The future of TV is not on TV
// April 29th, 2008 // Advertising
My favourite louche photographer, Mike Walsh, has a great new post up on the shaky future of broadcast television amongst a YouTube generation. I couldn’t agree more: the broadcast television companies were corporate giants for the last fifty years, but they will be media minnows in another five to ten.
While the television industry has been focusing on delivering ever-higher resolution and more channels of sound, the new web audience is already proving they don’t care – they are quite happy with the web’s low-res, low-frame rates and crap sound.
Choosing what you want to watch, and when, having it recommended to you or bookmarked by friends, choosing the kind of device you consume it on: who wouldn’t choose that over traditional TV programming in HD?
A big cash investment in a large HD LCD and all the components necessary to provide the HD program input and sound/vision output is something that the >35 generation will do for the bragging rights alone. The <35 generation shies away from spending that much on anything, much less something that can only do one thing – deliver television.
Few of them even aspire to own the home containing the room featuring the wall such a system might be hung on. It makes much more sense to them to also use their laptop as a TV, or their phone.
When I demo my iPhone or my AppleTV to friends – particularly young adults – it is the ability to watch YouTube on it that excites them much more than being able to purchase and watch broadcast programming, even great shows like This American Life, which I predict is about to sweep the world and be as well known outside the US as The Office has been outside the UK.
Broadcast TV will continue but its margins will shrink as big brand budgets continue to move online in order to have more of a targeted, interactive relationship with their customers. That shrinking of margins will force the networks to reduce the average cost of production, reducing the quality of programming, which will in turn drive more users online.
The only way to save a broadcast media company is to admit this is unstoppable and start producing content for the new medium first and foremost, using your broadcast network primarily as a marketing tool to drive your audience there – flip the current network strategy on its head. If you do it first and execute well, you might build a bigger business than the one you have now.
But you won’t: the immediate revenue loss is too hard to justify to shareholders and the ongoing investment in broadcast infrastructure is an oil tanker that takes years to turn around.
So in the future, free to air broadcast television will hold about the same position in the minds of marketers and consumers as talk-back radio does today. Not gone, but not quite the powerhouse it once was. A medium of SMS-to-win single-camera gameshows, of $1,000 giveaways between programs to try and keep you watching, of a thousand insta-celeb lives all trying to out-outrage each other. All these program types are on broadcast now, some of them even in timeslots that were once premium programming. But in the future, they will be all there is to watch on broadcast TV.
