remain the same for the foreseeable future
  • PC/online media consumption rates will increase (rapidly) over the next 5 years
  • TV viewing rates will NOT decrease over the next 5 years
  • Cable attachment rates (# of people who pay a cable/satellite company) will decrease over the next 5 years, specifically due to people “cutting the cord” and consuming Internet-provided content instead
  • All major sports will have full live and archived streams available online within 2 years
  • At least one major sport will provide direct-to-TV streaming services within 2 years
  • Blu-Ray will continue to flounder, but will show continued (mild) growth for the next few years
  • Real-time interactivity will be tested on major TV shows in the next 2 years (and it’ll be more than just a twitter stream!)
  • Apple will do something more interesting in this space than Apple TV.
  • 3D will not drive the sales of new sets anywhere near what “the industry” hope or project
  • The biggest growth area will be the confluence of laptop use simultaneous to TV viewing
  • There will likely be a resurgence in more dedicated portable media players (that aren’t iPhones) with native streaming services.  They will fare poorly.
  • The concept of the “convergence/Internet set-top box” as well.  These too will do poorly.
  • In 3 years there will be 14 different versions of CSI on the air. Also, the writers of Heroes will still fail in their attempt to kill a character permanently.

I’m loving it
Let’s face it, this is an exciting time for being entertained.  There are so many ways to consume content, and so many interesting experiments occurring around the industry.  Further, many “standards” are pretty well in place, meaning the 720p 42″ plasma you bought 3 years ago is still going to work just fine 3 years from now.  This is unquestionably a good time for innovators, entrepreneurs, and consumers alike.  If you find yourself bored and you have a screen somewhere nearby, you just aren’t trying hard enough.

Disclosures: I was on the steering committee for UPnP, DLNA, I built the Slingbox, and have consulted on topics related to convergence and marketing/PR for Boxee, DivX, VUDU, Clicker.com, NETGEAR. As such, I’ve attempted to avoid anything specific to those companies in this post. In no way are any of my consulting clients related to my tech blogging, though one could argue I’ve seemed to align myself with companies who build cool stuff in the convergence space – and they would be right.

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Posted in Convergence | Tags: Convergence, future, internet, laptop, streaming, television, TV, video on demand, youtube | 1 Comment |

About

Jeremy Toeman is a seasoned Product leader with over 20 years experience in the convergence of digital media, mobile entertainment, social entertainment, smart TV and consumer technology. Prior ventures and projects include CNET, Viggle/Dijit/Nextguide, Sling Media, VUDU, Clicker, DivX, Rovi, Mediabolic, Boxee, and many other consumer technology companies. This blog represents his personal opinion and outlook on things.

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