The Future of Television

Writing after a long break… Started writing this post over a month back!

On 20th May 2010, Google announced new Google TV in US, that was late evening by Indian Time. Incidentally, same day morning – my very good friend working in an Television Channel was discussing about how TV programming will shape up in next 10 years. Below is the extract of the same mail I had sent to her and followed by the presentation on SlideShare with some concrete ideas about the Television of future.

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“Past Few Years:

Television as hardware device – evolution from standard television box to slimmer versions
  • From Regular to Flat Screens
  • From Flat to LCD
  • From LCD to LED
  • The evolution will continue towards personalized broadcasting.
In future the televisions will act as display devices,that could be plugged in to any input devices not necessarily only satellite or cable channels.

They would be used to stream information. In US time spent by consumers online is today much higher than on televisions. Consumers are willing to view video streaming online for TV shows, Sitcoms and also movies. If that happens and continues over a period of time – TV business (as a hardware will go out of business) which large players like Samsung, LG will not want to. Simple because when users would want to spend time online and consume same content online – the players who will gain most are the laptop and desktop manufacturers – HP, Dell, Apple and others – among which LG and Samsung dont have much share.

So to keep TV in business they would reinvent the use of TV box. So expect devices like TV to get IP addresses and WiFi features that could be hooked on to the Internet. Consumers would want to create playlist (of youtube videos?) or information streams (twitter, facebook) or photo stream (family albums, etc ) that could be broadcasted over the internet to their TVs or personal devices.

Unlike what users see today – a choice of channels that they browse on TV, they would create their own broadcast and stream it to televisions. So users end of creating their broadcast, they would access it from wherever they want to. Like you are on a vacation, and you have a TV at your hotel, you would connect that to your own broadcast and view entertainment of your choice.

So media channels and networks will not just face competition from existing television competitors – but anyone would could participate in these broadcast of consumer’s choice – even a small website. These broadcasts online will be standardized to any web content format or APIs or anything as simple as a XML or RSS feed.”
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Below is the presentation format of the same ideas.