The future of TV is apps
S07E11: Game of Streams (The future of TV is apps)
Our Media Solution Specialist, Magnus Svensson, is sharing his reflections on the online streaming industry in this post. This is part of a monthly series so make sure to follow us here if you do not want to miss an episode.
“We believe the future of TV is apps,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook at an event in 2015. A few years earlier Netflix disrupted the market and delivered premium television in a new way, and the other media companies followed in their footsteps. And no doubt that streaming is the future of entertainment. Households started to replace their traditional TV packages, or at least complemented these, with several streaming services. All to get the freedom to watch premium content at a lower price with higher flexibility.
With the increasing number of services, and increased pricing of each service, a lot of people, both in the industry and viewers, wish for an “everything product” where you find all the content you want in one place. Ironically what the traditional TV packages, that is now abandoned, delivered.
If it were possible to get all media and entertainment companies to be part of such a service, it would be impossible to create a service that would be able to serve all content in a good. Also, easily forgotten that such a service would never be able to include all content such as TikTok, SNAP, and others.
Contenders
Many companies try to create the “one-stop shop” and the “everything product”. The favorites to gain such a spot would be Google and Apple. The traditional TV distributors and telcos that now deliver the channel packages are trying to enhance their offerings and include streaming services.
Some services have taken pieces of the pie or trying to. Netflix has in some way grabbed the spot as the base service to subscribe to for series and movies. But no other service comes close to their size. At SportsPro Madrid the CEO of DAZN, talked about DAZN’s ambition to become the go-to place for sports on a global base.
But to bundle all kinds of services into one single experience will be very hard.
The future of TV is apps
Coming back to the statement from Tim Cook, that the future of TV and entertainment consumption will be with apps. With dedicated apps for specific types of content and audience, you could create a better experience for the viewer. An app for series and movies will differ a lot from an app serving sports content.
Too many services and apps are today trying to adapt the same flows and logic for all types of content. This will create a bad user experience for most of them, or in the worst case all. And navigation and search will be hard and to quote Bruce Springsteen: “57 Channels And Nothin’ On”. You will only end up with similar problems as traditional TV channel lineups.
With dedicated apps for the different services, you could develop the best possible user experience for the specific content. Sports could include statistics, standings, highlights, and information about the teams. Movies could be categorized by different genres, moods, or any other sorting that would make sense. Recommendations and discovery will also differ between different services.
Universal search is another topic and something that must be handled outside of the different apps. But this has been solved for the rest of the internet by mostly Google, and similar search engines and services will be developed for television. That is the spot that Google and Apple are about to take with their Google TV and Apple TV. But once you have found what you’re looking for, the experience will be best served by a dedicated app.
Finally, to create a great user experience a service should also provide a good second-screen experience. For sports, you could serve statistics and highlights and the possibility to get extra material and camera angles. For movies and series, it could be more information about actors and the storyline. If the service doesn’t provide this possibility, someone else will. Viewers are multitasking whether the service provides a second screen or not, so it could be lost monetization not to do.
To watch out for the coming months…
The last year has been a year of cost-cutting and efficiency improvements to reach profitability. 2024 will continue that path in the beginning, but we’ll probably see a change during the year. We’ll see consolidation and acquisitions and fewer companies and media services will continue to grow.
Magnus Svensson is a Media Solution Specialist and partner at Eyevinn Technology. Eyevinn Technology is the leading independent consulting company specializing in video technology and media distribution.
Follow me on Twitter (@svensson00) and LinkedIn for regular updates and news.
