What Is the Future of the Television? (ben-evans.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Benedict Evans has an interesting post about where television hardware is headed. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the tech industry made a huge push to invade the living room, trying to make the internet mesh with traditional TV broadcasts. As we all know, their efforts failed. Now, we periodically see new waves of devices to attach to the TV, but none have been particularly ambitious. The most successful devices of the recent wave, like the Chromecast and Apple TV, are simply turning the TV into a dumb screen for streamed content. Meanwhile, consumption of all types of video content is growing on smaller screens — tablets, phones, etc. Even game consoles are starting to see their market eroded by boxes like the Steam Link, which acts as a pipe for a game being played elsewhere on a PC. It raises an intriguing question: where is the television headed? What uses and functions does one giant screen serve that can't be cleverly redistributed to smaller screens? Evans concludes, "The web's open, permissionless innovation beat the closed, top-down visions of interactive TV and the information superhighway."

Comments

There is no future in television

[TigerPlish]

Just give me enough dumb screen to give me a 47 degree field of view from my chair, and I'm happy. What I plug into that screen could be anything. It could even be a cable box, thus turning into a "television."

Scheduled programming is doomed. Maybe ads too.

[hwstar]

The future of television is on-demand and not scheduled programming with the option to pay subscription fees to kill all advertising. This means no cable TV as we currently see it. All TV programming will be sent over IP networks. Over the air local TV stations will start offering TV streaming to smart TV's, and will retire their transmitters. The spectrum will be freed up for other uses.

My take on Advertising: Advertising is a scourge which causes weak minded people to go into debt wasting money purchasing things they don't need. Think of it as the 20th/21st century Jedi Mind Trick.

Screw paying for ANY television viewing

[kheldan]

I think there should be advances in OTA broadcast technology.
Several years ago I decided that I was tired of paying $50 a month to Comcast for a whole slew of channels I never ever watched, a handful I did, and all the shitty extra re-compression they were doing to jam all the crap channels I never watched into the same size pipe, and got an antenna on the roof and started watching local broadcast stations instead, and never looked back once. Best decision I ever made. I've got more stuff on my DVR than I have time to watch, typically, it cost me nothing other than a one-time expense for the antenna, and the picture quality is about as high as it can be. Updating of OTA broadcast, I think, will find more people turning to it and away from shitty cable and satellite, which is already a trend. Streaming over the Internet, I think, is just another 'pay TV' trap like cable and satellite, and as a matter of fact if you think for a moment, how is it really any different than cable or satellite directly connected to your TV? Worse in some ways, you're paying for the connectivity and paying for the content! Get Netflix or something like it for the things you can't get OTA (newer movies, specific content) but OTA makes so much sense.