Television (Photo credit: *USB*)
I can’t remember the last time my older son, 22, watched television for ‘television’ – that is, for traditional series, movies and other content. Sometimes, late at night, he sits in front of the television, but always to play video games on the big HD flat screen.
Most of the time, he sits at his laptop, watching videos. It is a habit he picked up in Oxford, where he had no television (and didn’t want to pay the fees) and where video download portals (legal and illegal) were ubiquitous. And that’s how he continues to find his entertainment; surfing from obscure documentaries to Opie & Anthony YouTube feeds to strange indie films . . . wherever his passion leads him.
My younger son, 17, loves watching TV, but has little interest in regular programming (beyond “Breaking Bad”). Instead he sits at his laptop researching obscure plant species (he wants to be a plant biologist) while the TV endlessly plays in the background classic television series, from TJ Hooker to The Office. He knows more trivia about Seinfeld and Friends than most of the Gen Xers who grew up on those series. Unlike his brother, his passion is for continuity, not novelty; a soak in the curious-but-safe past rather than a high dive into a dysfunctional present.
My wife and I, being good Baby Boomers, like the spectrum in-between our two sons. Except for sports, we watch an old Sony Trinitron. We gave up on the networks long ago, but nevertheless have a predictable pattern of watching series we like on cable, PBS Mystery and Masterpiece Theater, cable news, and the occasional on-demand movie. My wife is a big fan of old films on TMC, and I was a loyal viewer of the History Channel until it succumbed to the siren call of Reality TV. You might say that our passion is for quality television in a predictable format, venue and schedule – one that requires a minimum of channel surfing and schedule searching.
Thus, though our desires are very different, all of us are still passionate about television, in whatever guise it appears. We still look to it to fulfill those passions for entertainment, experience, information and education. But each of us, in our own way, is frustrated by television as it is. And each of us has developed our own work-around to escape those limitations. Surely there is a way to give us television that matches our passions and yet is easy to find; something that combines the pure entertainment value of old-fashioned television (i.e., turn on your favorite network and watch it all evening) with the power and scale of the Internet Age.
We are hardly alone. In fact, as casual survey of the blogosphere and the comments pages of major entertainment web portals (like this one) suggest that we are, in fact, typical. And while the cable companies, such as Comcast, still tout the fact that they are giving us everything we want, few of us think they give us what we need -- television content driven not by the opportunity for the provider, but by the passions of the individual viewers.
And as it happens, just such a new industry is emerging. Call it “Passion Television”. Right now it is just a handful of small, but well-funded start-ups, most of them in Silicon Valley, each with a different vision of how to answer this need. But they could just be the next great revolution in television. Two of the hottest of these start-ups are Net2TV and PivotTV.
The Epiphanies Behind Net2TV
For media industry veteran Tom Morgan, the explosion of programming and channels over the last 10 years was a two-edged sword.
On one hand, viewers loved the seemingly endless supply of video content – old television shows, web videos, raw news footage, etc. – now available on TV and the Web. On the other, all of this content came with as much frustration as delight. Too much of it was uninteresting junk, and what was interesting was almost impossible to find. TV, he reminded himself, was supposed be entertainment, not an endless, wearying search.
Why Morgan asked, couldn’t targeted video content be delivered, grouped according to a viewer’s interests, passions?
“As they say,” commented Morgan, “One point makes an idea, two points make a strategy, three points make a business.” Morgan should know. He founded BlackArrow, then later took on strategic roles at Move Networks supporting ABC.com, and finally spent a term at Virgin. All the while he kept noticing that consumers were unhappy – not with the quantity of programming available, but by their inability to find what they wanted.
“It was apparent that, despite all of the competition from games and the Web, consumers still wanted to watch TV. But they were tired of searching for channels containing personal topics of interest, and that didn’t bury them in irrelevant advertising.”
There was still the universal complaint of, in Bruce Springsteen’s memorable phrase, “Five hundred channels and nothing on.” Not that there wasn’t enough interesting content out there – it was just too scattered around cyberspace. Moreover, a lot of it exhibited the most frustrating feature of the Age of YouTube: short, less-than-5-minute, formats.
“Personal relevance,” he says, “was the hallmark of the previous generation of cable television – networks like Discovery, A&E, and Bravo got rich delivering just this kind of content to viewers. But now they’d jumped on the reality programming fad, and left a void of just this kind of content.” It struck Morgan that this void offered a tremendous business opportunity
Television content was now available on hundreds of channels, an uncounted number of websites, and scores of platforms from traditional television to smartphones and game consoles.
“It suddenly struck me that the time was ripe for the low-cost delivery of existing and newly-created non-fiction content, in a longer format – even if that meant stitching together archival short pieces,” said Morgan. “But even more than that, the opportunity was there to bundle this content together on single channels based upon a user’s passion.”
So he teamed up with another television veteran, Jim Monroe – who had his own epiphany when his 21 year-old daughter asked him “What channel is ABC?” – and founded Net2TV. The company eschews traditional distribution and programming models – instead, users can simply call up specialty channels through their television’s Internet connection, skipping television cable altogether.
Net2TV offers the kind of narrowcast channels that were unimaginable a decade ago: continuous access to live and recorded programming on everything from the Popular Science’s “PopSci” to cooking shows to a newscasts from Newsy and AP, all without paying for hundreds of other channels. This is the format for my wife and me – and probably as it expands, for our younger son as well -- as right now none of us consistently watches more than a half-dozen of the several hundred cable channels available to us, and at no small price.
None of Net2TV offerings are broadcast, but rather reside as a vast archive in the Cloud, so that the user can tap into the material anytime, selecting based on interest. And while you may find the concept of watching three hours of experts showing how to cook the perfect lasagna, followed by detailed directions on how to sharpen cooking knives, to be excruciatingly boring, a lot of people out there find the idea riveting. And, in doing so, they have pre-qualified themselves for hyper-targeted advertisers of the type marketers used to only dream of.
Right now, Net2TV is available only on Philips television and Roku, but it is scheduled to be available on 20 million connected screens by December. It is preparing for this by expanding its studios for live feeds and increasing the number of platforms on which it will be available. It is also busily securing independent film and short-format videos that it can knit together and repackage into longer programming for its audiences.
User Defined
Passion TV can be characterized as television defined by user interest and not by delivery system or viewing platform. In Morgan’s words: “Programming with personality and a passion, on any screen the consumer wants, with complete mobility.”
Says Will Richmond, editor of VideoNuze, an influential online publication covering the new video space, "Online content has long been about filling infinite interest-based niches and the same phenomenon is now happening in video. We're witnessing the natural evolution from 3 broadcast networks to 500 cable TV networks to millions of online channels. Changing consumer behaviors and the relentless pace of technology innovation fuels it all.
“Name the interest category and it's likely there's high-quality video in it. Examples include gaming, cosmetics, how-to, comedy, toys – the list goes on and on. Investors have taken note and have poured tens of millions of dollars into niche content providers."
This content is of increasingly high quality, and often free – which is why a company like Net2TV is taking this short form content and turning it into full-length TV shows with logical story sequencing.
Passion Television – whether full TV programs or short video clips – has two key elements that distinguish it from traditional network and cable television:
-- It is narrowcast: The Passion TV viewer isn’t interested in hundreds or even thousands of channels – 99 percent of which contains content they aren’t interested in (though are still paying for). Even the channels they do want are compromised by added programming designed to capture new viewers (for example, History and Discovery channels’ shift away from history and science programming towards larger-audience enticing reality programming). Passion TV takes advantage of the fact that technological advances (Cloud, Web services, high speed wireless, etc.) now make possible the long-held dream of being able to deliver to individual users content customized to their individual interests.
-- It is structured: There are a lot of massive databases of video content out there (think Netflix), but they inevitably require the user to conduct endless searches with limited knowledge. That’s fine for some viewers, but for most people television is still perceived as a passive medium – something you watch while you are doing something else. And that calls for the packaging programming with studio-based hosts to tie all of the pieces together (think early MTV) into a continuous stream of shows, studio intros and a limited amount of passion-related advertising running 24 hours per day. At Net2TV what little navigation is required between channels is handle by a simple user interface called Portico with hosts who help viewer discover new, and relevant programming.
“What we’ve learned,” says Morgan, is that people love to watch TV that connects with their own personal passions. If we can make that experience continuous, they will keep watching for hours.”
Says Richmond, “This passion-driven viewing is being accelerated further by the convenience and personalization of mobile viewing. Tablet and smartphone-based viewing are skyrocketing and displacing desktop viewing. Next up is viewing on connected TVs, whether through devices like Roku, Apple TV, Xbox and others, or by a new generation of low-cost dongles like Chromecast that converge video from mobile devices to the big screen.
The new generation of television providers recognize that their typical user is not only not attached to the traditional cable television screen, but may have consciously abandoned it for the various other platforms now available, from web-enabled TVs to laptops and tablets to smart phones. The crucial difference is that the content is no longer being delivered by a dedicated cable service for a fee, but rather via the Internet, often using the vast storage capabilities of the Cloud.
Participant‘s Pivot TV
Net2TV is only one pioneer in this new field of Passion Television. Consider PivotTV, which launched this summer. Founder Jeff Skoll is celebrated figure in both Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Skoll first came to the public eye as eBay’s second employee and first CEO. Having made a fortune there, instead of diving back into the high tech pool, Skoll decided to change the world by creating the Skoll Foundation, a leading funder of the new-style nonprofits that are based social entrepreneurship. [Note: the author once served on the board of the Skoll Foundation.]
Having revolutionized that field, Skoll then turned to do the same in movies, founding Participant Productions, which knocked Hollywood on its ear by producing (in just its first few years) such lauded and culturally influential films as Syriana, An Inconvenient Truth, The Help, and Lincoln. What made these movies memorable, beyond their critical success and multiple awards, was that they combined high production values with strong political views—and that they reached out beyond the theater, via social networks, into social activism. In the process, Skoll and Participant changed the world of cinema.
Now Skoll has turned to television, hoping to create a similar revolution with Pivot TV. Pivot promotes itself as a new kind of television for “Passionate Millennials”, which it calls “the New Greatest Generation.” To reach this audience, Pivot is using a vast repertoire of content including original series, existing programming, films and documentaries.
Pivot TV could have been invented with my oldest son in mind. In the company’s words, it “focuses on entertainment that sparks conversation, inspires change and illuminates issues through engaging content.” But crucial to its model is that this programming will be available on a wide array of platforms, including traditional Pay TV and an on-demand streaming option via Pivot’s proprietary, interactive and downloadable viewing app. And, of course, in keeping with Skoll’s history at Participant, Pivot also will be integrated with its own social networking website, TakePart.com, to get viewers to actively become engaged with the content.
Wild West
Net2TV and PivotTV represent opposite ends of the Passion TV world: one appealing to existing passion for special-interest programming, the other a precise demographic. In-between can be found a growing number of content delivery companies, some old and some brand new, that have recognized the power of narrowcasting and passion-based programming and are moving quickly to take advantage of it.
Veteran programmers that are finding a new Passion-based format to their existing long-form content include CNet and Newsy. Amazon is heading into this space as well, taking advantage of its dominance of the consumer Cloud world. And the recent announcement of the Esquire Channel, based upon the content and philosophy of the venerable men’s magazine suggests a possible new strategic direction for the struggling print magazine industry – itself a “passion” industry created 150 years ago.
“For now”, most of this passion video is advertising-supported,” says Richmond. “But to the extent that they build audiences and loyalty, we should expect to see them tap into paid models, whether subscription, pay-per-use, commerce, product placement and other forms."
No doubt there will soon be many more passion-based networks and content providers, especially once companies like Pivot and Net2TV prove the concept. And, of course, by definition ‘narrowcasting’ offers the potential for an almost unlimited number of markets.
Says Richmond, “The Internet's unlimited shelf space and low cost of entry mean a proliferation of video is still ahead. Of course, not all passion content will ultimately succeed, but for now it's a Wild West, with lots of experimentation and opportunity ahead."
If that experimentation means a happier, more passionate television experience for me and my family, let the Wild West show begin.
