Tomorrow’s Interactive Television

By John M. Smart

The iPad and its successors could revolutionize television. But only if and when we choose this future.

The elephant in America’s living room right now is that there is not nearly enough quality choice, specialization, and personalization on television. According to many social critics, 70 years of lowest-common-denominator, mass-produced, big-business-driven TV content and news has hobbled Americans’ education and narrowed their worldview. It has stunted their social participation and increasingly distracted them with entertainments, as in decadent Roman times.

Those who want sustained, in-depth television coverage of any particular issue; who want more transparency, accountability, foresight, and the ability to measure progress (in their own or their party’s terms) on an issue; who strive to see the United States in global context; and who desire collective action to fix a problem are today unable to use society’s primary electronic medium. They can’t use it to interact with their fellow citizens or to produce programming worthy of their communities.

As the Internet advances, however, this is beginning to change.

In recent decades, many European and Asian developed countries have become more equitably regulated in media ownership and transparency, and they are much further along in wired and wireless access to the Internet than the United States. Not coincidentally, these countries also have superior educational performance, much stronger social safety nets, more-extensive personal rights, and greater citizen participation in governance. Many, including Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, are centers for world-leading manufacturing run by high-paid workers.

The same can no longer be said for the United States, as demonstrated by the nation’s persistent trade deficits and the 60-year collapse of steel, auto, and manufactured goods industries. Only 4% of all American firms and 15% of manufacturers do any exporting at all, according to Matthew Slaughter of Dartmouth College. The export economy has so little diversity that just 1% of U.S. firms account for 80% of exports.

But perhaps the deepest problem that the United States faces, as documented by the Gini coefficient, is that the rich–poor divide has grown so much in the last 40 years that it now rivals emerging nations, countries like Venezuela, Argentina, China, and Mauritania. Meanwhile, the developed countries mentioned earlier have all become more income equal over the same time period. Data-backed books like Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (Bloomsbury Press, 2009) document that income inequality leads to greater crime, educational failure, illiteracy, unemployment, poorer health, teen pregnancy, obesity, mental illness, homelessness, class warfare, and political deadlock.

Ingenuity and the right incentives can fix these problems, but the United States will first need new groups of citizens that recognize them as problems. U.S. leaders don’t have the ability to change the system on their own. Furthermore, as the income gap data suggests, these leaders are increasingly among the ultra rich, so they may not be motivated to change the system.

To change this state of affairs, access to true Internet television, not the walled gardens that cable companies offer American consumers, will be a critical piece of social equity.

I argue that access to the Internet’s media universe in our living rooms, with appropriate content controls for youth, should be the right of every citizen in a developed society. It’s also something that the major telecommunications companies like Verizon and cable companies like Comcast want to slow down, according to testimony from public-interest groups like Public Knowledge, the Center for Public Integrity, and even industry groups like the Competitive Telecommunications Association.

How Television Could Rise From the Wasteland

Robert Putnam’s perceptive book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon and Schuster, 2001), chronicles the loss of social identity and interpersonal relationship complexity that occurred in U.S. towns and communities from the nation’s 1950s zenith to today’s nadir. Putnam names a number of culprits for this, but principally blames television.

Network television steals our eyeballs out of complex, two-way, social interactions in human space. It focuses us instead on one-way electronic messages. In The Assault on Reason (Penguin, 2007), former U.S. Vice President Gore says that average American consumers have seen a steady loss of complexity in the political conversation in the last 50 years, and the quality of American media is directly to blame. Network television is, on average, a “vast wasteland,” and has been so for decades, as then-newly appointed FCC chairman Newton N. Minow said in his famous speech in 1961.

TV production quality now rivals the movie studios, and programming choice has slowly expanded over the years (as noted in The Economist’s May 2010 report on the future of television, Changing the Channel). But compared with video on the Web, which includes user-created channels like YouTube’s Disco project and peer-to-peer offerings, television is less competitive than it was. Cable television gave U.S. viewers first 50, then 90, then 150 channels of slightly more interesting wasteland.

I argue that access to tens of thousands of specialty channels, a variety of content-aggregation options, and collaborative filtering by peer and trusted expert rankings would better serve U.S. social needs. Such a system will enable all those who wish to do so to eliminate unpersonalized advertising. What we need is two-way communication: person-to-person and many-to-many, not one-to-many. What we need is an electronic re-creation of the interactivity of the 1950s communities that Putnam chronicles, but in digital space, with the modern world’s collective intelligence and diversity. Social networks are a start, but not nearly enough. Web 3.0, comprising TV-quality peer-to-peer video delivered on the Web, will be the next major step in this progression.

Film and television remain among the least competitive and democratic of all media. They have historically high development costs (your average Hollywood movie costs more than $106 million). We’ve seen small cracks in the film distribution monopoly in the last decade, with all the new documentaries produced by “filmanthropists”—folks who mortgage their house and self-finance low-budget films with $100,000 of capital or less. Many of these filmmakers can now make their money back, plus a small profit, just by using the personalized Netflix content distribution and rating system (“you told me you liked this film, so you may also like this new film”), which surfaces such niche films for users to consider. Most of these films would never get on cable TV or the retail floor in any Blockbuster or Hollywood Video store. More recently we also have Netflix’s Watch Instantly (streaming video), iTunes movies, and a few other Internet outlets for independently produced specialty content.

Imagine how much more important, entertaining, and educational video we will see once most of us have Internet televisions at home, managing our access to thousands of online video aggregation environments. Want to see a three- to five-minute public domain film summarizing a Wikipedia page? You’ll be able to pay 25 cents for it through the iTV of tomorrow, and eventually someone will make that film for you (and all of us), and make a profit. The media marketplace will be forever splintered. The old media corporations, and their big federated ad clients, will have given up trying to keep the lid on our choice. The new video universe will finally have arrived for everyone.

The Future of the iPad: How the Television Will Be Revolutionized

Today, 17 years after the Apple “Newton” MessagePad debuted in 1993, tablet PCs like the iPad are poised to live up to the hype that first surrounded them and realize their promise. More than 3 million iPad units sold in its first three months. More-open and diverse Android tablets from more than 20 manufacturers, running software from Apple’s rival Google, are also on the horizon. Uncomplicated and easy to use for brief tasks, tablets seduce us into even more online social interaction, eReading, eLearning, gaming, and other activities, and bring us another step closer to wearable computing.

The iPad’s blockbuster software application is also now evident. The tablet PC is an ideal platform to manage all of the video viewing we will be doing on the Internet televisions that are beginning to arrive in living rooms around the world. This “killer app” seems likely to sell tens of millions of tablets annually as media center computers and iTV roll out across the world in the 2010s. Consider the following facts:

• In 2009, 211 million TVs were sold worldwide. In 2010, 228 million are projected to sell, with 79% being digital-ready LCD TVs. There are now 2.3 billion TVs in the world, and 6.7 billion people.
• Fully 25% of U.S. TVs sold in January 2010 were connected by consumers to the Internet. About 10% of TVs sold came “Internet ready.” The rest, and all our older TVs, are being Internet-connected via set-top boxes, media centers, DVRs, game consoles, and DVD players.
• Today there are 20,000+ streamable Internet TV channels, waiting to be connected to Internet-enabled TVs. With the accelerating popularity of YouTube, Metacafe, Vimeo, Viddler, etc., we can expect, and hope for, more than 100,000 specialized channels by 2015.
• A few companies, like Boxee, have had easy-to-use, open-source Internet media center software since 2008, and are now developing set-top boxes. The best of these include social networking, peer viewing, and chat-while-viewing features and deliver a far more rewarding and personalized viewing experience than cable or satellite TV.
• All media center devices currently use “dumb” remotes with unusable small keyboards, and display their viewing options in large characters, with low resolution, on a distant TV screen. Only one remote can be used at a time, so individual viewers can’t search for or signal what they want to watch next, or multitask on the Internet with their remotes. None of these use the advanced voice command and search software we find on our phones. In short, the television is waiting to be revolutionized by next-generation media centers and tablet remotes.

With the right software, a tablet can rapidly organize the most relevant of 20,000 (or a million) potential channels for the viewer. It can deliver a highly personalized viewing and learning experience while we are in the same room with others who have their own tablets. It can allow social viewing options so rich that we haven’t even fully visualized them yet.

Imagine a tablet that displays what’s on your “top 50” favorite channels on the home screen, and with the next 50 channels or titles just a tap away. With key words, user rating, and community rating as filtering options, all of these video items would be fighting to get higher in your stack depending on your viewing habits, feedback, and interests. Imagine an extensive set of social viewing features (real-time chat, social network integration, video and audio conferencing, peer-to-peer video, etc.) allowing you to watch TV and videos with others, and see what your friends are watching right now. Imagine being able to use your tablet to check the Internet for more on any subject while watching the large screen, just as those with Wi-Fi enabled laptops do today.

In an Internet-enabled, transparent society, advanced content control could create many new communities of specialization. As Adam Smith said in The Wealth of Nations, specialization and hard work are the tried-and-true roads to understanding and mastery of our environment.

Youth today often multitask on the Web when they watch television, and audience share for network television has been falling for more than a decade as consumers’ video options (DVD, DVR, Netflix, the Web) have grown. Nevertheless, according to the American Time Use Survey, in 2008 the average U.S. household still spent roughly 2.9 hours for men and 2.6 hours for women watching television each day. Television viewing remains the single largest discretionary activity that U.S. residents engage in daily, accounting for fully half of daily leisure time.

It is an easy thesis, therefore, that improving television’s quality, diversity, and relevance is a uniquely important target for social progress. Opening up the idiot box and making it competitive is where we need to go next, if we truly care about American free enterprise, social diversity, and democracy. When a society’s openness and diversity grow, the country gets less stable at first, and then much more stable and productive than it was before openness began, as Ian Bremmer notes in The J-Curve (Scribner, 2006).

Paying for the iTV Play

To maximize revenue for the hundreds of thousands of new iTV content creators (individuals, organizations, communities) who are currently shut out of the American living room, there will need to be a mix of payment options, including direct micropayments, personalized commercials, and click-through ads.

Micropayments can be used to purchase video content from a marketplace (like iTunes), or, more commonly, to purchase a subscription from a specialty channel producer, like today’s magazines and newspapers, almost all of which may need iTV channels by the 2020s to survive. Programming on some channels will be monetized by more viewer-friendly versions of today’s commercial breaks, commercials that we can automatically play captioned or at a much lower volume than the regular program, giving us back our conversation space, and a system that allows us to “like,” “dislike,” and permanently block commercials of any type.

Another form of payment, perhaps occurring in a hideable window adjacent to the video, will be context-based per-click revenue and advertising (like Google’s AdSense), a revenue model that is already greatly broadening the availability of text-based content on the Web.

Prospects for iTV

Yochai Benkler’s FCC-commissioned Berkman Center 2009 report, “Next Generation Connectivity,” addresses America’s lagging wired and wireless connectivity and affordability. Other leading developed economies, such as Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and parts of Europe, have many times more broadband (data transfer ability and speed) than the United States has today. The report urges a public–private partnership to make affordable, always-on broadband (1,000 Mbps or more, via fiber optic cable) into a public right. Such “gigabit broadband” is what will allow iTV to emerge in the United States, and the incumbent carriers will provide it as slowly as they can.

Another critical need is net neutrality—that is, the principle that all providers use the information superhighway at the same rates, without discrimination by content type. Some of the above countries, like Japan, have already passed net neutrality laws, while the United States has yet to even consider them in the courts.

I believe that it is the U.S. government’s, not corporations’, role to provide leadership to close the “fiber gap” that currently exists between the United States and leading Asian and European countries, to ensure that the poor have affordable access, and to develop the incentives for bringing broadband (via Wi-Max, LTE, satellite, and other routes) to rural areas. If the U.S. government mandated eminent domain of fiber access routes, and allowed any authorized firms to have access to fiber trunk cabinets, competitive delivery of fiber-to-the-premises (home or office) could be quickly achieved today in all U.S. cities and, a few years later, everywhere.

Americans have had a similar learning experience with the national highways in the early twentieth century, which were once networks of private roads. Road development is ideal to start privately, but once the cost of construction has been recovered plus a reasonable return on investment, private ownership is very inefficient to continue, with all those turnpikes and the constant need to “turn” a profit. U.S. leaders figured this out and nationalized the highway system. Today, the build-operate-transfer model—starting with private construction, a limited operating lease, and then transfer to public ownership—is the fastest-growing and most productive way to create new roads in any country.

I believe the same situation holds for wired and wireless communications channels, our information superhighways. These digital “roads” are great to build out privately, but once the corporations have made a reasonable profit, it’s time to turn those data pipes into a publicly owned utility. Competitive private bidding would keep the public information superhighway maintained and free to all, and many new services and businesses would emerge, with far greater total market value than is possible in today’s limited-connectivity world.

The big telecommunications and cable companies could then be freed to develop even faster and better communications technology, or, failing that, to become content providers. The government could grant them all one last five-year monopoly license before they started this in any state, to give them time to prepare for the rigors of the marketplace. In that setting, Comcast’s recent purchase of NBC would be something we could champion (a move from carrier to content provider).

U.S. leaders may not act to fix the nation’s growing connectivity gap anytime soon, as pundits and lobbyists will do their best to portray this as “inefficient governmental intervention.” Yet, it is exactly such smart intervention that has allowed Asian countries like Japan and South Korea to leapfrog the United States in critical digital-infrastructure development and to develop profitable new businesses and exports around the high-bandwidth Internet, including several early versions of iTV.

Many Americans don’t understand just how anticompetitive the nation’s communications technology laws and regulatory agencies have become, and how much this diminishes the diversity and value of its digital economy. In an iTV world, we can imagine a lot of easily available quality media that would make this case. In the meantime, we do what we can.

About the Author

John M. Smart is a futurist, president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, and associate professor and Program Champion of the Master of Science in Emerging Technologies at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Arizona. E-mail johnsmart@accelerating.org.

Download the PDF of this article.