TV and its Transformation Journey

A curious thing happened to me the other day. I was listening to a snatch of commercial radio (in the bathroom at my office in case you’re interested) and there was a trail for a competition sponsored by Netflix. It struck me that Netflix had entered to the collective consciousness as a place to watch TV, in the same way as traditional channels. Over the next few weeks I kept my ears open for conversations and references to Netflix, and found people referring to it just like a TV channel. After all, it’s a place you go to watch TV shows, on your TV right?

The thing is that Netflix is not a TV channel. It’s not run on a schedule like a TV channel. It has no EPG entry (electronic programme guide), no need for ‘series linking’, no +1 channels, no repeats schedule, no stripping the previous series to promote the new series. Compared to Netflix all this paraphernalia of linear broadcast feels a bit clunky, like a relic of old technology.

It’s the ability to watch video streams over IP (Internet Protocol) that enables Netflix to be truly on demand: a 1-to-1 connection rather than a 1-to-many. With a 1-to-1 relationship you can start watching whenever you want, or pause, pick up where you left off, switch from TV to mobile to tablet, download for offline viewing and so on. This offers so much flexibility and opens up new ways of watching TV; on the subway for example (who envisaged that 10 years ago!)

What if, at some point in the future, all TV was like this? It’s an intriguing possibility that comes with huge infrastructural challenges, and not being a network engineer I’ll gladly skate over the massive inherent complexities of making this a reality. If consumer trends are pointing to the increasing take-up of broadcaster on-demand consumption and OTT services (OTT means basically stuff like Netflix that you get in addition to normal TV), and a decrease of linear TV viewing, then at some moment in the future there will surely be a point where linear TV stops making sense. These trends are being accelerated by millennials (this term has various definitions, I’m taking it to mean people born since 2000).

I’m going to attempt to avoid being pelted with rotten tomatoes by my fellow colleagues and state that I believe that, for a large part, the way that people watch TV won’t really change. There will still be a load of time spent watching TV whilst doing the housework, school work, hungover or sick in bed. TV will always be there as a companion, a distraction and a background. It will also be there for big events, whether that be sports, talent shows or news.

So, literally and figuratively, “lean forward” and “lean back” TV will still need to exist to fulfil a large consumer desire. But does it need to be scheduled, as it is now? Schedules, and more specifically the channels they are attached to, make it simple for viewers to choose where to look for programmes. They offer easy signposting — people typically have 7 go-to channels in an EPG that they feel most represent what they want to watch. It makes it quick: flick on the TV and get entertained without making an effort.

So if schedules will become a relic of linear in a non-linear world, will they remain? After all they’re useful and familiar, so if something different were to come along it’d need to be even better, even more useful. It’d need to be as easy to use, as transparent to users’ experiences, as simple to understand.

A 2013 research piece conducted by TV industry consultancy Thinkbox identified 6 main reasons that people watch TV, their need states:

Unwind: defer life’s chores or de-stress from the pressures of the day
Comfort: shared family time; togetherness, rituals, familiarity and routine
Connect: a sense of ‘plugging in’ — to feel a sense of connection to society, to time or to place
Experience: a need for fun and a sense of occasion to be shared
Escape: the desire to be taken on an enjoyable journey to another time and place
Indulge: satisfying your (typically guilty) pleasures with personal favourites, usually alone

Our schedule replacement would need to satisfy all of these states, particularly the more social needs such as unwinding and seeking comfort.

The vision

Here’s the vision: the viewer switches on the TV (or other viewing device), gets a small, easy to digest choice of what to watch — small enough to fit on a couple of screens. The choice contains a mix of individual programmes and groups of programmes, and viewers choose what to watch by talking, swiping, clicking, or whatever method of interaction we haven’t invented yet.

The key to its success, its magic sauce, is for the TV to be smart enough to figure out what you might want to watch, and what need state you may be in. The choices are presented in natural ways that make sense to humans — “something fun”, “zone-out TV”, “glossy drama”, “whatever’s good on Syfy” — as well as in specific ways — next episode of Homeland, “the rest of The Wonders of the Universe episode I was watching”.

To give it the best chance of being right, it’d need to know a bunch of things about you:

Who you are (in the simplest sense: your user profile)
Where you are, and who you’re with
The time of day, day of week, and whether it’s a special day (Christmas day for example)
Your viewing habits: what you’ve watched in the past, and when, and your engagement level (i.e. whether you’ve switched off after 5 minutes)
Your interests: what you read, your hobbies and passions

I imagine this sounds a bit, well, intrusive to most of us. Much less so to millennials I’m guessing. Also, for those of us who struggle to have a happy relationship with technology, this may all sound like a barrier rather than an enabler. Let’s take a leap of faith, though, and make the assumption that technology and systems will all just work wonderfully in the future, even for old people and technology deniers.

That list above describes simple concepts that belie a staggering amount of complexity, and I’d like to dig into these in a bit more detail.

Who you are

Your TV (or viewing device) needs to know who you are before it can do anything that’s personalised. And because it’s shared with everyone in the home, it needs to know everyone.

Here’s the tricky thing: to be as good as possible, your TV identity needs to be used (or synced) by a whole bunch of other systems, services and social networks. Today’s connected social identities offered by the likes of Facebook and Twitter are the closest we have to this, and the way that Google uses your Google+ identity across its large array of products in a transparent way shows this cross-application identity in action. I’ll come back to this theme shortly.

Where you are and who you’re with

The viewer’s location is an interesting metric that will affect what may or may not be appropriate for viewing recommendations, and the “where” goes hand in hand with the “when” described next. At home, on the big screen, it may be more appropriate to recommend longer-form content; on the bus it may be better to offer short snacky content. I’m assuming that GPS location data together with a cross-reference of movements to mapping (to determine travel via road, rail etc.) and a match of your habits (going to work time, weekend away etc.) will enable the device to make a pretty good guess about the viewer’s environment.

Group viewing is also interesting: the challenge is to offer recommendations to satisfy everyone (or in the example of parents and a toddler, a mix of programmes for grown-ups and, well, Peppa Pig). Two things come into play here: the first is the need for the device to learn what particular groups habitually watch (couple plus teenage daughter, weekend means Dancing With The Stars!). The second is the ability of the device to compare the preferences of each group member and make recommendations that are designed to appeal to all. For shows with long narrative arcs the recommendations would need to take into consideration individuals at different stages of watching a season.

A near-field technology such as Bluetooth could be used to identify individuals’ smartphones or wearable devices within a group clustered around a TV.

Time and day

Clearly we are creatures of habit, and tend to watch different things at different times and days. A smart system would need the sensitivity to determine the difference between breakfast time and mid-morning (and not just AM) as the need states are different for each times. It should make a difference between a Wednesday and a Sunday, a public holiday and a regular work day. It’d need to adapt itself to the shift worker, student, stay-at-home dad and so on.

Naturally, it’d also need to know what the viewer might want to watch at that particular moment. And that’s where the next two types of data come in useful: your viewing habits and your interests. The system needs a lot of information about the viewer to make informed decisions, it needs to learn, be aware of subtle changes, and keep updating itself.

Viewing habits

The concept of viewing habits is already well understood and widely used by websites and applications to generate relevancy between items. These are then presented to users in explicit or implicit ways. Think of “Like this, try this” widgets that you get on Amazon, or “Are you still after a toaster? Don’t miss out on these” type emails from Ebay. Certain search results can be crafted by relevancy. Netflix’s suggestions engine does a valiant job of recommending stuff I might want to watch, which goes particularly haywire after my young niece and nephew have visited (“No, I don’t want to watch sodding Frozen!”). TiVo remotes have thumbs up and down buttons that help it learn user preferences (if used, of course).

These examples are fairly two-dimensional in their nature; they take usage information about a type of thing and recommend more things of the same type, although again they belie complexity. But what our theoretical system has is a vastly richer picture of the viewer, particularly if interests are taken into account.

Interests

It dawned on me recently just how clever it was for Google to add sign-in to its search engine. Its potential is staggering, as well as the privacy concerns it throws up (I suspect that they rely on users either not particularly noticing, or thinking it was there just to give them links to other Google services). It allows Google to know what I search for, and what I click on — hence where I go on the Internet afterwards. It knows what I want to buy (sometimes actually what I buy), what videos I watch. It is able to match my search history to my YouTube history. If I use an Android phone it knows what apps I’m using. If I have a Gmail account it knows the contents of my emails. If I use news search or news alerts it knows what I’m interested in. And so on.

Just imagine what all this rich information could bring to my TV recommendations. This multi-layered data could be mined for extra insight into me as a person rather than me as a viewer. It would be able to add interest areas to my profile without me needing to consume any TV about it.

Google has already started to join together the dots with its Google Now software. Using voice recognition it interprets users’ spoken information requests and returns answers, recommendations, and search results, partly based on the information it knows about the user from their search history. It also offers up information that it thinks the user may be interested in (but doesn’t yet know), again based on the user’s habits: common physical locations such as home and work, repeated calendar appointments, search queries, visited websites and so on.

Who can make this real?

So who could make this a reality? You may have noticed the odd reference to Google in this document…It’s impossible to ignore its global ubiquity and that arguably it’s the most powerful institution the world has ever seen: it has more information about us than any government could dream of. But who else could potentially make this a reality?

My hunch is that it would need to come from a corporation that’s already global — to get the buy-in of device manufacturers would almost certainly mandate this. They’d need to already have a daily relationship with millions of individuals and have extensive usage behaviour available to them. So other than Google, I’m sure that Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Yahoo! are well-positioned to have a go.

Any others? Sony? Microsoft? Samsung? I don’t feel I have a relationship with them. If it was something that could be developed for local markets then here in the UK the BBC would probably be well-placed. But I feel the scale of development required would preclude local players.

Final thoughts

This feels like a logical extension of where we are heading. In many ways the TV industry has morphed and wriggled and reluctantly sputtered forward to sort of keep up with technology, although it seems that a mixture of industry fear and indifference has held it back. I’m sure other industries suffer from the same.

In my own time in TV over the last 10 years I’ve seen the impact that social media has had on TV (illustrated perfectly by the hyper viral and not monetised YouTube clip of Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent in 2009) and the brief flourishing of second screen interactivity (The X Factor app is a good example). But if you look at overall viewing numbers (without splitting out millennials), its delivery has largely been untouched by technology: even video on demand and PVR usage is a small fraction of overall TV viewing. The next 10 years will be different.

Today’s on demand apps and services are generally of a good quality and usable. The problem that viewers have is that everything’s just more difficult than it should be, and is far from a seamless experience jumping from linear to on demand. From switching the input on your TV from ‘HDMI1’ set top box to ‘HDMI2’ Apple TV then switching remotes, to having to download all the broadcaster apps separately and learning how to navigate them, to trying to love your TV’s user interface when it’s just so horrible and unintuitive. This doesn’t even cover dodgy WiFi or fiddly logins. All these things will need to be solved to make the whole experience friendly and, well, loved by older people, those with accessibility challenges and people with hangovers.