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Future of TV TiVo Media

2016 TV Year in Review: Pete Thompson, EVP and COO, TiVo

By Pete Thompson, EVP and COO

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December 19, 2016 | 6 min read

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The below post is part of Found Remote's 2016 Year in Review guest post series and is written by Pete Thompson, EVP and COO, TiVo.

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TV Trends for 2017: These 5 Innovation Areas will Separate the Leaders from the Laggards in the Years Ahead

The competitive playbook for the last few years emphasized providing the same content across any screen and any network. But it became clear in 2016 that this is becoming less of a differentiator. New OTT entrants and leading-edge existing service providers enjoyed a competitive advantage in the marketplace for a number of years, but it is becoming a standard feature expected by consumers and the technology has improved to make it a cost-effective approach to develop a multi-screen strategy and to maintain it. So now what? Here are five emerging trends that will once again separate the disruptors from the disrupted in the coming years.

Content is king…again. Innovation will once again focus on content. In addition to a continued emphasis on original content as a differentiator, we will finally see the rise of interactive content and narratives. With the ubiquity of improved two-way networks, cloud architectures, and integration of interactive technologies across the content value chain, the ability for content creators to envision and implement cost-effective and compelling experiences will be possible. We should see the emergence of social networking and online gaming mechanics come to linear TV. Creators and consumers will develop methods to tap into the latent demand of people to engage more with their favorite TV shows, sports teams and personalities. Power watchers will be rewarded for their time investment and knowledge. Your gamer score will mean much more than just your involvement with online games. Watch every episode of a season and level up and earn points. Communities will arise around the content and this will bring new opportunities for monetization and new ecosystems.

Virtual gets real. There are still challenges to overcome in terms of making the virtual reality experience much smoother but some well-funded startups and large platform companies are starting to resolve these problems. As the typical cycle evolves of hardware innovation leading to software innovation leading to content innovation, a fresh wave of content innovation around virtual reality will develop that will be more than just a good demo. TV is one very interesting application for VR. Take sports programming, for example. Producers will be able to give fans the sensation of sitting at center court to watch their favorite NBA team and even interact with players—all from the comfort of their own living room. Software experiences around the content will also have the capacity to add complementary augmented reality (AR) experiences that will spawn new fertile ground for advertising and transactions. Imagine a group of friends gathering at a virtual sports bar to watch the game together, even though they all live in different cities. This will start to blur the lines between physical and digital presence.

Local content makes a comeback. To date, content creation has largely been polarized. There are the high production, nationally syndicated TV shows at one end (Westworld) and the quick-and-simple user-generated content at the other (remember the water bottle flip videos?). In the middle there is latent demand not being met. That demand used to be filled by local TV stations. Everyone used to watch the same handful of channels to be exposed to local information. Those channels are struggling today as their relevance for younger generations has decreased. The need and desire for local community content still exists, but it needs to be transformed to be relevant to the new way of watching and sharing video content. Hybrids of professional and local video content will emerge to bring communities closer and enable more targeted relevant advertising opportunities.

Return of flexible and adaptable network architectures. Over the last few years, the rise of cloud architectures has led to the overwhelming technical approach of smaller consumption devices with the intelligence and content moving to the cloud. This has led to hardware innovation around low cost streamers – everything from pucks to dongles to sticks. The long awaited projection of the ‘death of the set-top box’ seems to be imminent. Perhaps a single function set-top box will go away but as additional innovation occurs around higher bandwidth video experiences and applications, network architectures will again see the need for a balance between device and network capabilities. Local storage, caching, and processing will be required and gateway-like devices will make a comeback in the home, acting as all-in-one devices for numerous applications.

A la carte meets aggregation. The popularity of Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime and others shows that consumers want the ability to compose their own programming menus rather than be constrained to fixed bundles put together by traditional service providers. While this trend continues to have momentum, we are seeing increasing frustration from consumers in finding what they want to watch and where they can watch it. Compiling and maintaining your own channel menu is complex and time consuming. Consumers will come to realize that there is value in an aggregator bringing together a compelling mix of content personalized to the household and eventually to the individual. Expect to see a rise in content/service aggregators that will partner with multiple video services to provide valuable video offerings to the benefit of the consumer.

People will look back 10 years from now and remember this as the decade of video. There is a remarkable amount of innovation taking place in the space and the seeds being planted today will determine how and what people watch for years to come.

Future of TV TiVo Media

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