The Curious Absence of Innovation on the TV

Over the last twenty years we’ve seen a boom in technology innovation for the consumer. Mobile devices, Tablets, the PC and Home Services are experiencing a renaissance period of technical evolution. Yet in the fast-paced world of the Internet of Things one particular technology perpetually has lagged behind… and it’s the device we’ve all lived with longer than any of the others.

Sony’s announcement that they are offering the first ala-carte service as an alternative for traditional TV bundles was both a surprise for many in the industry and ultimately was met with very little fanfare. Insiders quickly ascertained that the move was a strategic shot at the widely expected first-movers Apple and Google, who remain largely mute about their TV plans.

But as the months have gone by we continue to see little from Apple and Google on the TV front as well. Both have TV STB-style devices and while the form factor is certainly appealing in different ways for both, the overall technologies and services they bring to bear are hardly revolutionary… and trail far behind the efforts of both companies in other verticals.

A deeper look into the Sony announcement shows that the channel coverage isn’t as widespread as originally hoped… the initial lineup will be restructured to existing OTT players like HBO and the WWE, and add Showtime, Fox Soccer and Machinima, the later of which is hardly considered an established network player. There’s no doubt it will expand over time, but it’s just another example in a long line of attempts that show how difficult the evolution of TV really is.

In comments describing Sony’s previous attempts into the space Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony’s Worldwide Studios admitted that evolving the TV isn’t a simple task. In comments on why Sony’s PlayStation TV has struggled to capture market share, Yoshida admitted that the device and features were a hard concept to explain.

“It didn’t capture the consumers’ imagination. It’s a hard concept to explain. You could say it’s a mini-console, it’s a video streaming device. If we say it’s a mini-console, like other mini-consoles, people expect a better device like PS4 or Xbox One. It’s short in that delivery. When you say it’s a video streaming device, there are other devices with higher def video. It has some unique things like remote play of PS4 games. It can do many things, but it’s not easy to say this one thing is extremely good. I think that’s the reason we were not able to convince people at the original price.”

By comparison to TV, Mobile innovation has been relatively easy to market and fast to adopt. A decade ago the adoption of new Mobile technologies happened at a brisk pace on all fronts, even while network speed and hardware lagged behind. Comparing the struggles with bringing cellular networks online and compressing technology for Mobile with a wired, larger form factor of a large screen and casing should create obvious advantages for the TV. Also, while nearly every home had a TV already as part of their lifestyle converting the market to purchase and carry a mobile phone should have been a much tougher sale. So why is it that outside of form factor and resolution the TV as we know it really hasn’t changed that much in twenty years?

Sony’s example and comments are telling. Unlike the mobile phone where new use cases were discovered that allowed users to do things they hadn’t considered before, changes to the TV meant changing an established behavioral pattern. The ecosystem around how TV content was packaged, marketed, promoted and consumed is something that hasn’t really changed in over 50 years and the industry is seemingly proud of that. Only recently have OTT packages really taken hold, and these have been met with fairly wide skepticism from the industry. HBO’s initial attempts with HBO GO were largely criticized by nearly everyone but the consumers themselves… and there is another lesson in why TV innovation isn’t happening faster.

A look at the changes to TV services that have snuck through over the years reveals a nearly unanimous reaction of disapproval from the industry upon first launch. The DVR, Online Streaming and services like Netflix all had detractors who argued that the changes would be short-lived at best and destructive to the value of the market at worst. The destruction of established advertising models on programming would lead to a collapse in the market and in quality content (arguably the reality genre has emerged to make part of this case). In the early days On Demand Programming was something that was frequently described purely as a defensive move against Netflix and torrent sites, something hard to believe given how popular the services now are with users.

Unlike other technologies and mediums, TV had an established ecosystem that people understood and strove to protect… not innovate. You can see this same psychology play out in other long-term industries like Hospitality and Automotive, but in those two spaces the leaders have determined that change is inevitable and now strive to evolve without imploding. Yet with the TV we often seem stuck in a different place where change moves at a far slower pace by the traditional TV manufacturers. New features that have been trialed, which take advantage of the network or the cloud, are little more than knock-off features from other more innovative business units. Which begs the question: why aren’t the consumers then driving TV innovation themselves?

Perhaps the problem is that with rapid improvements in mobile and tablets, the expectation has simply been set that those devices are the evolving ones and the TV in the living room is little more than dumb glass. The perception of the TV at home is that it’s really offering little more than what you get at a movie theatre; a completely passive and one-directional experience. Any kind of interactivity and personalization will happen on other devices… the TV is only for viewing. Even when people talk about screen sharing they often view it as moving content from the mobile device to the TV, not the other way around. The TV as a device is psychologically one-directional, the service a taker, not a provider.

All of which is particularly strange given the rich opportunities for growth that the content, network and hardware provide. All of the tools are present to bring the TV into the circle as a fully connected and rich device, as powerful and important as every other bit of technology in the home. The capabilities are there… but not the ideas.

When new features to the TV involve taking services that work elsewhere and porting them to the screen, you know you have a problem. The phone is a perfect environment for writing a Tweet, but the TV is terrible one. Even if you add voice control or a full keyboard to the remote it doesn’t work as a place to engage in Twitter… at least not the way people engage in it today. That doesn’t mean Twitter will never have a place on the TV -quite the contrary- but the use case has to fit the device and how people are using it.

There’s an interesting world of possibilities for bringing the TV into the mix as a powerful, connected device. On the service side we can have smarter, more personal connected programming. On the social side we can have more interactive, inter-connected options for sharing and discovery. On the device side we can do more with storage and functionality to mirror and communicate between devices. In all fronts there are dozens of ways the humble TV can evolve, change and expand to offer solutions we never even thought we needed… much like the smartphone, the tablet, and all of the other devices we can’t live without today.

But it’s not a simple path to get there. Innovation for the TV fall into one or both of the two common traps we see elsewhere; either the business model is so established and inflexible that there’s no incentive to change… or the changes proposed for the screen are entirely misguided in what they are trying to accomplish. It’s an industry desperate for disruption, and when it finally does happen it will happen quickly.