WebTV is flourishing…will GoogleTV simply webify the big screen?

June 23rd, 2010 | Leave a comment

Everyone is abuzz over GoogleTV creating a paradigm shift in entertainment…. myself included.

What could be bad? All digital. Surfing from the couch. Social check ins. An easy-to-use time-shifted TV viewing reality.

I’m ready…but for those of us willing to live in the small laptop screen or geeky enough to hardwire the pieces together we have not all…but most of the promised goodness on WebTV today.

WebTV is well beyond its early stage already. With movies, TV shows, great new web content like ThisWeekIn… The web is fast becoming a digital video and TV frontier.

Whether you are on your laptop, wired from your Mac Mini to your large screen with Boxee, using Hulu…this is no longer a small niche by any standard.

New numbers on WebTV and TV watching online from eMarketer are enlightening:

  • 33% of the US Internet population watches full-length TV programs today; growing to 39% by years’ end
  • Hulu alone has 38.7 million unique monthly visitors. Largest video streaming site on the internet after YouTube.
  • 14.6 million-web devices that can run TV applications shipped in last 12 months, increasing to 83.4 million in 2014
  • 50% of everyone who watches any video online, will watch a full-length TV show

Mind-boggling actually…in the US, one in three connected people watch network TV shows online and one in two who use video in any way do some portion of their TV watching from the web.

In Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm way of thinking, we are just this side of an Early Majority position with WebTV and the chasm-crossing leap is only a holiday season away.

So with GoogleTV and the Boxee Box and every TV for sale with an HDMI plug, what’s the difference between now and…then, when these solutions launch?

The obvious changes will be:

  1. It will be easy and inexpensive to purchase and install for everyone
  2. More big screens will drive more content
  3. Some built in widgets (apps) like YouTube, maybe Facebook and IMDB
  4. Browsing and searching via Google from the couch position

Honestly, this is great but not a revolution. The iPad was a revolution, this is a big iteration pushing the web to the big screen WebTV experience. I like easy. I like larger displays. I like apps. We need search. But I want what I can’t imagine which is more than just the webification of the big screen.

Richard Kastelein, a friend, blogger and founder of AppMarket.TV believes that one of the big gaps to bridge is ‘lean back interactive in your living room’ versus ‘lean forward at your desk or laptop’. It’s the remote versus the keyboard and the mouse. Content will come. But seamless control of the web interactive elements of search, community and social are the mountains to scale.

Hmmm…So according the industry and folks a lot more in the know than I, the intersection of the widgets on the big screen (like an embedded app), a consistent interface for search, social attributes and some cool device like glidetv for surfing are the formula for the future.

I’m missing something here.

If interface and usability are the kingpins, then why not Apple rather than Google as the architect of the best solution? Steve Jobs, more than anyone gets usability and the mass market. Google is search but certainly they don’t understand GUI or social or consumers.

And I can’t imagine connected TV to be a single screen solution. We are all sitting on our couches with iPads and laptops and phones. This is not going to change. So why isn’t the input one of these devices, like an iPad as the control and with special social content?

Maybe an anecdote might clarify my uneasiness at settling with GoogleTV as the answer.

Recently I was watching ThisWeekInVentureCapital with Mark Suster and Mo Koyfman talking about efficiencies on the web. Mo made a statement that when you take an old industry and bring it online, you don’t just webify it or make it more efficient, you take the core of the old and its value and find something new…something better. This seems right on to me.

So…what is that leap to something new with connected TV?

Maybe it’s just more efficient. Maybe it’s a standard interface with some widgets and open access to a gazillion apps. Maybe it’s a perfect and closed and controlled Apple world of ease-of-use and locked down. Or maybe it’s just what we have today but bigger.

I don’t buy into this.

A year ago, I couldn’t have imagined riding on the subway or sitting in the coffee shop, watching TV and working and tweeting on my iPad. Or building distribution systems for my clients that connected their Facebook fan pages to their e-commerce storefronts.

I’m a video and movie aficionado and ever so ready for connected and social TV. See my post on this.  But the web is still figuring out social video and socialization around WebTV. It’s not necessarily the model to copy. The jump from laptop to big screen is fraught with opportunities for new ways of entertainment and needs more than a redo of the current web reality, retooled for the digital living room.

You agree?

What will make you and the hundreds of millions yet to buy, do so and enjoy in a new and more interesting way?

—————————————————————————————–

Thanks to my friend Jennifer Fader for always finding interesting data before I do.

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  • http://twitter.com/emerigent/lists/memberships Emeri Gent [Em]

    Revolutions are meant to be radical changes in thinking and culture, but they invariably end up as revolutions such as an orbit, which in culture today is called spin. When I look at the potential of media for change it is mostly at the personal level. How we meet people has changed for sure. So as the spectrum of choice available not just purely for entertainment consumption but which involves personal change.

    Much of this change has evolved around emulation, which as a culture is our chief learning pathway, much as we love talking about innovation, imitation scales while innovators are usually people who upset or confront societal expectations, with a small minority getting kudos because their innovations crossed the chasm.

    Personally for me the chief media marker is Newton Minnow's 1961 speech called “The Vast Wasteland”

    “The Vast Wasteland”
    http://janda.org/b20/News%20articles/vastwastla…

    For me health care and entertainment will always be the two great sources of fat. We entertain ourselves, some of us get heart disease, then we figure that is due to stress and not consumption, so we entertain ourselves more while we watch news reports about how we can solve our health care costs. This is as dumb as society gets but it is the reality that not even Minnow's great speech can change.

    Yet when I look out of my window, I see a great testimony to splendid self-organization. We are not just the minority billion who live on the nice parts of the world, but we are also the minority million who live in the nice part of the nice parts of the world. Revolutions are one way of change but they are not about the cost of health care, there are no hospitals for those who have sacrificed in the name and cause of freedom only tombstones or ashes.

    We are not the one's who die for freedom, we have it and we are the one's who have a choice how we tweak it. When we sacrifice our bodies that leads to increased healthcare costs (majority of these costs are behavioral) we can pharmaceutically buy our way out, or mediate on media as a medication.

    The revolution today is evolution. We are evolving though the mass is still revolving. I cannot lead people in a wealthy world to get something they already have which is the freedom to choose. The fundamental evolution is that there will always be money to be made on mass desire, but the words of Newton Minnow have not gone away. The “Vast Wasteland” will continue to be vast, but when I look at my own media choices, it is no longer a bunch of broadcasters who can choose my wasteland, it is myself.

    The right to choose is the freedom that comes from revolution. We are learning to choose that freedom today because we are enabled by modern technology. Indeed with a few choice clicks we can actually hear the words of Minnow

    “Audio of the Vast Wasteland Speech”
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_BuN7bJLAI

    Here we hear a passionate man that is as passionate as we like to be on our best days. GoogleTV is one more extension of such a choice. That freedom then means we choose our own wasteland and maybe society in the end picks up a health care bill for those choices, but we are getting smarter about our environment, smarter about our own voice, smarter for having this breadth and scope of technological development. It is here things are evolving and not merely revolving in an orbital age that can still be spun.

    [Em]

  • http://arnoldwaldstein.com awaldstein

    Hi Em

    I'll check out 'Vast Wasteland' and see how it fits with my views.

    Whether it is revolution, like the iPad or Facebook, where the paradigm shifts, or evolution or iteration, at the end it is about human behavior and change.

    The social web has changed the world and people with it. And for the better. It was a revolution of platform and an iteration of human evolution. Somehow they are tied together.

    Thnx

  • http://twitter.com/Ovurmind Viktor Ovurmind

    When television was the revolution the “vast wasteland” was pertinent because it was the broadcaster who defined social attention. Today we can define our own attention and see it's long-term consequence. The “vast wasteland” is now an individual choice. This freedom isn't a revolution in societal systems but how we are able to personally evolve. [Note: I utilize "Emeri Gent" as longform thought, M. is the initial of my name]

    [v.o.M.]

  • http://arnoldwaldstein.com awaldstein

    Thnx Viktor

  • http://richstaats.com/ Rich Staats

    i think apple has shown that “al a carte” media is profitable. $1.00 for 1 digital song file is really quite expensive, considering the actual file size and ease of distribution, but I gladly buy it, and often times will buy the album if i can get it for less than $10. So i'll pay the same price as a CD, minus that actual tangibility (and therefore cost of production), just because its convenient and there right now. Right Now!

    “What will make you and the hundreds of millions yet to buy, do so and enjoy in a new and more interesting way?”

    al a carte HBO, ShowTime, PPV, etc. Once i can pay for “Entourage” but not HBO, or only pay for Bayern Munich Games, and can archive it on my HD and watch it on my 42 inch HD, i'll be broke and happy! Add the ability to talk trash to a rival live from my iPad, which also controls the Dolby Surround Sound (that i don't yet own), well that's priceless.

    Always a pleasure reading your thoughts!

  • http://arnoldwaldstein.com awaldstein

    Hi Rich… thnx for stopping by and your input. I'm with you that I'll pay for shows, not networks…even if the price I pay is the same over time.

    There are so many contradicting forces at play…cable, networks, Google, Apple. It's going to be a mess and take awhile but you and I will be the winners over time. The process of unchaining the forces that control our living room displays will be a pleasure to see crash.

    BTW–I may ping you as I plan on passing through Boulder early August to visit family.

  • http://richstaats.com/ Rich Staats

    Please do. I'd like to show you the stuff we are planning for next winter with OWLE and CamCaddie.