The Future of Television
Mindshare
A medium in terminal decline?
TV has come under increasing pressure in recent years and there have been plenty of observers ready to write it off as a mass medium. Much of the challenge has come from technology, of course. Newer pursuits like gaming and the web have competed with TV for our attention. It was predicted that innovations like Sky + could make live viewing obsolete. Empowered by this technology, we would all watch whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted it. We would fast-forward through all the ads. And the once-sacred TV set itself would take second place in the home to the all-conquering PC.
In its initial form, Ping in theory allows users to follow their favourite artists and see what music their friends are listening to. Sounds compelling. However, after testing Ping, we found that it currently struggles to deliver on its core proposition. On top of this, Ping also suffers from what is, in many ways, Apple’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness: its closed nature. Despite the fact that Facebook and Twitter both have massive existing audiences, and are used by many other social platforms to grow their own audiences, iTunes currently has no way to link your Ping profile with your Twitter or Facebook account (or last.fm or MySpace for that matter) thus limiting its social reach.
Evolution, not revolution
Only it hasn’t really happened that way. Or not to the extent that the industry feared. The reality has turned out to be much less dramatic and much more subtle. So we thought it was time to take an unbiased look at the trends likely to affect the development of the industry between now and the end of this decade.
We interviewed a number of key industry figures and asked what they considered to be the key factors determining the TV landscape between now and 2020. And we also analysed lots of industry data about current consumption habits, how they are changing and how they might continue to change in the future.
These subjective and objective sources both pointed to the same conclusion: while many of the existing trends - fuelled in the main by technology - will continue to gain ground, there are many aspects that will change only slowly and less radically than anticipated. The overall picture is most definitely one of evolution, not revolution.
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The Future of Television via Slideshare (pdf)