TV overhaul
The wires and airwaves are buzzing (e.g. Bill Gates’ talk at the Davos meeting) with talk of a new era in television culture that is supposedly upon us, putting more options and new levels of interactivity and control in the hands of viewers and content creators.
New p2p-based services such as Joost (ex-The Venice Project), Zudeo or aggregator tools such as Democracy are just a few examples of new players on the attention market, seducing people to pull the plug on their cable subscription. Technology companies such as Apple are pushing to rearrange the media landscape, in similar ways as they did with the music industry. Some ‘traditional’ players such as the BBC are jumping on the new bandwagon to get their content out there in new ways and viewer-knowledge and -feedback in.
The shifts and changes are not merely technological, but will also have an increasing economic impact. Google’s YouTube recently announced it will start paying content creators and uploaders. Advertising agencies are looking into new ways of ‘embedding’ and ‘integrating’ instead of ‘intermezzing’ their content into the viewers’ experience in new ways. Think Fight Club-like catalogues as product placement overlays, clickable/zoomable movie elements etc.
Yet, if one sees how the industry looks ahead and sees ‘more content, more choice’, ‘no match for professional current-tv quality’, ‘mass-customization, viewer-tailored tv schedules’, ‘less but still dominant big network players and production companies’, ‘cross-device, cross-medial entertainment culture and content’, … one wonders: Where are the extreme scenarios, those beyond the ‘business as usual’ or ‘slight/incremental change’ ? Where’s the revolution beyond the evolution?
As the radio guys never invented TV, TV people never invented the internet, the future of television is sure to come from a different angle than the traditional industry itself.
BTW, check out holographic TV or the good old Sensorama.
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