Television 2.0

29 Apr 2011 | 0 Comments | Direct Response TV , IPTV , TV Advertising

To get a grasp on how much television has changed in just a little over a decade, reflect on what your living room looked like around the turn of the millennium.

Odds are the centre of attention was a chunky CRT, possibly a flat-CRT (although most were only flat in one dimension, like Sony’s flagship Trinitron). It was most likely hooked up to a VCR, and maybe even a DVD player. And if you did have a DVD player, you probably also owned a copy of The Matrix.

You had the three major commercial broadcasters, the ABC and SBS to choose from for your free to air viewing pleasure. Each with only one channel on offer. Some of you would have been amongst the only 10% of homes hooked up to pay TV. All analogue at that point. You would truly have been in the minority if you’d owned a digital television set-top box.

Ten years on, and how things have changed.

Yet the shifting landscape of the last decade will pale in comparison to the transformation of the media sector we’ll witness in the years to come. By 2020 television will be almost unrecognisable compared to what we have today.

Most fundamentally, it won’t look like broadcast television. And it won’t look like the internet. It’ll be a hybrid of the two, something quite unlike anything we’ve experienced before.

At its core will be IPTV – internet television. Although even the usage of the term “internet” is deceptive here, because while it uses the internet as its backbone, it’ll little resemble the internet as you know it from your PC screen.

But IPTV is unequivocally the future. This might be surprising to some, particularly if you’ve been listening closely to the government and the major networks over the last decade or so. To them, the future has been digital television. However, when we look back in 2020, we’ll see that digital television was only a minor bump on the road to the inevitable world of IPTV.

Digital television was an expensive bump at that; it’s estimated the federal government has doled out over $1 billion in its digital television rollout, largely to facilitate adoption in regional areas. Not all of that money will have been wasted, but much of it could have been better spent if only the government had the foresight to see beyond the high definition panoramas pointed at them by vendors and networks in the late 1990s.

The problem with digital television is not that it lacks quality, but that it follows the same broadcast model as 20th century analogue television. Only with a better picture.

But it’s worth remembering that it isn’t quality that drives the uptake of digital technologies. Consider that the MP3 arrived at the same time as five-channel high-fidelity Super Audio CDs. Yet which became the dominant technology? The reason MP3s won is clearly not because of quality, it’s because of convenience and the ready access to vast libraries of music – new and back catalogue – that MP3s facilitated.

Likewise IPTV will lubricate the flow of content, will amplify choice and will lower the cost of content delivery. And it’ll be on tap, available when we want to watch it, not when the broadcaster chooses to deliver it. Just like the internet.

This is not to say there’ll be no role for broadcast television. On the contrary, live events, particularly news and sport, will continue to be the mainstay of broadcast television. As will new-release headline programming.

But when it comes to how we spend the majority of our time in front of the box (panel?), it’ll be IPTV serving us. We’ll have access to hundreds of thousands of hours of viewing at the touch of a button. New and old television series, mainstream and niche movies, re-runs of classic sports matches, foreign language programming, IPTV-only productions, YouTube, games, social media, even programming from the ‘traditional’ broadcasters. And all this through the screen in the living room.

The challenge for advertisers will be to find some corner of this melange of content to attract the attention of increasingly choice-addled and skittish viewers. On the other hand, the opportunity will be an unprecedented ability to target content and ads at precisely the right audience at precisely the right time rather than the broadcast ‘educated guess’ model.

Furthermore, unlike broadcast television, IPTV is a two-way street. Advertisers can not only communicate with consumers, but the consumers can communicate back. This raises some intriguing prospects when it comes to direct response, as well as more traditional forms of advertising.