You can think TV is in terminal decline or not, but it’s plain that powerful forces are changing the Tv industry. Digitization is changing behaviors, business models, consumer expectations and well, everything. 

All media becomes bits and bytes, the Internet becomes the pipe to all content and devices become converged. The boundaries between music streaming and radio, between digital art and short films and, most importantly, between video and TV have all blurred.

What becomes the defining feature of TV vs. Video? Is it the device it’s watched on? The length of the content? The production quality? Or is it the pipe for the data?

I think in an age where Apple commissions TV content to run on Apple music, where Burberry shows premium footage via Smart TV app, where we stream the NFL via Twitter on a phone, or watch news from Hulu in VR.

It seems that the delivery mechanism, the device and the content length offer poor guidance in what TV is and isn’t. For years the difficulties in production, the cost of distribution meant that professional commissioners would decide what should be created and distributed. They were the arbiters of what was TV.

Now it’s everyone. What we have in 2019 is abundance in all directions. We have more screens, in more places, than ever.

We have devices like mobiles creating ever more incremental media moments in life. More screens, more moments, it’s a pie that’s growing and this best describes the vast opportunity for everyone in TV. 

The challenge is create better content

The challenge is how we can make better content, how we can aid the discovery and sharing of the content and how we will make more money and in better ways.

I now need to select my remote before I decide what show to watch. We have SVOD, AVOD, TVOD, LIVE Streaming… it’s messy.  This is the Tv Future.

TV will one day all be digital. In a world of 5G, set top boxes could fade to the smartphone as a hub. VR content can be already made and streamed in real time.

The notion of broadcast vs. streaming will be a false choice. We need to embrace that reality now. All these changes allow more money to be made from more people, more often and in new ways.

Everything from rights negotiations, to content format, to payment systems and business models need to be assessed with a future focused lens.

The Tv Future

Technology is not a threat, new media doesn’t replace the old, it just gives a new framework to pull it through and creates more places for it to appear.  

This transformation that makes TV the best place to be right now.