Every so often it’s a good exercise to examine some of the core beliefs of a company or industry and call out the ones that don’t make any sense. In the short run, saying out loud what a lot of people have been thinking pisses off those who are heavily invested in these now outmoded ideas, but in the long run, it’s healthier for all involved to recalibrate. TV Everywhere Wasn’t Worth The Battle. It sounded like a great idea at the time: you can take your television with you anywhere you go and watch it on your tablet or smartphone. The reality, however, shows a very limited number of use cases beyond sports and live events. Because seriously, when are you going to have a half hour to an hour to watch live TV outside the house in a place where you have a decent 4G or WiFi connection? It’s not like you’re going to leave your bedroom or … Continue reading →
While the terms “social TV” and “second screen” are often used interchangeably, they are, in fact, two different experiences: Social TV is a subset of second screen — and a somewhat minor one at that. As technology and adoption advance, every show will need to come up with its own unique spin on what constitutes valuable second-screen content. For a baseball game, it may be a very graphics-intensive take on statistics; for a reality game show, it may be online voting. Those decisions are up to the networks and the individual show runners, who’ll need to balance their goals (e.g., increase tune-in or cement loyalty) with what their budget allows. READ THE REST AT DIGIDAY.COM
KIT digital’s Alan Wolk has a piece in The Guardian this week, the UK’s leading newspaper and quite possibly the world’s. It outlines our vision of the future of connected TV in a rather prestigious forum: A smart TV’s connected features can be controlled from a second screen, creating many different commercial possibilities. Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images A recent study by the NPD Group showed that more than 40% of households with smart TVs have never actually bothered to hook them up to the internet. However, given the state of the interface found on most smart TVs, this should come as no surprise. TV manufacturers got it into their heads that users might like an easy way to connect to Netflix. Which was not a bad idea. If only they’d stopped there. Instead, they turned the screen into a Compuserve 1993 concoction of random apps, few of which had anything to do with television… READ THE REST AT THE GUARDIAN
The more I use Facebook Graph Search, the more evident it becomes that Facebook made a major mistake with their most ubiquitous feature: the “Like.” Follow this train: Facebook’s value, their kryptonite, is their data. They have a billion users, and they know the habits and preferences of all of billion of them because they can easily track that information by examining what they’ve Liked. Or can they? On the pre-Like Facebook, users were Fans of pages. That information – which brands, bands, books, movies, sports teams, etc. a user was a Fan of was prominently displayed on the user’s profile page. Which meant users spent a lot of time curating those selections, pruning and adding so that the list was an accurate reflection of who they were. Or at least who they wanted people to think they were. As a result, it was tough (or tough-ish) to get users to become fans of pages they didn’t think would give … Continue reading →
This is the second of three interviews Alan Wolk did during Beet Retreat 2013 Wolk notes “As an indication of how fast the industry is moving, although we filmed this about 3 weeks ago, in the intervening period, Nielsen announced that they would soon begin counting views on iPads, Xboxes and other non-TV devices. Since that was the crux of the network’s objections to TV Everywhere (the fact that they’d lose ad revenue when people watched remotely on a iPad) it would seem to give a green light for a renewed push. One that may have the full cooperation of the networks, or at least their tacit blessing.” Read the rest at Beet.tv
