The Future of TV isn’t apps
By Jim Bask
Whenever a new technology arrives we typically misuse it. Rather than rethinking what’s possible and transforming industries, we consistently use it to embellish what we’ve done before.
We’ve seen this many times with new media. The first radio shows re-read newspaper headlines, the first TV shows were teleplays with cameras pointed at the readers, even websites today mostly replicate past forms with digital paper. Right now a tectonic shift from broadcast to streamed TV is upon us, and sometimes it feels like everyone is missing the point.
While everyone has talked about cord-cutting, surprisingly few have done it — largely because the packages on offer were substandard; the pricing didn’t work out; and content was limited. From Playstation Vue and Slingbox to the announcement of DirectTVNow (and shortly Hulu’s new TV service) we’re seeing a new tranche of offerings that should change how we view TV forever.
Yet a spin on these new services quickly reveals a gap in knowledge and how, so far, many companies have failed to understand how people’s behaviors and expectations have changed. This means a huge missed opportunity. The move from broadcast to streaming is of no interest, people don’t care how things get to them. They don’t care about the screen it’s on, they just care how they experience them…[continue reading on Tech Crunch]