Image: Capt Kodak/Flickr
Imagine it’s 2023 — only a decade from now, but in digital time that’s a century. What will TV be like then?
It’s Emmy Award season, so television’s future is on my mind. What sorts of shows and technologies will we honor in 10 years? I love television — and I’m one of the very lucky ones who gets to spend his lifetime living in it. As a digital executive and entrepreneur, I can make some guesses.
First of all, TV as we know it today will evolve into a multi-screen experience throughout your home. You’ll have screens in any room you want them, any size you want them.
They will be commanded by voice, and you’ll have a panoply of viewing choices. You’ll be able to choose to buy or stream any particular show or channel or brand. Ads — tailored just to what might interest you — will be delivered to you as product placements or surrounding your favorite shows and events.
So come with me to the future, and picture it for yourself. You walk into your living room, and command a screen to appear. It materializes, thin and pearlescent, on the wall above your fireplace. Admiring its sleek beauty, you command the screen to turn on.
You think for a moment: what do you want to watch? The news of the day? Nah, you’re in the mood for some light entertainment. So you tell the screen to offer you a selection of short rom-coms and a couple of even shorter comedic viral videos of the day.
You look them over, choose a few and queue them up to watch. You see that squirrel ride a skateboard and kitten napping that everyone’s been talking about, then suddenly have a hankering for an old movie: The Fast and the Furious XII (well, it is the future). Just by calling out the title, or even saying “the movie with Vin Diesel and Justin Bieber”, up comes the film—layered with hashtags and clickable product placements.
On demand viewing won’t just be an extended cable option—it will be the only way we order up programming. We can already use our digital cable boxes to search by keyword, and by 2023 we’ll be tagging every piece of content that’s streaming so we can call it up by a slew of keywords. Voice commands will be so ubiquitous by then that Siri will feel like you’re calling a switchboard operator asking to be patched through to Murray Hill-2857.
And you won’t need thousands of pre-paid channel options, either. In the end, the winner of the digital content shakeout will be the strongest, most memorable brands.
If you think we all suffer from a bad case of ‘media metonymy’ now—blurring the lines between brand, network, and show–just wait another decade when there are just so many options from the convergence of TV and web channels that the only way we’ll be able to demand a show is by calling out basic phrases like “that sci-fi thing with you-know-who in it” and letting the algorithm do all the hard work.
A classic like The Sopranos won’t require an HBO subscription anymore — the brand itself will be its own channel, complete with its own programmatic ad buys tailored to you. And I don’t mean the generic, archetypal “you” we target now. I mean you, specifically.
You’ll see ads on, in, and around the screen for things you have been price comparing on your phone, talking about on social media on your tablet, and bookmarking on your desktop at work. The old industry joke about the ads following you home won’t just be a metaphor, they’ll be creating themselves before your very eyes.
This presents a challenge for the content providers and also an exciting array of options for us eager users. By 2023 the cable provider won’t be the content hub it’s always been, simply the delivery platform. The Time Warners, Comcasts, and Cablevisions will have adjusted to being little more than the browser, just as Internet Explorer or Chrome became little more than a platform to the high-speed internet that let us shake off the shackles of AOL and Prodigy.
Don’t think you’re trapped in the living room with this incredible viewing technology of the future, though. When you’re snuggled up on the couch with your array of credit card-thin devices sprawled out around you and begging to be part of the multiscreen adventure, you’re going to get hungry.
Just get up and go to the kitchen, where the display follows you to any of the flat surfaces — the microwave, refrigerator, even the cutting board will have screens. You’ll never have to miss a second thanks to your ability to rewind, pause, capture screenshots, and share them with the world all with your voice or a simple tap-and-swipe.
That’s my snapshot of the future — convergence at its best. See you there.
Chris Young is CMO of Alloy Digital.
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