Feb 23, 2012 Watching television (sic) in the New Broadcast Landscape
Something interesting is taking place in broadcast media today, and it has to do with the consequences of declaring video the heir apparent of our future.
Video is the future.
If I never heard it again it’d be too soon. As a web-consumer of course I realize the salience of video, youtube, chatroullette, gimmicky memes… As a marketer, however, I worry all the hype around “video” is a misguided mortaring of a new cottage industry. I worry when advertising is more interesting than the product advertised. I worry even more when the message and the messenger are both Video.
The future is not in fact video. It is democratized broadcast. The term video is just an emotional cue to days of physical cassettes, when a piece of plastic with the look, feel and size of a Gideon’s Bible magically aired recorded motion picture. Fuck video. It’s a euphemism.
Democratized broadcast is something else entirely. It assumes the future is already that iPhone 5 you’re picturing yourself using to Instagram a latte in 9 months. It assumes you’re not just going to watch the Oscars on a big television with a handful of friends, slamming red carpet douchebags and status quo carpetbaggers. You’ll actually be “watching” with millions of people on Twitter and Facebook. Hashtagging every insult worth its pica in sans serif.
Television is dead.
Long live television.
television (lower-case t) is what I would watch on something like Vimeo’s original showcases, even little Kickstarter promos and a modicum of Youtube Channels. When I want a cast of writers and traditional TV shows, I will used something like Aereo. Television (upper-case T) is the monitor in my living room that channels digital antennae.
[In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I have been privy to a beta group of Aereo users based on my work with another broadcast app, GO HD App. The latter is an anonymous broadcast-landmarking tool for capturing photo/video/text with GPS coordinates and under a tag-hierarchy, while the former is a “TV on the go” app that allows users to watch network television on local digital networks. Lower case t, people.]
television is the future.
This isn’t just an advertisement for apps like Aereo and GO, but it’s certainly an informed endorsement for a new viewing behavior based on living with GO for months and playing with Aereo for weeks. As a case in point, these two companies have very different markets in mind and are polar in their different approaches to privacy (lack thereof has been thinly veiled as “database marketing” FYI). Also, while both apps ultimately want people to learn to behave with and not in spite of their smartphones and tablets, ultimately, GO is about creating an absolutely threshold of thematized content, Aereo is about making already convenient content, totally ubiquitous.
Now let’s go back to last year when I was forced to watch the Oscars from a Russian guy’s bitstream on a count of not having a TV (or friends with TVs, more sadly). I was not interested in HD resolution, the commercials or the pre-show interviews. I was truly only and wholly interested in content. Because when you watch network TV by means other than the so-easy-to-slam traditional broadcast, content matters again.
So let’s forgive the TV networks their addiction to Nielsen ratings and destination viewers. Real time stopped taking place during Prime Time ™ 5 years ago, and no one needs to feel worse about living inside the bell jar of iPhones than we already do. Let’s turn this one into a city of shattered glass.