Interviews with Digital Media Thought Leaders
Internet TV - Video or Mixed Media?
Podcast Video | Posted by Phil Leigh on March 5, 2009
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Getting Internet connectivity at the TV is not merely about Internet Video. It’s about getting mixed media on the television.
It’s a common mistake to think of Internet access at the TV as being “all about” getting Internet Video. Confessedly, that’s a big part of it, but it’s not the whole story. Once the TV is connected to the Internet users will want unlimited access so that they can consume a wide mix of media including video, text, graphics, audio, podcasts, and animation.
For example, sometimes they might choose to visit the New York Times Website. As today’s video demonstrates, once there they can read articles, watch videos, listen to podcasts, contribute comments to news articles, and write letters-to-the-editor. Furthermore they can do this from the comfort of their living-room sofa with the use of a wireless mouse and keyboard.
While the uninitiated may suppose that reading a newspaper on the TV screen from the living-room sofa is too cumbersome, they forget that most of us are familiar with how to increase the text size in a browser. After all, we’ve been surfing the Internet for 10 – 15 years and the browser is the most common software we use. In such a setting, newspapers providing videos with associated articles are likely to be the first place readers will see a video about the subject news item, even before they watch it on conventional television.
Evidence of the demand for mixed media is illustrated by the graph below that shows the traffic leadership of the multimedia-centric New York Times website in comparison to those of other newspapers.
As noted repeatedly during the past month or so, consumers are discovering that they can connect their laptop computers to flat-panel TVs thereby using the TVs as giant monitors for the laptop. This gives them unlimited Internet access on the TV and the use of mixed media becomes a natural part of their experience. Vendors providing only a Walled Garden of Internet content to the TV screen will discover that consumers will be dissatisfied with the limitations. They will demand unrestricted access.
While the laptop-as-TV-Media-Controller is not the “end game” it is a forcing-factor that will ultimately lead factory-made browser-centric TVs.
This is Third Generation Television.
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Categories: Podcast Video
Tags: digital-media, Future-of-Television, Internet-video, New-York-Times, newspapers, podcast, podcasting, television, Video
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