TVs after Television

Sydney.
We're in the next session at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress now, with Robbee Minicola from Hybrid Television Services. She begins with a story about her grandmother sharing her recipes (giving away IP) - but the question remains: can you actually follow the recipes the way she can? The same is true in the television field, and Robbee says that 'TV is the new black'.

Watching television, users are mostly in a passive, lean-back state - focussed, relaxed, and easy to intrigue. This is critical to how content and services are delivered through the TV. But is a TV a TV any more? Today, TVs can be used to play games, download content, browse the Internet - when before, TV was drama, news, and sport, today its potential is virtually unlimited. Broadcasters must stop working with a narrowcast view of TV.

What, then, is this screen? Robbee calls it the 'central screen', in the central room of the house - augmented by screens in virtually every other room, and by mobile devices. With these ubiquitous screens, viewing eyeballs will be further distributed across different screens - but we'll end up viewing more content then we do today.

Currently, we see such screens as opportunities with devices (which are largely hidden in shelves cupboards) - but the experience remains on the screen. Our discussions should be more broadly about the technologies which will be plugged into such screens, then - a deluge of devices fundamentally changing our entertainment experiences. What is plugged in matters less than what users get out of doing so.

The standard TV approach used to be to get as good as possible at programming shows for maximum ratings. This was bolstered further by pay-TV, mobile, and Internet services, taking a 'build it and they will come' approach to content services, again based on programming appropriate offerings in these different spaces. Additionally, content was repeated ad infinitum - hardly requiring users to time-shift content at all.

But this approach isn't working particularly well any more. Content is not king - people who understand how to deliver content to audiences are kings. The old thinking is 'own the content', but as a telco or TV network that is not what you should do; the new thinking should be 'own the services'. The services will be combined into the viewing experiences whether the media industry likes it or not.

Such services include 'me services' (that is, personalised to individual users' interest profiles), services for my family and my community, services which make my life easier, and my entertainment. What will not be delivered on the central screen, Robbee says, is the Internet, however. (Hmmm.) The central screen is a filtered environment controlled by the user - unlike the Net. The central screen remains the lean-back experience, not the lean-forward interaction. So, media companies will need to retain their tie to present-day TV content, but add to this the appropriate services which will be accessed through this central screen.

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