"I bought a bourgeois house in the
Hollywood hills, with a trunk-load of hundred thousand dollar bills. Man came
by to hook up my cable TV, we settled in for the night my baby and me. We
switched ’round and ’round ’til half-past dawn. There was fifty-seven channels
and nothin’ on." - Bruce Springsteen
When the
Boss sang "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)" the year was 1992. Fast forward
to today and Springsteen's channel-surfing woes would be much, much worse.
This over-abundance
of content has naturally led to a lot of frustration. On the consumer side, there's
the sense that the majority of their cable bill goes to pay for channels they don't
watch. For pay TV providers it creates a complicated user experience that
manifests itself in an impenetrable grid/program guide that everyone agrees is
cumbersome in an age of visually rich user interfaces.
One
solution that's frequently bandied about is "unbundling" or "a la
carte." Rather than group channels together into various service tiers,
pay TV operators could, the theory goes, simply let consumers pick, chose and
pay for only the channels they're interested in seeing. In practice a la carte
simply isn't feasible given today's market structure. While it's true that
sports packages consume a disproportionate share of an operator's programming
costs, smaller, niche channels may struggle to stay viable when their reach
shrinks, as it naturally would in any unbundling scheme.
But
there is a new, alternative future coming into view, and that is
"curation." Rather than sift through an endless channel guide, pay TV
operators will present their customers with a selection of content that they
believe is of interest, using recommendation algorithms in the same way that
Netflix is able to surface shows you may enjoy. They will also enable greater
customization. At CES, the cloud-based user interface firm ActiveVideo showed
off technology that would allow pay TV subscribers to create customized channel
clusters based on themes (sports, science, etc.) with live video thumbnails for
each channel grouping.
Cisco
also stressed content personalization during its CES press conference. Their
new "Snowflake" interface, which will be rolled out to service
providers as part of Cisco's Videoscape Unity package, combines multiple
content sources -- pay TV channels, video-on-demand, YouTube, social networks
-- into an experience that can be personalized to each member of the home. The
same content recommendation algorithms that Netflix and Amazon use to such
great effect are being ported over to cable and IPTV providers to deliver this
personalized experience.
In the
curated future, you'll still subscribe to hundreds of channels, but you'll only
see those that you're interested in. You will have, in effect, the illusion of a la carte, if not the trimmed
bill that should accompany it.
Looking
ahead, it's also possible that this curated approach will suck more wind out of
Apple's (still opaque) TV plans. Aside from Siri integration and an elegant
display, the big hope underpinning an Apple foray into TV is the notion that
they will be able to force an a la carte approach on pay TV providers. If
consumers are getting something close to the a la carte experience from their
pay TV providers, they'll be less tempted to jump ship for a "virtual
MSOs." At least, that's the theory.
