2025+: A super-app for video
Part 11 of a history and future of TV.
What consumers want is something like Spotify for video. An elegant app that works on all your devices, and with all your video streams. Made for our best interface devices, our phone and PCs, to watch on them or on your TV. With a brilliant AI advisor that knows everything about entertainment, old and new, and everything about your tastes, what you’ve watched, skipped, liked and disliked, hidden and promoted. Something modern and social, making it easy to see what your friends and heroes are watching, blast away bad suggestions, share your favorites, add their favorites to your watch list, or to watch with them. Both Sonos and Plex are going down this path.?
The goal is to transform the video experience. By combining the right interface, algorithms and data, our watching experience, whether on TVs, PCs, phones or HMDs, will become increasingly driven by algorithm, like TikTok or Spotify. Users will be fed an endless stream of shows. As the algorithm learns your preferences, the AI will do a better and better job of automatically flowing from show to show, suggesting alternatives, notifying you when the game is about to start, scheduling your movie night with friends, telling you about the best new shows (across all your services, not just Netflix), letting you easily switch between your favorites, and connecting you to the right advertisements. You can talk to your AI TV ‘friend’, ask it questions, tell it to kill that show, or play something new. It can even pick the right shows when the family is watching together, or when you want to chill with a real friend.
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Next: Part 12. 2030: Head Mounted Displays - TV’s nemesis and successor
Great series of insights Ned....looking forward to next post, when AI surpass the next super-human challenge of "pick the right shows when the family is watching together" !
Part 3 So Ned, I agree, I'd like to see "super" video streaming apps. Again, for music, we do have some separation of app from content. I can use Apple Music instead of Spotify if I prefer that from a technical standpoint, but I'm playing the same content on either app. I'd love to see the same for video. I'm not sure I have any faith in this happening any time soon though as I can't see the various content companies getting together and standardizing to either a single licensing body or a common technical playback / monetization scheme an app can use to get content from various media company servers while the user pays a single subscription fee. Until any of this happens, I'm just not going to care that I never got to watch the last seasons of Stranger Things. I've been following all your parts in this series, and like you say, the smartphone is now king, and for me there's just heaps of other stuff to do there to entertain myself with less friction than deciding what streaming services I need to subscribe to this month. Sounds like you have something cooking in this area to make streaming more interesting though :)
Part 2 So I've pondered the question for a long time to anyone who will listen, is why are music and video content licensing models so different? As far as I know, in most countries, if you run a radio station you can just pay for a general content license and you can then play whatever you like over the airwaves. The licensing body will then make distributions to the various content providers based on popularity on the airwaves. I don't think Spotify runs under quite the same rules but they seem to have cornered the market in such a way that effectively *almost* anything you want is on Spotify. The consumer pays a fixed monthly price and has access to everything. Now I know the whole Spotify thing isn't working out as well for either Spotify or the artists but that is another story ... Continued ...
"What consumers want is something like Spotify for video". Darn right I do. I cut the cable cord long ago and was pretty excited about where this was going when Netflix basically owned the market and licensed a lot of content from the various media providers. I eventually got a Netflix subscription. Then, these media companies all wanted to be like Netflix so pulled their content licences in and started their own streaming services. I stopped enjoying Netflix because the licensed content I liked became increasingly scarce, replaced only with Netflix produced shows, which had zero appeal to me. I don't want to subscribe to numerous streaming platforms and maintain numerous apps and still not even be able to find something I want to watch. I've become disillusioned and given up on all of the "premium" services and now just use free stuff like Tubi (an amazingly deep content library, actually), YouTube, or just find other ways to entertain myself. Continued ...