The Disruption Tour - Run To Survive A Social Media Revolution

Funny bit on Facebook -- done by Saturday Night Live

Funny bit on Facebook done by Saturday Night Live

http://bit.ly/cuiBLq

Consumer Electronics Manufacturers and the Fight for the Digital Living Room

Eric Anderson, VP of Content and Product Solutions, Samsung had the right answer, “We’re not fighting for the living room, we’re fighting for the account.”

Fasten your seatbelts; this is going to get rough.

According to Mr. Anderson, Samsung (SSNLF.PK), makers of exceptional consumer electronics, will sell over 8.5 million Internet connectible flat screen television sets this year. And, approximately 5.5 million of them will be broadband connected and registered online within a week or so of being purchased. This stopped me in my tracks. Peter Schwartz, Vizio, Senior Director Product Management was also on the panel, and when asked, he told us that Vizio would sell approximately 7 million Internet connectible televisions this year and the company expected about 4.5 million of them to be broadband connected and registered within a week or so of purchase.

I asked if these numbers were published and publicly available, both gentlemen said they were. So let’s do some back of the envelope math. Take the biggest players in flat screens: Sony (SNE), Samsung, LG (LGERF.PK), Vizio, Sharp (SHCAY.PK), Panasonic (PC), Toshiba (TOSBF.PK), Sanyo (SANYY.PK), Mitsubishi (MIELY.PK), etc, and add up all the connected TV set sales expected for this year. Let’s say 25 million sets that will actually be broadband connected this year. Multiply by three and up the estimate each year to account for a drop in price and increase in popularity of the services, and it looks like the United States will have over 75 million broadband connected television sets fully installed by 2013.

The CEA has a different estimate as do some other research firms, but they are all higher than my little back of the envelope calculation.

Now, let this number sink in for a moment. To help you intellectualize this number, please take into account that there are about 115 million television households in the US. Approximately 100 million of them are currently cable, satellite or IPTV subscribers, the remaining 15 million or so households use antennas to tune in television. More than 50% of US households are broadband connected, but that number is suspect because the FCC definition of broadband is meaningless. For this calculation you are only concerned with US households with broadband connectivity suitable for video consumption.

To help you emotionalize this statistic, remember that almost every household in America has more than one television set and the deployment of new flat screens will not be one per household. These new connected televisions will be purchased by people who have excellent broadband connectivity to their homes and can afford to purchase new flat screens — in short, the most affluent, most desirable demographic for almost every advertiser and marketer.

Shelly Palmer seekingalpha.com

Evolving Sources of Information

By Kevin Meyer

Baekdal has a fascinating article, complete with some fantastic illustrative graphics, showing how our sources of information and news have changed over the past couple centuries... and how they will continue to evolve.  Below is just the overall summary graphic, shrunk considerably, so visit the original site to really dive into it in detail.

You'll note that the time scale is a bit skewed, but just because so much change has happened so recently.  The article goes into considerable detail of the changes occurring during each time frame, but I'd like to summarize the most important ones here.

In the 1800, the only way you could really interact with other people was to go out and meet them. It was all about face-to-face communication. If you wanted to sell a product, you would go to the local marketplace, where you would setup a stand. But this also meant that the only way for you to get information - or to give information back - was to be at the right place at the right time. You didn't really know what happened in another part of the city.

Moving on into the long era of newspapers.

By the year 1900, the newspapers and magazine had revolutionized how we communicated. Now we could get news from places we have never been. We could communicate our ideas to people we had never seen. And we could sell our products to people far away.

That was truly a revolution... until the radio changed the game. 

During the next 60 years the newspapers dominated our lives.

Except that during the 1920s a new information source started to attract people's attention - the Radio. Suddenly you could listen to another person's voice 100 of miles away. But most importantly, you could get the latest information LIVE. It was another tremendous evolution is the history of information.

Moving on to...

During the next 40 years a new technical revolution, the television, was introduced. It started to real get public interest in the 1950s, and by the year 1990 it was huge. It had surpassed the newspapers and magazines, and it was slowly obliterating the radio. Now people could not only hear information, they could also see it.

The 1970s-1990s was also the time where the newspaper executives were realizing that something was going terrible wrong with their market.

Information, fast, immediate, and visual.  What's next?

1998 was the year when the internet changed from being a geeky place that had little relevance, to ‘every company needs to have a website'. It was a place where everyone could get information from everywhere - at least in theory. People also started to realize that the internet was more than just information. You could give something back. You could join the conversation. You could be a part of the experience instead of just a spectator.

Notice anything?  The velocity of information evolution is accelerating... rapidly.

In 2004, only 6 years later, the internet had revolutionized how we approach information.

For the first time in our lives we were being exposed to more information than we could consume. In the age of newspapers we had to choose what we wanted to see. But in 2004 we had to choose what we didn't want to see. This had a devastating effect on the traditional forms of information.

2004 was also year when a new phenomenon started to take off - Social Networking. The concept had been slowly gaining ground with the concept of blogs. It was an easy, simple and affordable way for everyone to share their ideas. And you could post a comment. For the first time, everyone could create their own sphere of information without doing ‘technical things'.

We've gone from centuries to decades to a few years... and now significant change is happening in the span of months.  Perhaps in the future we'll look back on this and see each change as just a smaller step in the larger electronic/online information revolution, but each change is still nearly as dramatic as the change from newspapers to radio.

2007 was also the turning point for the traditional websites. It was once the most important change, but now people compared the traditional websites to newspapers - a static and passive form of information. We wanted active information. We wanted to be a part of it, not just looking at it.

The blogs also started to get in trouble. Just as TV had eliminated radio (because it was better and richer way to give people LIVE information) so are social networks eliminating blogs. A social profile is a more active way for people to share what they care about.

And where are we today?

The new internet is completely dominating our world. The newspapers are dead in the water, and people are watching less TV than ever. The new king of information is everyone, using social networking tools to connect and communicate.

Even the traditional website is dying from the relentless force of the constant stream of rich information from the social networks. But 2009 is also going to be the start of the next revolution. Because everything we know is about to change.

We're just at the beginning of the next revolution?  So what's next?

Social news is quickly taking over our need for staying up-to-date with what goes on in the world. News is no longer being reported by journalists, now it comes from everyone. And it is being reported directly from the source to you - bypassing the traditional media channels. Instead of having a journalist reporting what some analyst are saying, you hear it from the analyst herself. Social news is about getting news from the source, directly, and unfiltered.

And a new concept in the form of targeted information is slowly emerging. We are already seeing an increasing number of services on mobile phones, where you can get information for the area that you are in.

Now imagine the year 2020...

The traditional printed newspapers no longer exists, television in the form of preset channels is replaced by single shows that you can watch whenever you like.  The websites have a much lesser role, as their primary function will be to serve as a hub for all the activities that you do elsewhere.

Social news, as described previously, is going to be the most important way that people communicate. The traditional journalistic reporting is by now completely replaced getting information directly from the source. Everything will incorporate some form of targeting. You will be in control over every single bit of information that flows your way.

In 2010, two new concepts will start to emerge. One of them is intelligent information, where information streams can combine bits from many different news sources. Not just by pulling data, but summarizing it, breaking it apart and extracting the valuable parts.

The concept of having to get the paper, sit in front of your TV, or look at your computer, will be long gone. Information will not be something you have to get. It comes to you, wherever you are, in whatever situation you happen to be in. The information stream will be a natural part of every second of your life. It is not something you get, it is something you have.

I know a lot of people bemoan the loss of "journalists"... but what are (or "were"?) journalists anyways?  Yes they are trained, but they are also a filter.  And as we know, any filter has a bias, admitted or not.  Looking back it's actually frightening that newspapers, often just one newspaper in a town or city, was considered a reputable source for information.

Compare that to today where we can receive live tweets directly from the protesters in Iran, create dynamic and lively social communities around niche interests with immediate information flow, learn new concepts when and where you want, and ponder and learn from the insights of great minds who in another era would never have been heard from.

How will future information evolution affect you... and your organization?

 

TiVo Shifts to Help Companies It Once Threatened

Click for more info from the NYTimes.com

 

By MARIA ASPAN

 

TiVo may be getting a second chance by thinking outside the box that made it famous in the first place.

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Mark Lennihan/Associated Press

Tom Rogers, the chief executive, said TiVo would still sell DVRs, but move toward being a media company.

Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

As the company that popularized digital video recorders, TiVo turned time-shifted, commercial-skipping television watching into a verb, only to antagonize the television industry and see cheaper, more generic DVRs undercut its success. Now it is trying to climb into the black by working with the media companies it once threatened and moving away from the hardware that it pioneered.

During the last two weeks, there were several promising developments for TiVo, which accounts for about 4 million of the more than 20 million digital video recorders in American homes.

On Nov. 28, the company reported a smaller quarterly loss than anticipated ($8.2 million, down from $11.1 million a year ago) and the next day, the Patent and Trademark Office recognized TiVo’s patent on time-warp technology, which lets users record one program while watching another. Shares of TiVo, which started the two-week period at $5.60 on Nov. 26, hit a 52-week high of $8.53 a share on Friday, before closing at $8.20.

TiVo recently announced partnerships with NBC Universal and Carat, a media-buying agency, to provide second-by-second viewership data and demographic ratings information collected from a sample of 20,000 TiVo subscribers. Those deals underscored TiVo’s new emphasis on subscriptions and media services rather than hardware.

Nielsen: Young People Don't Watch TV on TV

marketingvox.comc click here for more...

A new report from Nielsen shows young adults are increasingly watching TV at times other than their original broadcasts — on devices

ABC News Bombs on Facebook, As Predicted By You

from mashable.com

We were pretty skeptical when ABC News and Facebook announced a partnership last month to provide coverage of the US elections on the social networking site. Mashable readers were even less optimistic, with 84% of you saying you would never use the application. Here were the full results of that poll:

Michael Learmonth peeked in to see how the app was performing, and as we can confirm, it’s not pretty. Despite the huge buzz in the blogosphere and a write-up in the New York Times, the app has only 8,700 active users, 3% of the total that signed up in the surge to see what the media giant and Facebook were up to.

While Facebook could still be considered in an “experimental phase” when it comes to new types of content and ways to make money, the lackluster start to the ABC News deal suggests that political coverage is not going to be one of the company’s winners going forward.

Macrovision Agrees to Buy Gemstar-TV Guide for $2.8 Billion in Stock and Cash

BRIAN STELTER

More from the NYTimes click here...

 

Macrovision, in an effort to position itself at the forefront of the digital platform business, has agreed to buy the television listings provider Gemstar-TV Guide International for $2.8 billion in cash and stock.

Macrovision’s roots are in the prevention of unauthorized copying and viewing of media content. Fred Amoroso, chief executive of Macrovision, said Gemstar-TV Guide’s most valuable assets were its technologies for interactive program guides and its relationships with cable operators.

Mr. Amoroso said the combined company would seek to be “the home page for the TV experience.”

Lots of Little Screens: TV Is Changing Shape

From the NYTimes click here for more...

An episode of “Backpack Picnic” on ON Networks.

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By DENISE CARUSO

Published: December 2, 2007

 

INEXPENSIVE broadband access has done far more for online video than enable the success of services like YouTube and iTunes. By unchaining video watchers from their TV sets, it has opened the floodgates to a generation of TV producers for whom the Internet is their native medium.

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A scene from “Quarterlife” on its own Web site.

And as they shift their focus away from TV to grab us on one of the many other screens in our lives — our computers, cellphones and iPods — the command-and-control economic model of traditional television is being quickly superseded by the market chaos of a freewheeling and open digital network.

According to Move Networks, a company based in Utah that provides online video technologies, more than 100,000 new viewers jump online every 24 hours to watch its clients’ long-form or episodic video. During the first two weeks of November alone, more than twice the number of Americans were watching TV online than in the entire month of August.

The shift is proving quite inspirational to digital media entrepreneurs.

“What absolutely convinced me to start a company in this area was when I realized just how large the disruption was,” said Kip McClanahan, the co-founder and chief executive of ON Networks, an online studio in Austin, Tex. “It touches everything — how video content is created and monetized, how it’s distributed and consumed. And it’s a half-trillion-dollar market, if you include the advertising that supports it and the revenue associated with subscriptions, tickets and so on.”

A market that size provides plenty of room for experimentation. Many flavors of technology and programming are being tested, as are some changes in traditional revenue models.

Vuze, based in Palo Alto, and Joost, based in Leiden in the Netherlands, for example, have both developed proprietary software that must be downloaded to view their video programming. In addition to providing programming from established brands like PBS, Showtime, the BBC and A&E, the start-ups encourage new producers to make deals with them and upload new programs to their sites.

How to mobilize a TV Audience

An industry poised for an explosion

imediaconnection.com

From the first time home viewers sent text messages via their mobile phones to vote for their favorite "American Idol," they were clearly hooked. The first night, 50,000 votes were cast, and the numbers continue to climb.

Currently users can interact with all kinds of programming, from reality competitions such as "Project Runway," "Dancing With The Stars" and "Hell's Kitchen," to game shows. The current king of participation TV (PTV), "Deal or No Deal," offers viewers a chance to play at home with the Lucky Cases Game. PTV is also being incorporated into new programs and even more forms of entertainment with its addition to fantasy football and the broadcast of NBA games.

It is no exaggeration to say PTV is on the verge of a growth explosion. According to data from Nielsen Mobile, (previously known as Telephia) for the first half of 2007 PTV accounted for retail revenue generation of $56 million in the mobile entertainment industry, with the most popular four or five shows making up 85 percent of the revenue. Currently, there are dozens of shows incorporating viewer participation into program formats.

My company, mBlox, a mobile transaction network, estimates that the market for PTV in the U.S. will grow to $170 million in 2008. Behind the scenes, mBlox, as an aggregator, connects the production companies with the viewers who send text messages. Aggregators act as the intermediary, providing the infrastructure

The Google Set-Top Box (Think Android For TV)

techcrunch.com

Deep in the Googleplex there is an engineering team thinking about how to extend Google’s reach into your TV. Its work goes way beyond the Google TV ads currently being tested by EchoStar (and targeted with help from Nielsen). It even goes way beyond the development of a Google set-top box, which has been hinted at in the past. In fact, Google may very well want to do to the set-top box what it is trying to do to the mobile phone with its Android operating system—create an open-source hardware platform and attract developers to build applications on top of it. At least that is the unconfirmed rumor I’ve heard from two knowledgeable industry sources.

“That’s been a persistent rumor, yeah,” says Peter Barrett, chief technology officer for Microsoft TV (and the only source willing to be attributed by name). “You would have to ask them about whether they are doing anything like that and whether it is a good idea or not,” he adds. So I put the question to Vincent Dureau, the head of Google’s TV technology team and the former chief technology officer at OpenTV, who was hired by Google two years ago. “There are rumors about what Google does all the time,” he says. “We have been totally focused on advertising so far.” Google’s policy is not to comment on future products. But Dureau never denies the rumor outright. He couches his response with phrases like “so far” and “at this stage.” And, when pressed, he does allow that there is “a lot of potential” for turning the TV set-top box into a platform for applications, but insists, “I have no insights as to what form of applications will be deployed on those set-top boxes or not.” Perhaps. Or perhaps he just doesn’t have any insights he is willing to share with us. Fair enough.

Let’s read through the tea leaves ourselves then. So far, Google’s aspiration has been to change the way advertising is sold on TV. Through its partnership with EchoStar, it is automating the way TV ads are bought and sold, and changing the way they are measured (by studying the second-by-second logs from millions of set-top boxes in an anonymous fashion). But why stop there? The modern set-top boxes you get from your cable or satellite TV provider are basically computers. They are loaded with a few limited applications—a program guide, DVR menu, customer-service messaging, and not much else. They are closed boxes, tightly controlled by the cable and satellite TV companies. For the most part, there are not a lot of interesting applications that run on set-top boxes.

An open-source operating system like Android for the set-top box could change that. If creating applications for set-top boxes was more like creating applications for the Web, we’d be able to do a lot more things with our TVs—especially if those set-top boxes were also connected to the Web. Want instant messaging and caller ID on your TV? No problem. Want customized information widgets for the TV that scroll breaking news, weather, sports scores or stock quotes from sources you choose in your own ticker at the bottom of the screen? No problem. Want to turn that annoying ticker off? No problem. Want to control the camera angles on that basketball game? No problem. Want to add the live video stream from your friend’s cell phone who is at the game? No problem. Want to create your own video mashup of fight scenes from various movies that you can edit right on your TV and share with others on their TVs? No problem.

Oh, and what about new forms of advertising? Inserting ads into pay-per-view or triggering them when someone presses fast-forward on their DVR require applications of a different sort. You might not like that, but the TV industry would. Any new video ad unit that starts to gain traction on the Web could be ported over to regular TVs—clickable overlays, contextual video ads, unobtrusive sponsorship icons. Why not even let viewers program their own ads with a laundry list of categories and companies to choose from? They might actually watch them.

When it comes to advertising, Google is not shy about stating its ambitions. “We are confident we are going to revive the television advertising industry,” says Dureau, “by bringing new advertising to it.” Already, Google is trying to make TV ads more relevant, easier to target, and cheaper to deploy. As a result, Google thinks it can attract more ad dollars from smaller businesses that may not have been advertising on TV before.

“In many ways,” says Dureau, “we think that television is becoming like the Internet in that there is a multiplication of channels. This creates challenges for viewers, advertisers and creators.” He is already addressing the concerns of advertisers. An Android-like project for the set-top box could help address the concerns of viewers and creators by giving people more control over their TV viewing experience. And making the set-top box more useful by opening it up to a bounty of applications could mean more advertising opportunities. Those apps would be yet another way to keep viewers glued to their TV sets.

Before Google announced Android, many people thought Google was developing its own mobile phone. But the point of Android is to get other companies to build the phones and a new set of applications for them. Google wants to supply the underlying technology to make it happen, and finally bring the mobile world into the Web age. It should be obvious by now that Google is much happier when it is creating technology platforms—for mobile apps, for social apps, for advertising— than one-off consumer products. Why should it be any different when it comes to television? (And remember, Andy Rubin and others on Google’s Android team used to work at WebTV and TV software startup Moxi Digital, although Android is not officially part of Dureau’s group).

In any case, Google would not be the first to try this. Some of the hypothetical applications I describe above are already being developed for Microsoft’s IPTV set-top boxes, which runs Microsoft Mediaroom. Anyone can write an application for Mediaroom on the PC and easily make it work on an IPTV set-top box (or an Xbox or an HD-DVD drive, both of which come with Ethernet jacks). There are only about 50 or so third-party apps for Mediaroom right now, however, because making TV apps easier to build is not enough. Getting cable or satellite TV providers to put those apps on their set-top boxes is the bigger battle.

“Service providers are open to good rich apps on their network if they do emerge,” says Microsoft’s Barrett. Not surprisingly he does not think that an open-source, Android approach is the way to go. “Trying to make a level playing field,” he says, “really is not in the service provider’s interest. It is in Google’s. But if you just throw the doors open, the TV or the phone becomes unusable pretty quickly.” The same argument is why Apple is cautious about allowing third-party apps on the iPhone. You don’t want some random app crashing your cell phone or your TV. But that just means device makers or carriers need to certify that the apps are safe. The still-closed mobile world is moving in this direction despite these issues.

The prospect of opening up the TV to Web-like applications holds a lot of promise, especially if those same apps can run on the Web or mobile phones with a few tweaks. Whether people will want those apps on their TVs is another question entirely. So far, the answer has been no. But that could just be because it has been too difficult to get apps onto those set-top boxes. For this to work, Google would have to convince at least one cable or satellite TV provider to let viewers try out the resulting apps on its service. Google already has a strong relationship with EchoStar, which I hear is for sale. My understanding is that Google is in the early stages of developing its Android set-top box strategy. It may end up deciding not to pursue it. But it is the type of thorny problem that Google engineers (and ad sales executives) thrive on.