TV NEWS STREAM

Pic of Netflix button on a Toshiba remote

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:27:42 -0800

From CES...

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CES 2011

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 18:23:47 -0800

On my way to CES, along with half the world (all crammed into my airplane).

Will take lots of pics of interesting TV UI designs and post here.

Stay tuned...

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What the Hell is Going on with TV?

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 11:56:47 -0800

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/03/what-the-hell-is-going-on-with-tv/

Good article from Fortune about the slow, bumpy start to the Converged TV revolution this past year. No one has gotten it right so far.

We will see improvements in 2011.

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Value of TV Tied to Scarcity of Inventory

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 05:14:12 -0800

A big question is how moving from 500 channels to 5 million channel will affect the $60 Billion TV ad market. Will that market expand or contract?

I believe a lot of value in TV is tied to the scarcity of inventory. TV is the most regulated, tightly editorially controlled media outlet, which increases its value. As unlimited web content invades this traditionally closed system, we'll see how that affects the value equation.

Based on the networks' negative reaction to Google TV, it appears protecting the scarcity of TV inventory is going to be a high priority. Balancing that with what consumers want will be the challenge. Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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The Influence of Friends on your Media Choices

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 21:39:00 -0700

Below is my take on the relative influence of "social discovery" on a typical consumer's media selection / preferences, by media category:

1. News

2. Live TV (channel surfing)

3. Movies

4. Games

5. Songs

6. TV Series

It's all about relative investment of time, with one exception: songs require less commitment than movies and games, but music taste is extremely personal and specific for many people, and therefore harder to influence.

Channel surfing is a very interesting one. The jury is still out, since real-time, live TV social recommendations is still largely uncharted territory. I am going out on a limb by pinning it up at #2.

By "social discovery" I mean one's own social graph, as well as the wisdom of the crowd (to lesser degree).

Hat tip to my super-smart colleague Bruce Hertzfeld for forcing me to think harder about this list.

What does your list look like?

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A Natural History of Social Content

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:41:00 -0700

Story-telling is old. My guess is that it dates back to our first efforts at domesticating fire. The camp fire afforded us "leisure time" after nightfall for the first time ever. Imagine all of us pre-verbal, proto-humans huddled around a fire, faces awash in the red glow, staring at each other, for hours...

The context was ripe for language. And for story telling.

We learned, were cultured, and were entertained by stories in that ancestral environment. We made sense of the world through story-telling. It was all inherently social, passed from one person to another. The social fabric of "the tribe" was the content medium; social was the only content channel in town.

Fast forward 50,000 years or so to present day. Our stories are now impeccably-produced, high-definition TV shows, movies, music, beamed around the planet at the speed of light, blanketing 6+ billion people in the blink of an eye. With the swipe of a finger, I can instantly access one of 10 million stories available, anytime, anywhere. No fire required.

And no tribe required, either.

I believe we lose something when social is not part of the content experience:

We are left to our own devices to make sense and find meaning in the story.
We are muted in our ability to express our emotional response to it.
We miss the opportunity to bond and deepen relationships around shared interest in the story.
And we have no one we really trust to guide us through the endless maze of 10 million choices.

TV, movies, and concerts are more fun and enriching when experienced with others. And we give more weight to recommendations from friends than from strangers or algorithms. Hard to argue with these statements.

TV used to be naturally social. A few decades ago it was the "modern camp fire". Families congregated around it every night. And while the act of story-telling was no longer social, the experience of it certainly was social.

That has changed; the experience of content is becoming less naturally social. As more and more single-user content devices flood the market (iPhones, iPads, Kindles, etc), social experiences around content are either absent or dependent on technology solutions.

Imagine: mom, dad, Dick, and Jane, all huddled around the living room coffee table, faces awash in blue techno-light, staring at their individual tablet screens, completely unaware of each other, absorbed in non-intersecting realities.

Extreme, for sure. But I'm fairly certain that we're becoming more isolated via our new devices, and our need for integrated social technology and virtual social graphs will only increase as a result.

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Entertainment Technology should be "People Aware"

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 08:44:46 -0700

Read post below on linking location based services to entertainment consumption:

http://itvt.com/blog/next-technology-should-be-%E2%80%98people-everywhere%E2%...

There are of course a ton of privacy issues to work through. But those aside, I think it's the right direction. The more "identity aware" entertainment technology is, the more compelling user and social experiences can be created.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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Human Community Fragments as the Content-Landscape Fragments

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 08:34:00 -0700

First, see this post by Will Richmond about how live sport events continue to attract the largest online video audiences.

The virtual world is indeed resembling the real world in this important manner:

Where large communities of people gather to co-experience live sports, speeches, concerts, breaking news ("point events") is also where people virtually gather in TV and video land.

People crave community, especially as virtual experiences become more fragmented and isolated due to the explosive growth of content supply and choice.

The more viewing options there are, the less likely you and your friends will watch the same thing.

Human community fragments as the content-landscape fragments.

But sports and other live events bring us back together. Big events in the real world, like The World Cup, are now the scarcity. In a big way. As such, their value increases in a big way.

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Twitter Hashtags Are The Best Marketing Tools You Got

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 01:29:00 -0700

Dear All TV Programmers / Marketers (and heck, all content marketers in general):

Twitter #hashtags are your most effective marketing devices. Start using them wisely and liberally.

Drill them into your viewers' heads. Make them memorize the hashtag for each of your shows.

Never miss an opportunity to get your hashtags in front of your viewers' eyeballs, wherever they are: on TV, online, on mobile, even on the street.

Seriously.

Every tweet about your content that does not include a hashtag is a wasted opportunity, a lost soul, a dead-end.

Your fans want to know how to talk about your shows, but they are frustrated that they don't know how. Guessing a hashtag is horrible user experience. Don't put the burden on your fans to figure it out. Tell them proactively. Help them help you.

Display your shows' hashtag on screen at the start of every show. Make it as pervasive as your network logo; it is a far more effective branding tool.

Seriously, Twitter hashtags are now your best marketing tool. Never shy away from promoting them!

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Is YouTube Victory Really a Victory for "Innovation"?

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 23:22:00 -0700

Yesterday the judge threw out the Viacom vs YouTube case, stating that YouTube was protected under the "safe harbor" provision of the DMCA.

The "safe harbor" provision basically says that a content host (such as YouTube) can't be held liable for copyright or redistribution infringements committed by its users, as long as the host had no prior knowledge of the infringement and quickly responds to take-down notices submitted by the content owners.

Many folks are applauding this ruling as a great victory for the DMCA and for "Innovation". Yes, it's certainly a victory for the DMCA, but I'm not so sure it's a victory for "Innovation".

Based on several emails between YouTube founders surfaced in the Viacom / YouTube lawsuit, it seems that YouTube probably got away with some questionable tactics with regard to premium (copyrighted) content on the site.

If true, it is not at all surprising.

There is tremendous pressure on start-ups to show inflection points (steep up-and-to-the-right growth curve) quickly. And it's usually high-demand, low-availability content (or spammy viral tricks) that drive that type of rapid growth.

In this context, what the DMCA protects is not Innovation but rather a greater freedom to leverage crowd-sourced content aggregation. That is, on UGC sites like YouTube, as long as the site owner does not proactively monitor what gets uploaded, and quickly takes down content upon request from verified content owners, it's not liable for the copyright infringements of his users.

The DMCA is therefore very appealing to entrepreneurs who are looking for ways to amass compelling and differentiated content from its user-base, with minimal risk of liability.

But this is a business tactic, not innovation.

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Dear Facebook: The World Needs Both a Twitter and a Facebook, It Doesn't Need Two Twitters

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:56:00 -0700

There is an interesting post on Mashable today called "Why Facebook Can’t Genuinely Connect People": http://tinyurl.com/2u2menn.

Let's face it: Facebook is getting less personal, less intimate.

Mark Zuckerberg has recently stated that Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and transparent. That's awesome... But open and transparent generally create environments where people are less personal and less intimate.

Open and transparent is what Twitter does naturally, not Facebook. The bulk of Facebook users joined when the promise was still very much about connecting them to people they know in the real world: friends, family, colleagues, old high school friends, etc.... in a private and secure manner. An environment well-suited for personal and intimate social exchanges.

Twitter is natively public; all content published by its users is public by default. This is well understood by everyone who joins. In fact, the goal for most active Twitter users is to get as many random people to follow them as possible. An environment well-suited for open and transparent social exchanges.

This may explain why Facebook has made so many changes over the last year and a half, in response to Twitter.

The world needs both a Facebook and a Twitter. It doesn't need two Twitters.

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So Much Content; So Little Time.

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:29:00 -0700

The wonder of the Internet is the enormous, enormous amount of content it makes available to all of us. It's one of those mind-benders, like: "if you added up the length of all the digital audio and video accessible via the Internet, it would amount to 15 billion years worth of linear playback... Or the age of the universe." I have no idea if that's true or not, or even if it's within several orders of magnitude (no one does)... but it's a HUGE number.

The last decade has been all about bringing that content online and accessible, with ever-improving user experiences. Currently, many of us are focused on spiraling all this content out to all the various consuming devices available: PC's, phones, tablets, TV's, embedded devices, clothing (soon? :-) ) etc... and enabling us to easily pass "the best" content on to our friends and followers, to any of their preferred devices. It's a VERY exciting time for those of us involved in this work. Hooray for that!

But there is a very large elephant in the room: the supply / demand balance is now totally out of whack. There is exponentially more supply than demand. And the gap is ever-widening. It's not that people are demanding less content (they're demanding more and more - especially as the number of consuming devices proliferate), it's that we have a fixed and relatively short time to consume it (24 hours is the most we get in a day).

This is an inherent problem with linear content: it requires time to ingest.

This "natural law" problem causes massive fragmentation in the content distribution business, and poses a big threat to content programmers. For instance, TV networks place big, big "bets" on a tiny, tiny, TINY fraction of available video content. That's a tough model to sustain, given all the above.

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Google TV neglects the "Sloth in all of us".

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:52:00 -0700

For most of us, TV is an escape, an opportunity to wind-down, to relax. No more decisions; just entertain me.

I'm not sure that Google TV, which starts with Search as the primary content discovery mechanism, embraces this mindset.

Discovering content in TV-land is a very different mindset than discoverying content in Web-land.

On the Web, people generally seek specific information or content.

On TV, people generally want to be entertained. Yes, they may have something specific in mind (and search is great for that), but just as often they don't.

Honestly, the last thing I want after spending all day in front of a computer is to collapse on my couch, only to see a blinking cursor in an empty search box staring back at me on the TV screen.

"No thank you, Google; just entertain me."

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Steve Burke (Comcast) and Steve Jobs (Apple) talk about competition in the TV market.

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 15:54:00 -0700

Here are two very interesting video clips from this week's D8 conference, especially in how they relate to each other.

First is Comcast's COO Steve Burke commenting on the competitive threats to cable. When pressed about the cord-cutting threat from over-the-top services like Boxee, Roku, and Apple TV, Burke points to the fact that pay-TV subscriptions (bundled channels) have been up every single quarter, across the entire market. Distributors like Comcast must serve both customers: content programmers and consumers. The current economic model works very well for content programmers and is evidently still working for consumers. Putting consumer costs in perspective, Burke notes that consumers pay an average of only $2 a day on their TV service (the price of a daily coffee).

Second is Steve Jobs commenting on the difficulty in competing against cable. When asked why TV is "just a hobby" for Apple, Jobs points to the now classic TiVo case study. Cable and satellite companies subsidize set-top boxes, such that they are almost free to consumers, preventing would-be competitors from entering the market. There is no go-to-market opportunity for new comers, since most consumers won't pay for set-top box if they get it for free from their cable provider. The obvious opportunity, which Jobs did not speak to, would be for Apple to build their own TV and control the entire experience, from UI to content marketplace & subscriptions. This is what Apple does; they've done it on all other screens... so why not TV?

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Some quick thoughts on Google TV

Thu, 20 May 2010 22:46:00 -0700

Google TV disrupts the disrupters (Boxee and Roku) while supporting the incumbents (cable).

Google TV is a rev on WebTV. It's about bringing the web to the TV screen. It is not really about making traditional TV any better.

Google TV was clearly designed in Silicon Valley, by web product managers... not by TV product managers in LA, NY, or Philly.

Google TV provides "a million channels". I don't know anyone who wants a million channels.

Google TV's picture-in-picture mode (TV in small frame on top of a web site) is pretty damn cool.

Google TV is truly all about Search. Surprise!

Google TV surfaces Hulu episodes in its TV search engine. Will Hulu cut off Google? Absolutely.

And...

Google TV as a stand-alone set-top-box won't sell. But Google TV natively installed in Connected TV's, with a cable subscription, could be a home-run.

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Will iPhone / iPad TV Apps Engage Advertisers?

Tue, 18 May 2010 10:40:00 -0700

Since it launched with Apple's tablet in early April, the ABC app has 609,000 downloads and 2.1 million episode starts. "That's a significant amount of viewership since launch," said Albert Cheng, exec VP-digital media for Disney ABC Television Group. "For us, it's additional distribution and additional inventory, but the inventory is an incredible premium experience.

via adage.com

I think the jury is still out regarding the advertising value of TV apps. The problem is there's now so much TV inventory with broadcast + cable + online. Adding mobile apps to the mix only creates more supply. As an industry, maybe we ought to focus on increasing demand and actually limiting supply.

That doesn't mean limiting viewer access to content on different devices. It means being more selective about what inventory is made available to advertisers, and how to best package it. It also means capturing more value back from viewers, via subscriptions and non-free apps. Give users a super-compelling experience via a TV app, and they will pay a few to several bucks for it.

That may be the full revenue value of apps. But building that direct relationship with viewers is priceless.

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Among elite product designers, simplicity is coveted. Among elite artists, simplicity is shunned. Why?

Tue, 11 May 2010 23:45:55 -0700

Indulge me as I muse. I was once a music composer...

Why is it that simplicity is coveted among elite product designers, while among elite artists and composers, simplicity is generally snubbed?

Are the audiences not the same for both?

Yeah, I know: one is commercial and the other is art. But still, they both ought to be aiming to elicit emotional response from basically the same people. Symphony concert-goers also buy iPads.

Truth be told, as a music major I struggled with the academic, cerebral side of art. Innovation for innovation's sake rarely plays well in product design, and plays worse in art & music. Ever listen to John Cage or Donald Erb?

There are hundreds of design patterns that have been proven over centuries to elicit specific emotional responses, which are repeatable, reusable, and recombinable (in music: a major 3rd is positively charged, a major 7th is nostalgic, a diminished 5th is urgently seeking resolution, etc). The same is true in product design. They just work.

We don't need to innovate on the building blocks of art and design; we know them pretty well at this point. There are still countless permutations which remain unexplored. Let's focus on creating great and novel experiences with them, rather than the inventing new building blocks.

OK, back to work.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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Facebook LIKE Becoming Indespensible for Publishers

Tue, 11 May 2010 21:33:03 -0700

IMDb.com has seen daily referral traffic from Facebook double, and its users have generated more than 350,000 likes. Dailymotion, one of the top 50 most-trafficked websites in the world, has seen users click the Like button tens of thousands of times per day on their site. As an example, more than 250,000 users have engaged with one of the most popular videos on Dailymotion, PIXELS by Patrick Jean, and a quarter of its views are from Facebook users.

via developers.facebook.com

After a mere 20 days, more than 100,000 web sites have added Facebook's new LIKE button. This is lightening-fast publisher adoption, the likes of which have never been seen before.

While publishers are racing to be "the first in their category" to integrate a Facebook LIKE button, there continues to be concern among some consumers and consumer-advocacy groups about the impact on user privacy.

Why do publishers and media distributors "love the like" so much? Because it instantly turns their content into social objects that can be frictionlessly shared and discussed among a potential population of 500,000,000+ people. From an audience acquisition perspective, it has the potential to unseat Google as God. From a user experience perspective, it makes the content personally relevant and provides a social context for the content. From an advertising perspective, well, the sky's the limit (which, of course, automatically raises flags in consumer advocacy circles).

Now, Facebook has the monumental task of organizing all this data about 500,000,000 people's media, entertainment, sports, and location interests.

The first task for Facebook: disambiguate! Example: I liked Lost (TV Show) on Hulu, Fancast, and IMDB. On my Facebook profile, there are now 3 versions of Lost listed in my TV interests section. Facebook needs to de-dupe as a #1 priority.

One possible solution for Facebook would be to create a parent, "platonic" Lost TV show entity object, while retaining "Lost on Hulu", "Lost on IMDB", etc as children objects.

Just a thought. :-)

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Is Google TV The New TiVo?

Mon, 10 May 2010 08:34:00 -0700

Google TV will be launching its highly-anticipated, Android-based TV operating system in a few weeks. It will come embedded on many Internet connected TV's, as well as a stand-alone set top box.

Google TV is a "converged" product, blending traditional TV programming with web content, VOD, recorded programming, and personal media.

It will have an Android-based TV application platform, with a ton of ready-to-use apps & widgets out of the box.

It will have web search.

It will have the famous Google-simple UI for search and discovery of video, via a comfortable, in-the-lazy-boy chair, lean-back experience.

It will have seamless integration with YouTube. It will have Netflix integration. (But probably not Hulu.)

It ought to be a killer app for the living room.

However...

Google TV won't have TV programming, at least not natively. It you want live news, ESPN, CSN, CNN, HBO, TWC, Discovery, FOX News, MSNBC, etc, you'll need to connect Google TV to your cable service.

You see, Google TV is not meant to be a replacement of your cable service. It is meant to be an enhancer of your cable TV. Or so the Google PR folks say.

This sounds a lot like the TiVo story all over: a killer app for the living room (the DVR), but not a disrupter of the TV supply chain. In fact, TiVo was ultimately unable to compete with the large MSO's, and that has completely diminished their upside.

With all the parallels to TiVo, will Google TV be different? Will it be able to disrupt the TV supply chain, or will the content distributors apply leverage and keep Google in check?

Content is king, after all.

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The Future of TV is NOT TV, Mr. Cuban.

Wed, 05 May 2010 21:44:00 -0700

I like reading Mark Cuban, especially when he uses punctuation. He’s the jock in the crowd of nerds. He loves his opinions, especially when they run counter to the counter-establishment. I respect those like Mark who provide balance by taking the anti-anti-establishment position. He usually does this with compelling, down-to-earth arguments.

Lately, however, it seems his imagination has become a bit stunted. He said earlier this week that the “future of TV is TV”, in an counter-argument to the recent cable-cutting doomsday predictions.

I agree with Mark that the cable-cutting doomsday is not likely to happen, though I do believe there will be some drop-off as more over-the-top services become available. Google TV, for example, is set to launch in a few weeks and that will certainly spur experimenters to cut their cable. But it will have only a marginal impact on overall cable subscriptions; I think we might see a 1-2% drop over the next year, at most… and then I believe it will bounce back in 2011-2012 as the cable industry refreshes and modernizes its product offerings.

And that brings me to my point: the TV industry absolutely DOES NEED to modernize to remain relevant. The world will quickly pass the establishment by if it doesn’t innovate, much like the world passed by the music industry.

But I have visibility into the TV industry, and it is keenly aware of the risks of status-quo, of inaction. The TV industry will not suffer the same fate as the music industry.

The future of TV is not TV. Or it's not the TV you're familiar with, I should say. The future of TV is on the verge of unfolding, from all corners of the industry. Google TV is step 1 of 12. It’s not about widgets and applications, it’s deeper than that. It’s about augmented story-telling. It’s about living within the content, and living beyond the story. And the future of TV extends beyond entertainment. It will support the connections between family and close friends. It will help organize busy lives. The TV screen is on the verge of rapid evolution.

So while I agree with Mr. Cuban that cable-cutting predictions are over-blown, I disagree with him about the future of TV. Perhaps his imagination is limited; perhaps all those hours of sitting in front of the tube as a kid are now catching up to him.

:-)

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