Can’t See The Web For The Apps: The Future Of TV Is Social

As usual the industry insiders can’t connect the dots that show how radical change is happening at the edge of their markets, and so underestimate the change that will obliterate them.

Today’s example: all the TV people pooh-poohing the webification of TV. And the author of the article, Jessica Vascellaro, plays along by couching the issue as ‘apps on TV’:

Jessica Vascellaro, Do People Really Want Apps on TVs?

One thing everyone agreed on was that it is going to take much longer for app-enabled televisions to reach mass adoption than industry insiders expect, with several executives noting that the number of consumers who actually activate the Internet functionality on TVs that have it is very small.

“A generation is going to have to stop watching TV” before it happens, Mr. Bullwinkle said.

It’s not ‘apps on TV’, it’s ‘TV on the Web’. And the reason that few users have taken advantage of the functionality currently embedded into TVs is that the apps are designed with stupid limitations and using bizarro world use cases.

Here’s what’s really going on, courtesy of the Pew folks:

The main news source for 18-29 year-olds is now the Internet, passing TV for the first time. And the shift is happening in all the age groups. TV is falling and the web is rising.

The streaming web will absorb TV-type communication media, and reanimate it. They don’t realize that the web is principally a social fabric, where people share through relationships. These TV insiders are thinking about it as just plumbing, with web integration being a matter of putting a few apps on the TV sets, which communicate to network-managed servers. Wrong metaphor. They may grudgingly accept that those apps allow people to watch TV socially, but they don’t get what that means.

Once they get scared enough to allow TV to be treated as content to go through externally owned and managed social tools, then we’ll see the social TV revolution.

We don’t have to wait for a generation to stop watching TV before the social TV revolution comes, but we may have to wait for this generation of TV executives to retire.