The Big Screen is Dead. Long Live the Big Screen.
The other day I had a lunch conversation with a friend who invests in startups for a living. She said to me, “the big screen in the living room is over.” In a few years, she continued, nobody under the age of 40 will spend any time watching big screens, and nobody will be making any content for big screens.
I couldn’t disagree more.
My friend, who is ready to leave the big screen in your living room for dead, has deep, deep experience with gaming, media, and consumer marketing. She knows what she’s talking about. And her opinion isn’t unusual among tech-oriented entertainment investors and executives. “Look at the numbers,” they say, “phones are the future.” Average minutes spent “engaged” with digital content on phones and computers has already passed traditional, “tv” screen, minutes for every US demographic. And the trend lines in the 18–24 age range are crazy steep: live tv usage is dropping precipitously; smartphone media is the default, the new normal.
Those numbers are really interesting. And they’re important, if you care about the future of media. Right now, phones are driving the evolution of our digital experiences. But part of what’s fascinating about the shift to a mobile-first world is that phones are not standalone devices. Our phones are tiny little attention-sucking windows into never-never land, sure. But they are also personal, powerful, digital prosthetics that give us new ways of interacting with other things in the world, including our stodgy old living room television screens.
Take YouTube, for example. The YouTube product team has done a great job implementing an easy to use “phone as navigator and controller” feature set. You can zip around YouTube on your phone while videos are playing on your big screen, adding to or interrupting the big screen play-list at will. If you have a big screen available, the experience of using YouTube via both your phone and that big screen, at the same time, is way, way more fun than using either by itself.
(At least, it’s more fun sometimes. Phone control works particularly well with Google’s little Chromecast stick. And sort of well with some of the televisions, connected set top devices, and Blu-Ray players that ship with a YouTube app. Apple is way behind the curve here. Apple’s AirPlay video sharing doesn’t work as well. It seems safe to expect Apple to close the gap, though, when a new AppleTV device is released later this year.)
Another example
In general, it’s a good bet that there’s a place in our lives for experiences that are convenient, compelling, and affordable. If you squint a little as you peer into the future, you’ll see that there are some big categories of convenient, compelling, and affordable big-screen experiences on the horizon, driven and enabled by our phones.
These “two screen” experiences are a new thing. They’re locally social, in ways that phones can’t be by themselves. They allow for multi-tasking (you can play a video on the big screen while doing something else with your small one). They’re immersive (bigger images and better sound).
YouTube’s two-screen interface leverages all of these advantages. And the experience is definitely affordable. These days a 40" television is cheaper than a new iPhone.
New kinds of games that leverage multiple screens are coming, too. (Check out Nintendo’s Wii U for an early example of experimentation with two-screen gaming.)
And sports, the 800-pound gorilla of television industry economics, is a natural big-screen/two-screen experience. We love to watch sports in person with other people. We love to use our little screens to engage socially. And it’s way more fun to watch the action on a big screen than on a little one.
A prediction: within five years, we’ll think that any media experience that only works on one screen at a time is broken. I kind of think that today, in fact. This morning I watched @mazzeo’s morning coffee Meerkat session, but I had to dedicate my phone to that one activity. I had a big screen in the same room, but the Meerkat app doesn’t give me a way to stream in the background to the Sony television itself, or to the AppleTV, the Chromecast, or the Mac that are all plugged into it. (I’m not picking on Meerkat. Support for this isn’t built into iOS. But it will be.)
In tech, innovation and attention tend to flow towards new ecosystems. But, as these new ecosystems expand, they bring the old stuff along with them into the new world. The rise of the web made “personal computers” more important, not less. Mobile “phones” aren’t really phones, they’re internet devices, and even though “apps” are in some ways more important than the “web,” these days, the web is bigger than ever because we can now use a web browser any time, from anywhere.
The centrality of passively consumed, big-screen-only media in our lives is definitely a last-century thing. But big screens themselves aren’t going away. In fact, we’re going to use our big screens more, and in more varied ways. The percentage of our “screen time” that we devote to big screens will continue to fall as we spend more and more time with our phones (and watches, and other new devices that have yet to be invented). But the overall value of, and desirability of, big screen experiences is actually going to increase as we make good on the potential of a multi-device, fully networked, everything-digital, world.
