Television 2.0
from the Who has time for this? blog
On everyone’s mind this year: it was only a matter of time before the internet changed TV in a way more profound than color or cable. That kind of disruption calls for a VC road map…
The entertainment industry managed to ignore the net for a decade. Only 250 miles apart, Hollywood and Silicon Valley might as well have been on different planets. Happy with their structural oligopoly, TV networks resisted change, and (just as buyers and sellers keep each other coming back to eBay) the talent and the audiences stayed loyal to the networks.
I also read a piece recently about how a child did not discriminate between the screens in his life – the television, the computer, the screen in the player in the back seat of his parent’s car, and his game player. I look forward to seeing who manages to integrate the lot into one device and what that device will look like and how it will operate. At the moment I sit at a desk to compute and lounge to watch TV (though rarely – partly because I cannot stand watching someone else flipping throug the channels. If TV becomes more interactive, will it become increaingly a solitary activity? I doubt it somehow. I watch my children sharing games and television, and they seem to be able to work it out. )
I guess it is similar to the juggling between books and the internet. Location , portability and interactivity are all aspects that need to be ironed out.