Regardless of the route they take get there, the end result is the same. Whether television makers begin to incorporate touch screen and tablet functionality into their products, or the tablet makers simply start making 30, 40, and 50-inch versions, the American home of the not-so-distant future will have a giant iPad as the center of their living room.
Already, traditional television viewing is moving onto the tablet. A recent study shows as much as 15 percent of full-length television viewing is streamed on a tablet. In fact when broken down by room, the TV may still be king of the living room, but tablets have replaced them in the bedroom.
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Increasingly, the idea of spending your night in front of the tube has become less appealing to Americans, even as we spend more and more time-consuming content. For the past decade, the networks have lived in fear of the day when viewers simply stopped turning on the television and went straight to their laptops, but with the rise of tablets and smartphones a third possibility has risen: the tablet as a companion to the television rather than a replacement.
Declining television viewership has been an issue since the end of the days of “The Big 3.” According to one recent study by Morgan Stanley, broadcast television viewership has fallen by over 50 percent since 2002. Similarly, cable subscriptions are on the decline as customers discover they can access content “On-demand” through various streaming services. Why pay $150 for 300 channels you don’t watch, when you can pay $9 to watch the three shows you actually care about?
In fact, a fair amount of content is now being created for these non-network sources. YouTube and Yahoo have increased both the budget and the volume of their web series, while Netflix has had a very high profile hit with their Kevin Spacey/David Fincher collaboration, “House of Cards.” The initial success of that show suggests that networks aren’t necessary to produce a hit, though big budgets, massive promotions and a bankable actor/director combo certainly help.
What is perhaps more indicative of the direction that television is heading is the increasing phenomenon of “Second Screen Viewing.” Intuitively we all know this happening, but it has just now been identified as a trend that media companies should be examining rather than handwringing about the attention spans of our children.
Think of the stereotypical Monday night in the middle American home. Monday Night Football might be on the big screen, but Mom’s reading the news on her tablet. The kids are texting their friends or playing Angry Birds on their smartphones. And even Dad isn’t totally focused on the big game, as he checks his Fantasy Draft pics and “social shares” out his witty commentary or ideas for next season’s pun based team name.
Obviously, this is hardly new. Technology has been working towards a personalized experience since at least The Walkman (if not the printing press). But is just now that this proliferation of personalization is starting to be viewed as a chance to change the home viewing experience.
App makers have been quickest to react to this trend releasing apps that are specifically designed to coordinate with the large screen viewing experience. New apps have effectively replaced the channel guide and the remote control, but the more ambitious projects are the ones that catch the eye.
Projects like ZeeBox attempt to lasso social networking into the experience. Users “check in” to a show and get an aggregation of tweets, Facebook comments and other social network posts regarding the show they are watching. More impressively, Yahoo’s “IntoNow” has an app that can identify the television show being watched within 4 seconds based on the audio and can instantly aggregate social network posts.
The app also displays related information like production notes, soundtrack listings, and various multimedia features that the production company may have available, creating something like a visual version of the hypertext movement. As with Shazam, a similar service for music recognition, the effectiveness of the product is somewhat dependent on background sound. A noisy room will make the experience less than seamless.
Perhaps the most intriguing development is Mircrosoft Xbox’s SmartGlass app that uses the viewer’s Xbox in sync with a tablet to provide a truly linked experience. Viewers of this season’s Game of Thrones will be able to have synced content that will directly reflect the action on their screen including interactive maps, character guides, production commentaries, behind the scenes features and other added content that aims to provide a vast new viewing experience.
But while second-screen viewing is probably here to stay, the question of who will win the battle for the living room remains. Most of the big names in TV production have launched so called “Smart-TV’s” that allow for integration with streaming services such as Hulu Plus and Netflix, with Sony or Samsung leading the pack.
There are of course third-party devices that let viewers use their TV in this way such as Roku and Apple TV, while owners of Xboxes and PS3’s have been using their gaming systems this way for years. Time Warner Cable, in a clear effort to stop the bleeding, recently offered customers a chance to buy Roku along with the option to “Watch up to 300 channels of live TV.” This is clearly Time Warner playing defense in an effort to prevent paid subscribers from canceling high-priced premium packages for a $9 a month charge from Netflix.
So far, none of the big boys has offered a TV that integrates all of this technology in the screen itself, perhaps feeling burnt by the awful TV/VCR combos that plagued the late 90’s.
On the tablet end, the largest available screen is currently 16 inches, which is more than adequate for catching Mad Men from the comfort of your bed. But it still lacks the room dominating force of current big screen TVs. The price of larger click screens (and potential for costly repairs) are currently prohibitive, but it’s only a matter of time before one of them makes the Tablet/TV hybrid that will change how the world entertains itself.