The future of television (login required)

 —  April – May 2013

S this the future of television of which Eamon

de Valera expressed himself ‘somewhat

afraid’ during his live inaugural address

on the ﬁrst night of broadcast by Teilifís

Éireann in ? Probably not, the fear currently

felt by the operators of conventional broadcast

TV has little to do with ‘Communications impe-

rialism’ or ‘Americanisation’ or even the threat

posed to ‘Sound radio’ and ‘Living theatre.’

Faster broadband and better compression are

in the process of making dithering pixellated

live online delivery of TV programming a thing

of the past. These and other developments are

already giving us online delivery of audio-vis-

ual content which is indistinguishable from that

delivered by cable or satellite. What this means

for the TV industry’s traditional standard-bear-

ers and their role is currently the subject of much

fevered debate.

Convergence - meaning TV and internet sec-

tors becoming parts of a single bigger beast - has

been a central tenet of the conventional wis-

dom in both industries for some time. But more

recently the digital cash-rich new kids on the

block have started to ﬂex their muscles. In one

incidence, by generating premium content and

taking it directly to the consumer they managed

for the ﬁrst time to cut the broadcast networks

completely out of the loop.

House of Cards is a drama series in which

Kevin Spacey plays an unscrupulous Washington

political insider. But what has grabbed the

headlines is less the medieval machinations of

its characters than the fact that the one-hun-

dred-thousand-dollar production was entirely

ﬁnanced by and released exclusively on its own

platform by online video rental giant, Netﬂix.

So until very recently all the players in the

industry knew who the competition were and

roughly where each of them came in the peck-

ing order. The major networks were undisputed

kings of television with a stranglehold over dis-

tribution through conventional broadcasting

channels and an unassailable position in con-

tent generation. Today new players with digitally

deep pockets are shaking up an industry which

was already struggling with how to meet the

challenge of new content delivery platforms,

dwindling advertising performance and mas-

sively changing consumer habits.

These changes have cast all sectors of the

industry into uncharted waters. Cinema, Gaming,

D, HD, Ultra HD, Laser, Smart, Multi-screen are

just some of technical advancements currently

being pitched or touted for the near future to

a globally declining market for televisions by

manufacturers.

Also with the industry in such a state of ﬂux it

was inevitable that some manufacturers would

seek to hedge their bets. So Panasonic intro-

duced their ‘Smart’ TVs which can download

third-party apps in an attempt to allay customer

fears about an expensive gizmo being rendered

obsolete by content-delivery developments.

Similarly, Samsung developed their ‘Evolution

Kit’ which is envisaged as being an upgrading

kit for your TV.

Rumours abound about Apple launching an iTV.

Analysts are of one mind that if such a product

is launched it will need to be much more than a

beautifully-designed piece of kit for receiving TV

programmes. The kind of returns Apple expects

from new product launches will not be availa-

ble for just another TV if Sony’s recent balance

sheets are any indication. So much was made of

recently-revealed high-level talks between sen-

ior people at Apple and their counterparts in the

cable companies but nobody has said whether

Apple are looking at more than the content tie-

ins with the likes of Netﬂix, Amazon and Hulu

which the four million buyers of the Apple TV

device currently enjoy. But with so many big

beasts already at that this watering hole it is very

unlikely that Apple will - even with their robust

negotiating tactics - manage to achieve anything

like the kind of market dominant position they

managed to establish for themselves in the music

industry with itunes.

But the real battleground has moved on from

the competing technologies of the televisions

themselves. With the abandonment of D, the

physical technology has for the moment almost

certainly reached a plateau. Apart from anything

else it is now a struggle to ﬁnd enough content of

suﬃciently high production quality that it does

not visibly creak when viewed on an ultra HD

 inch screen from across the width of a sub-

urban living room.

Web-connected smart TVs are now

media

richard callanan

The future of

television (login

required)

We’re still watching it, but everything else has

changed

The increasingly blurred

distinction between the

delivery systems is going to

give rise to more so-called

cord- cutters who abandon

their subscriptions