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Event: Review eTV World '99 September 15-18, 1999 ITVT Issue 2.32 9/23/99 (Article best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer for accurate formatting.) A Hard Rain By Brian Gruber, Principals.com With Hurricane Floyd huffin' and puffin' up the Coast, Jonathan Taplin, CEO of video-on demand company, Intertainer, in Santa Monica, California, relayed vision and business plan (amidst several reminders of his once-upon-a-time gig as Bob Dylan's manager). The prevailing vision of a brave new world brought about by the seamless integration of TV and the Internet has, of course, been sold to attendees as inevitable at these conferences all along - and Taplin stays the course. But what Taplin does promise is something else: Soon, he says, commercial and media institutions will know so much about you that ads and movie recommendations will be personally serve this content to your Personal Channel. Although we've had 30 years of utopian technology speeches that promise a fantastic new medium...in the age of video-on-demand, you won't be deluged with an increasingly vomitous mass media spawning a culture of gratuitous violence. You won't be soaked in a tsunami of increasingly intrusive commercial messages. You'll be able to create and watch what you want. Oy. Taplin has been preaching a gospel on both coasts for the last several months that bandwidth and interactive hardware will soon become ubiquitous, digital commodities. Digital convergence, which will enable this to take place, is yet the third of three great cultural revolutions he's seen in his lifetime (did you hear about the time he saved the Disney studios?...). Technology does not always enhance creativity -- a theme Taplin played in an interesting exposition on the relationship between art and money. As examples of that theory, Taplin referred to the "Buena Vista Social Club" and "The Blair Witch Project" - grand shifts in distribution dynamics with Intertainer ultimately becoming a new way to distribute movies such as these (Taplin produced Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets"...). With hardware becoming a commodity, Taplin says, value will be firmly in content and services. A few interesting observations by Taplin follow: The TV we grew up with is busted. World culture will reverse American media dominance. The words "serenity", "healing", "truth" and "love" punctuated a long speech about new opportunities for saturating Americans with fresh consumption opportunities. Not 57 channels, but one channel, your channel. The cable industry is a monopoly, a state which induces a confidence that things will always stay the same (they won't). We've had VCR Plus for 10 years and less than 1% use it. Cable operators do not want to pass through video media that will compete with HBO. DSL prices will come down to $20 per month. A few other comments overheard at the conference were: When VCR's proliferated as a new consumer electronics device, everyone thought people would tape shows and zap all the commercials. One VC's3 investment criteria: The business can scale. It can hedge bets on multiple revenue streams. They are US businesses that can be extended internationally. There is nothing interactive about TV-only in choosing whether you want to watch it or not. The interactive user device, such as the wireless keyboard, represents a real challenge to getting to the passive TV user. There are 5 waves of TV/Internet convergence: Basic convergence-TV channel and web site. No overt link. Brute convergence I. Imbed HTML signal but lose the TV viewer. Brute convergence II- Encode TV signal into HTML and pull up TV screen through web site. Intermediate convergence-If interactive element is available, an icon flashes, click and a smaller screen with interactive content comes up while the viewer continues to watch the program. Bookmark TV- Broadcast a signal, store it on a hard drive, then use additional information cached with the signal (PVRs). The key to making possible the next wave of personalization and interactivity is the shared Internet Protocol delivery mechanism. The dawn of a new media era -advertisements appropriate to each household- has begun. Internet plus TV is huge. Without advertising, there's nothing. Advertising pays for all this stuff. You can't be a digital have not. Those who are will be in real trouble as businesses going forward. No one has really talked about the consumer. Are consumers really going to want to interact with a TV commercial? Companies will have to look at new forms of advertising. Lifestyle, lifestyle, lifestyle. Ford recently announced it will not buy print unless it is part of an aggregated media buy. TV nets shouldn't say we are losing viewers. They should go to where their viewers live-Palm Pilots, cell phones, wherever. Look at the music industry to see what will happen in the TV business. But the one statement that defined all the rest: "No one has really figured it out." And then the hard rain really started to fall. Copyright 1998 - 2004 [ITVT] | Swedlow. All rights reserved