Television Everywhere

“Television Everywhere” is on the way. It’s a generic term for using the internet to get TV to more devices in more places more conveniently – what you want, where you want, when you want it. It’s far from a new idea. Plenty of futuristic notions of TV have been promoted in the past, usually by technologists with a shaky understanding of the television business.

But this time Hollywood’s content ownership combined with new, simple technologies could enable the television industry itself to take the lead and modernize television, while extending its economic life well into the future.

More important than delivering TV through the internet is using the internet to retain and expand audiences for the TV we already have. That’s what this book is about, and it offers a few practical ideas to people in and around the industry on how to do it.

Since before the internet, sweeping visions (convergence! interactive!) of new devices and video networks have held out the promise of additional convenience for viewers and of new revenue opportunities for content owners and advertisers. Yet for nearly two decades, Television of the Future utopias – featuring over-reaching, not ready for prime-time technologies, abstract futurism, and large investment banking fees – have failed to get on the air. These episodic fevers ranged from the Time-Warner “Full Service Network”, to the aborted Bell Atlantic/TCI merger, to Americast, to Tele-TV, to the AOL/Time-Warner epic mega disaster, to the Telcos’ boringly familiar warmed-over cable service.

Meanwhile, the world of actual television barely noticed. Today, US viewers spend record amounts of time watching plain old “linear” TV, time-shift a bit of it, and use around 1% of that time to watch video via the internet.

Television’s greatest challenge isn’t (yet) the internet upending the industry but rather that, apart from Nielsen top 10 programming, both watching and supplying TV in a 400-channel universe have become too complex.

If you’re a viewer, it’s too hard to discover, locate and organize what you like to watch. If you’re a supplier, it’s too hard, too hit-or-miss, and too expensive to find, attract and retain audiences, and the window in which to do so continues to shrink.

Programs disappear unknown, unsampled, unwatched, into a zombie world of brand and channel clutter, schedule confusion, and unreached audiences, just like the advertising that pays for them. This waste is the outcome of shopworn marketing methods and winner-take-all business models that are poorly adapted to the distribution complexity and audience fragmentation we already have, never mind the digital arrival of Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes.

For Hollywood, it’s not the internet per se that’s unwelcome. Big Media continues to own and control the content no matter where it’s distributed, and in Comcast/NBCU’s case they’d literally own a chunk of the internet as well. What’s unwelcome is the erosion of television’s unique value proposition: mass audience reach.

Instead of being feared as an instrument that takes television audiences apart, the internet can be used to keep them together, sustaining the core of TV’s scale-based economic model. The very internet accused of conspiring to turn analog dollars into digital pennies can be pressed into service to blunt the economic effects of TV’s self-inflicted fragmentation.

Over the last five years or so, the internet evolved to include software technologies which make it possible to do a broad range of new things cheaply, quickly, experimentally, and adaptably, but at serious scale as well. Gone is much of the need for Big Bang, Grand Projects and huge up-front I.T. infrastructure investments to support them. Nicholas Carr’s once controversial assertion, “IT Doesn’t Matter”, has become a near truism. Or as Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe wryly observed, “Carr’s [Harvard Business Review] article just won’t stay debunked.”

Inexpensive scalable infrastructure, bite-sized (often browser-based) “apps” and the marketplaces that distribute them have transformed the economics of building and distributing consumer software. This software evolution has simultaneously fueled and benefited from a parallel improvement in the simplicity and usability of consumer devices (the exemplar being the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad family).

The new software and device technologies, the social processes (often open source) for their development, and the marketplace models for their distribution have democratized who can have an on-going, active connection with a consumer. Not ethereal “brand conversations” existing only in the minds of “digital strategists”, but actual connections to end users in the same sense as high-traffic websites or frequently-used iPhone apps. And, to co-opt a bit of marketing babble, surely few categories are as “high involvement” or “engaged” with consumers as media itself? Television has long been a medium waiting to take the next step, to more (inter)actively connect with its audience. In that respect, television and the new software and device technologies are ready-made for each other.

By 2020, it’s conceivable that as much as a quarter of TV-watching could shift from being linear and passive (plop down on the couch, grab the remote, what’s on TV/the DVR?) to being more like using an application. For example: pull out the iPhone, check the ‘myTV’ playlist, pick a preview clip you tagged earlier, select the corresponding full episode, point the iPhone at the television, an on it goes.

Someone, it could be Hollywood (it should be Hollywood), is going to crack the problem of letting viewers get what they want. Of engineering the capabilities for a simple “personal program guide” which completely changes how viewers interact with sources of TV programs, in a way that DVRs only marginally managed to help. Of insulating viewers from not only the still-increasing frustration of fragmented program supply, but from the complexities of consuming media across so many different platforms or devices. Of treating television as an application.

Whoever does that is going to have the power to reshape and profit from the rebuilt relationship between viewer and content provider, silencing a lot of the abstract yammering about “social media,” “brand conversations,” “engagement,” and “digital dimes.” The talk will be supplanted with concrete, easy-to-use functionality that becomes part of consumers daily lives, because television is part of consumers daily lives.