Here is a topic I continue to be intrigued by (see category in the right column). While many
firms are competing in the race for the single box solution to TV Web
convergence, Mac Slocum at O’Reilly Radar reports that new data from Nielsen suggests they're all headed in
the wrong direction. “In the last quarter of 2009, simultaneous use of the
Internet while watching TV reached three and a half hours a month, up 35% from
the previous quarter. Nearly 60% of TV viewers now use the Internet once a
month while also watching TV.” 

I am doing this right now as I am watching TV while I
write this post.  This is usually
an easy multi-task. Mac notes the differences between television's lean-back
experience and the web's lean-forward positioning. Competing manufacturers did
to consider this difference with the Web’s pull potential and TV’s push.  

The Nielsen report also said that that Americans watch
network programs online when they miss an episode or when a TV is not
available. Online video is used essentially like DVR and not typically a
replacement for watching TV. Mac adds consumers are supplementing their consumption with online video, not replacing
it. This is where I liked the On Demand options to see TV shows when I want to.
I used this extensively for the Treme series that came on too late. It also
helped me watch each episode at least three times.

Now Mac takes this data to an interesting conclusion. He writes
that it matters if content is consumed, not how it's consumed. Much
effort has gone into bridging the web and TV worlds through brute force into a
single box. However, the most successful cross-media efforts are the ones that
let consumers interact through the tools they already use. This is why many
enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform vendors enable their users to interact
with their tools through email. What makes more sense: integrating Twitter into
a television's hardware or helping users tweet during a show? I would choose
the latter. 

I have been
writing a bit about the convergence of TV and the Web (for example, see Will
Google Succeed with TV Where Apple and Microsoft Have Fallen Short?). One of the remaining questions remains: will the Web TV convergence
lean to the TV side to the Web side? 
According to New TeeVee, while Google is planning to have its integrated
TV and web offering available on Sony TVs and Blu-ray players, as well as Logitech
set-top boxes, in stores by the holidays. However, TiVo says you can already
get similar functionality on its existing products and this has been able to do
so for years. TIVO claims it revolutionized television by creating the DVR, and
later, added search functionality to make it easier to find the content that
users wanted to watch, long before others offered this capability.

Leslie D'Monte recently covered Google's linking of TV and the Web. She notes that Google believes there is a huge market opportunity in this space with
around 4 billion people across the world watching TV. But also notes the
not-so-successful forays of Apple and Microsoft to bring the internet to TV
with Apple TV and MSN TV.

The browser on Google TV is simply the Linux version of Google Chrome.
The user interface will have to be modified for TV. The same Android software
that powers Google's mobile devices is being used with Google TV. With the
browser built in, Google TV is expected to help you access all of your favorite
websites and easily move between TV and the web. The open platforms of Andriod
and Chrome open up room for developers to add to the initial functionality.

Leslie notes that many other players have been in this market for a while.
TiVO had many fo the features in 2003. Other TV hardware providers that are
competitive to Google’s partner, SONY, have other means to access the Web.
Moreover, one could view content from Amazon Video-On Demand, YouTube and
Netflix even in 2007. Then there are competing set-top box products like Boxee,
PopBox and Roku.

Sean Portnoy looks at a different set of competitors for Google TV and
asks on ZDNet, Will Google TV Threaten Cable Providers?  He begins by also noting that despite the buzz surrounding its launch,
Apple TV never gave cable companies much to worry about. Now it is Google’s
turn.  Perhaps to no surprise he
notes that Google’s approach is far more insidious with its more open approach.

First, Sean notes that by buying a Google TV box for a one-time fee or
a new HDTV with Google TV built in, you are then not resigned to pay an extra
monthly fee when pay TV providers decide to add new features like Web
integration to their packages. 

And we all know that this Web convergence is coming. In fact this
convergence tees up Sean’s second and potentially bigger issue. With Google TV
more subscribers will no longer see the need to continue being cable customers,
since much of their viewing needs could be met with online video they could
watch through the Google TV platform.

However, the battle is far from over as there are still plenty of
people who are perfectly satisfied continuing to order on-demand movies from
their cable box instead of streaming them online from Netflix or Amazon. I am
one of them so far and just paid to see two new movies through Comcast this
afternoon.. Perhaps I am just lazy but ease of access is a big factor with
entertainment and I am not a gadget person like many others.

Google TV may urge on more innovation or reform by the cable
providers. I have seen a great increase in Comcast’s on-demand since options
like Netflicks became more prominent. Hopefully this will result in a win for
consumers regardless of the outcome. All this competition does seem to ensure one thing, the Web and TV are
becoming more connected to the benefit of viewers regardless of which vendors
win. 

PSFK
recently posted on How To Enhance The Viewing Experience, Rather Than Interrupt
It. The increasing
availability of smart phones and tablets such as the increases the number of
screens that consumer can view – or interact with – TV programming.   But will each medium take advantage of its characteristics to
enhance the experience. Bob Greenberg, CEO at R/GA,
recently provided some additional perspective in AdWeek
in his post, The Future of TV. He notes that as TV use broadens the convergence
of Web and broadcast TV will continue. 
He also offers some predictions and suggestions.

Utility-driven marketing and interactive TV
viewing: the
experience of watching TV has shifted to a more active experience rather than
the traditional passive couch potato image. Many consumers view TV while
surfing the Web, texting or chatting. TV people need to recognize this and
enhance this experience.

Social TV: Bob offers an example: last year’s
partnership between Facebook Connect and CNN’s presidential inauguration; many
players are creating a conduit for viewers to interact during programming.
There are many others. Darwin is working on one through a PBS affiliate.

Social
interactivity (via co-viewership, gaming): MTV turned TV watching into a gaming experience by inviting viewers
during episodes of the The Hills to join chat rooms to write and rate
comments. Comments with positive ratings accumulated points and respective
winners. The one with the most points wins. There are many other examples.

TV commerce: The click of a mouse or the touch of a
screen will eventually allow us to purchase products directly from video
content. Operators will no longer need to be standing by.

The traditional media people who best integrate with new social media
will be the winners.

Despite the growth of free, on-demand entertainment options it paying
TV customers appear to be growing. As PSFK posts, a new report by SNL Kagan
shows that even though people purport to be moving away from traditional media
sources such as cable and satellite, they are actually sticking with the familiar
more than expected.

The New York Times explains in More Americans Are Paying for Television:

“Regardless, more people are paying for TV: 99.9 million
at the end of 2009, up from 97 million at the end of 2008. The gain can be
explained in part by the nation’s gradual population growth, but also by the
enduring popularity of television in a fragmented media marketplace.

According to SNL Kagan, cable (Comcast, Time Warner
Cable, Cablevision, among the companies in the category) lost a total of
500,000 subscribers between 2008 and 2009; satellite (DirecTV, Dish Network)
gained 1.4 million; and telecommunications (Verizon, AT&T) gained 2
million. Cable providers still dominate, however, with 62.1 million
subscribers, while satellite competitors have 32.7 million and
telecommunications companies have only 5.1 million.”

If you add the numbers watching the various forms of Web
TV, there is only growth in this media. How to explain these results? The Times
concludes that we
may seeing a gap between how people feel and how they actually behave.  This is not new. Many psychology studies
have found this gap in many areas. In fact, attitudes or perceptions and actions often do not align. The Times adds that there is already a
history of this gap in the television industry: it has been well
established that Americans underestimate the amount of daily TV they watch.

I have written on how Apple
might impact the television business model. Google is also getting into the act.
Amy Vernon writes how Google's Open-Source TV: Coming soon to a set near
you.  She notes that it goes beyond
a simple set top box and is truly
being more of an OS.  If it goes the open-source route it's said to be
headed in the impact will be huge.

With print, the Web has initially been a competitor that has brought
many outlets down (see Who killed the Rocky Mountain News? from John Temple). Now, print is slowly beginning to
learn how to co-exist with the Web. However, with TV, it seems that the Web
firms are trying to better integrate and the traditional TV content producers
are mostly on board to make this work.

Google represents one of the latest Web firms to get into the TV
action. Amy writes: “if anyone is down for the democratization of
Internet-based TV viewing, it's Google. And with a built-in browser plus
expected apps from YouTube, Hulu and Netflix just for starters, it's
conceivable that the pace with which the average consumer has been moving from
the broadcast/cable/satellite model (which are all pretty much the same, just
different technology and channel capacity) could accelerate exponentially.”

Now Google is partnering with Intel and Sony for technology and
content. This is a smart move. 
Recently they brought in Logitech to offer a single remote for all this
stuff, including your laptop.

The High Def Digest picks up the story and notes
that, “Google has
learned a lot from Apple, and it’s pretty evident that they’ve taken those
lessons to heart. What was once a humble search engine based out of a garage is
now the company behind the Nexus One phone, Android operating system, Chrome
OS, Chrome internet browser and now open source TV software and, potentially, a
set-top box or two. The guys at Google have also learned a bit about what not
to do. With Google TV, they’re taking a full 180 from the incredibly
restrictive Apple TV.”

They
note that Google TV is not a standalone product but an operating system for
set-tops.  It will have a built-in
browser so you can go after unlimited content.  This will open up a lot of ad space for them. It will also
up more opportunities for Web-based services to provide analytics on TV related
content such as our vision for Darwin.

I have written a bit about the convergence of TV and the Web. Here is useful tool
to monitor and take advantage of this trend. Clicker is a search service to
find what is available in video on the Web. There motto is “What’s On
Online.”  At the site you are
greeted with a simple Google style search filed as well as links to what’s new,
what’s hot, recommended and your playlist if you have signed up for the premium
service. The basic features are free. You can search by show or by topic. Clicker indexes television shows, movies,
music videos, and original web content. 

Clicker recently received $11 million in expanded
venture capital funding. The series B round was led by Jafco Ventures. Benchmark Capital
and Redpoint Ventures also participated. The company has now raised
approximately $19 million since its launch in January 2009. The site does not
provide video itself. It links you to the growing amount of content that others
are producing. The Clicker catalog now includes more than 600,000 episodes from
10,000 shows. It lists those titles in more than 14,000 categories.

Jeremy Scott provides a nice Clicker review at ReelSEO,  Clicker Wants To Be Your Web TV Search
Engine – They’re Mine. He writes that Clicker solved his frustration in finding
out what is on the Web after he dropped cable. Jeremy gives the example of searcing for his favorite show, Lost. It “reveals a host of options. 
The first thing you’ll notice are some brief stats:  there are apparently
129 episodes of Lost available online for free, with another 86 available for
purchase.”  Plus there was a lot of
related content on the same theme.

This is a
nice discovery and one that will make Web video content much more attractive to
me. It will be interesting to see how Clicker evolve as the Web and broadcast
TV continue to converge.

Things continue
to move fast in the TV sector. Apple and other Web apps have certainly impacted
the music industry and print publishing. 
Now there is a move to impact television by changing the business model.
Instead of subscribing to cable for a fixed fee to get a lot of stuff bundled,
Apple wants to sell TV programs one at a time, like they do with music, for a
low cost per program. A recent Fats Company article best that they will succeed
(see: Apple's iPad Disrupting the Network TV Business Model? I'd Buy That for a
Dollar!).

Naturally, the TV industry is exhibiting broad concern
over this plan. While they're want to get on the Apple's iPad bandwagon as a TV
player, they are worried that lower prices will cut into their revenue streams.
Now TV has its markets to protect but there are also 125 million registered iTunes
users, representing a huge potential market, waiting to be tapped by someone.
The main worry on the TV side is that production is expensive and each show
represents a huge investment in time and money. Can they get their money a buck
at a time?

The FastCompany article, which builds a story in the New York Times,
suggests that they would be fools to not do this. If they do not offer programs
at attractive prices, people will just steal the shows as it is not that
complex to do in the digital world. If the price is right, it will convince
most people not to do to the trouble and potential risk to resort to
piracy.  It will be very
interesting to see how this shakes out. We feel that Darwin can help the winners, whoever they are, with both
news gathering and impact analysis regardless of the winner as TV moves closer
to the Web (see Monitoring and Measuring the Impact of Public
Service Media Part Two: Addressing the Issues). 

The New York Times
had an interesting article, YouTube’s Quest to Suggest More, that covered their
goal to have people stay longer on the site which would increase ad revenue.
Compared to other Web sites with similar content (or really almost any Web
site) they are way ahead. But compared to that other channel for viewing
content, televsion, they are way behind. Users spend an average of 15 minutes a
day on the site and they spend about five hours in front of the television.

To increase time
spent on YouTube Hunter Walk leads a team of about a dozen engineers, designers
and project managers who are fine-tuning YouTube to users what they want, even
when users aren’t quite sure what they really want. This is where discovery
comes in. One way is to select the 10-15 most appealing videos for a specific
user from their library of over 100 million.

The process starts
with search. The NYT reported that in November, Americans typed some 3.8
billion search queries on YouTube, more than on any search engine other than
Google, according to comScore, a market researcher. But there is a
difference. While Google queries tend to be very specific, users often come to
YouTube with requests as vague as “funny videos.” This is where discovery can
help by providing a range of results that are not simply literal matches.

One challenge is when
to anticipate the user might be getting tried of their original topic and
proactively offer related content to keep them on site.  One way to provide good options
suggesting videos that users may want to watch based on prior viewing before, or
on what others with similar tastes have enjoyed. The effort requires
data-mining techniques similar to those used by and Amazon to make music or book recommendations.

Darwin Ecosystems is
also in the discovery business. Instead of offering content in a list format
based on your prior behavior or others similar to you, it offers a set of
topics arranged in a Scan Cloud™ that correlate with the original search term
or, as we say attractor. Then you can hop around to explore the related topics
based on your interests. It is an alternative model to trying to read your mind
as YouTube and Amazon do.  Instead,
it gives you a range of choices in an easy interface to allow you to better
make up your own mind. 

The New York Times
had an interesting article, YouTube’s Quest to Suggest More, that covered their
goal to have people stay longer on the site which would increase ad revenue.
Compared to other Web sites with similar content (or really almost any Web
site) they are way ahead. But compared to that other channel for viewing
content, televsion, they are way behind. Users spend an average of 15 minutes a
day on the site and they spend about five hours in front of the television.

To increase time
spent on YouTube Hunter Walk leads a team of about a dozen engineers, designers
and project managers who are fine-tuning YouTube to users what they want, even
when users aren’t quite sure what they really want. This is where discovery
comes in. One way is to select the 10-15 most appealing videos for a specific
user from their library of over 100 million.

The process starts
with search. The NYT reported that in November, Americans typed some 3.8
billion search queries on YouTube, more than on any search engine other than
Google, according to comScore, a market researcher. But there is a
difference. While Google queries tend to be very specific, users often come to
YouTube with requests as vague as “funny videos.” This is where discovery can
help by providing a range of results that are not simply literal matches.

One challenge is when
to anticipate the user might be getting tried of their original topic and
proactively offer related content to keep them on site.  One way to provide good options
suggesting videos that users may want to watch based on prior viewing before, or
on what others with similar tastes have enjoyed. The effort requires
data-mining techniques similar to those used by and Amazon to make music or book recommendations.

Darwin Ecosystems is
also in the discovery business. Instead of offering content in a list format
based on your prior behavior or others similar to you, it offers a set of
topics arranged in a Scan Cloud™ that correlate with the original search term
or, as we say attractor. Then you can hop around to explore the related topics
based on your interests. It is an alternative model to trying to read your mind
as YouTube and Amazon do.  Instead,
it gives you a range of choices in an easy interface to allow you to better
make up your own mind.