Internet TV? Just buy a cable connector

From TV Debunked, Fortune Magazine, January 2011

The lead picture in this post – and nearly all the numbers -- come from a piece in January’s Fortune magazine. (Click on the caption for the link).

The writer, Jessi Hempel, has just received the brick-sized box enabling her to hook-up Google TV, and having played around with some of the cooler functions (like tweeting from her TV (@jessiwrites) she set out to watch some real stuff, namely of a recent episode of the sitcom Modern Family – but it’s not available. Or rather, she can get it from Amazon for $1.99 (if she is already a cable subscriber) or get old episodes from Netflix. Modern Family plays on ABC, and ABC like all the networks and major broadcasters, are teasing with the new media. At bottom, ABC still wants to keep you watching new episodes the way you always have, on their main channel. (You can see Modern Family on Sky1 in the UK).

In fact, the best new-tech option – if you live in the US – apart from watching it live on an HD TV, would be to catch up the latest episode on ABC.com. (From the UK, I could watch highlights of the next episode on ABC.com  but the latest full episode was blocked.)

All the devices in that picture, and the failures in their wake like Joost, add lots of convenience extras like search, and even more potential benefits like targeted advertising. But as Jessi puts it, “Netflix, Google and Apple can’t just swoop in and disrupt the $85 billion home entertainment industry. Their challenge lies in navigating the entrenched interests that make up the television business.”

So far they have not succeeded in doing that.

It used to be that the new technology was just too fiddly and did not give a good enough signal, a nightmare of cables at the back of a TV. That phase is almost over. Now we find that viewers are just resolutely loyal. They want the content they have always watched on a quality set where they can see the first-run of each new episode on the day it is released – or recorded for viewing later in the day or week.

The old networks are happy to try out new technology. But when a new device like Hulu in the US  gets successful, the big players withdraw the new content and leave it with the second-runs. Why? Because advertisers still spend $53 billion putting ads onTV and just $1.4 billion on web video ads.

In theory web TV can be social, searchable, mobile and instantly available. But all that promise is only visible at the margins of the viewing experience. Sites like Clicker and CastTV can find every place you can get an episode of Modern Family but the new content is still where you would expect, on the major networks.

To get round that Google would have to buy or partner with all the US networks, and who can see that happening? Or it would have to compete with cable and offer licence fees for the right to stream the network schedule. So far it has only got a few crumbs. Not surprising. The US cable companies will pay the US networks about $35 billion this year.

TV is the great serial medium. It wins on big communal events and the weekly pleasure of the latest episode. It’s why it is different from Music or Film. (Charles Dickens’s novels were serialised in the Victorian era and crowds queued at the New York docksides to get them next episode straight off the ship).

The networks know that. They sit on the motherlode.

In the end the networks will want to own or control the technology. They are willing for others to invest in and develop it. They use it now to add convenience, to promote their brands, to minimise priacy, and to be cool for the people to whom it matters. They are good at content – no Internet property has ever been able to match them at that.

Well, not quite true. Jessi does not mention YouTube, the other Google property, which serves much more Internet video than any other player. Most of it, of course, is short user-generated stiff. But it is a free point of entry with the greatest reach of any Internet player and Google might just decide that along with developing gizmos it tries its hand on new long-form content.

Who comes nearest to the most powerful mix of content and technology now? Oddly it might be the BBC and Sky in the UK. The BBC, unlike a commercial network, wants its free content to be seen on every platform: it is not afraid of fragmentation across platforms (merely short of data on aggregated viewing). Sky has the best viewing technology and, paradoxically,  gets all the major channels for free by regulatory order: the rules of “guide prominence”, as it is called, regulated by Ofcom, say where so-called Public Service channels have to be, right on top of the Sky guide.

This is a moving situation which we aim to observe as closely as possible.

My advice, if you want to get Internet on your TV, is: don’t buy a box, just a connector. You can get some help from http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-connect-your-laptop-to-your-television.