Reinventing TV (aka Waiting For Apple)

Fifth up on Wednesday at the Financial Times Digital Media & Broadcasting conference was "Reinventing TV" with a panel discussion featuring:

- Fearghal Kelly, VP Media Solutions, ioko
- Florian Landgraf, Senior Vice President Content & Product Management Cable TV, Kabel Deutschland
- Shane O'Neill, Chief Strategy Officer, Liberty Global
- Simon Calver, CEO, LOVEFiLM
- Corey Ferengul, Executive Vice President, Product Management and Marketing, Rovi

Again, very little new, and I felt that Richard Waters didn't press Lovefilm boss Simon Calver hard enough on why they eventually sold to Amazon and what they implied for the current value chains. As with my earlier post on News, you feel the sackcloth and ashes spiel is somewhat overplayed given the dominance of Olde TV still in terms of audience and advertising share, and OTT TV is (five years later from The Great OTT Year at IBC 2006) is still about to win all - next year - and in the meantine Lovefilm sold in to Amazon, Netflix is bumbling sideways at $7.99 for the whole farm. The things that made me open one eye from my pre-lunch torpor to scrawl a note were:

- "Live" TV and "Catch UP" TV are actually two different markets, like say newspapers and magazines.
- 60% of people still mainly watch FTA TV (I think it was 67% when I did my first piece pf analysis on this market in 1995). The more things change......
- The OTT game will go to the Most Seamless Service (well I never - so, 5 years on, why is the industry still waiting for Apple to do it to them - youddathunk by now....)
- EPGs have to be simple, as the user and home devices are - Google's "TV Search"won't work until next-gen home equipment comes in

There was the obligatory Recital Of The Credo - that The Tablet will be the Great Gamechanger for Media (sadly no one pointed out that it still only has a c 2.5% market share - so I went back to energy-saving mode at that point.

Forgive the bored ennui of this post, but if you go to the MyPCTV posts we started writing in 2006 you can see how little has actually changed in this particular game - or arther, how the current players are sleepwalking to their own doom, much like Planet Mobile has. We did a major piece of work on the Future of Web TV in 2008, and -a part froma few minor edits - its pretty much good for 2011. It is with sad resignation that I await Apple coming in with an iTV offering in 12 - 24 months and show the industry how to do it.