TV[R]EV: Apple 2012 = Facebook 2017

There was a very interesting piece in Ad Age this week (brought to our attention by our esteemed TV[R]EV co-founders Jesse Redniss and David Beck) that talked to the problems that Facebook is having in convincing the TV networks to use Facebook data and Facebook’s Audience Network (FAN) to reach those targeted audiences they keep talking about wanting to reach.

The networks’ reaction—intrigued by the possibilities but scared by the player—sounds a whole lot like the way the TV networks viewed Apple back in 2012, when Apple TV was the bête noire of the day.

Once Burned, Twice Shy

It is an article of faith among many in the TV industry that Apple killed the music industry. Apple’s decision to force a flat 99 cent price on every song on every album coupled with iTunes’ monopolistic hold on the music industry in the mid-oughts is widely held to be responsible for the disintegration of the music industry. Having seen music and then print fall prey to the predations of the internet, Hollywood was determined that the TV industry would not be next.

That’s why Apple allegedly had so much trouble even getting meetings with the various networks and why those meetings often took on the tone of Romans negotiating with barbarians, with the TV networks allegedly demanding absurdly high prices, culminating with a “bring me the head of the dragon” style quest to “go and get all the affiliates to agree to be part of Apple TV and then maybe we’ll deign to talk to you.”

The fear, of course, was that letting Apple inside the gates would be the death of the television industry, that they would quickly take over, reducing the business to a shred of its former self, selling off shows and putting millions out of work.

The “how” could never be articulated, but there was a clear sense that Apple meant to overthrow the powers that be in the industry and that they’d leave a smaller, weaker, less culturally relevant industry in their wake.

Facebook’s Dilemma

Fast-forward five years, and there’s a new tribe from the north looking to destroy the kingdom: Facebook.

Facebook, with its walled-garden approach and near-monopoly status over social media and digital advertising, presents many of the same problems that Apple did: it’s a behemoth with clear designs on the TV industry whose motives can’t really be trusted.

Facebook is in many ways more insidious than Apple, because Facebook is all about data and users, whereas Apple was all about hardware and interfaces.

The appeal of Zuckerberg’s social network is pretty clear: Facebook has a whole lot of data about TV viewers and data is the one thing the networks lack: other than a handful of people watching via connected apps, the networks lack a one-on-one relationship with their audiences.

So Facebook would, on paper, be an ideal way for them to serve up ads to targeted audiences and (better still) would be a great way for them to promote their own programming to those same targeted audiences. Given that the technology exists for a user to see a dark post on Facebook with the first two minutes of an hour-long show embedded in it, begin watching the show on Facebook and then seamless transfer the experience to their television set, it certainly seems like a fruitful partnership.

“Seems” being the operative word here.

In reality, Facebook has ambitions around TV and they’ve been quite open about it. While their latest project—a video app for Apple TV, Roku and other devices—seems to be focused on “ten by tens” (online video series consisting of ten episodes of around ten minutes each) it’s easy to see how they could take everything they’ve learned from the TV networks and start their own competing long form premium network. Given Facebook’s sizable cash reserves, hiring top talent would not be an issue for them either.

Like Apple, Facebook’s penchant for privacy adds to Hollywood’s unease. There are always unconfirmed rumors floating around about their plans for video and the data they collect around it, and both Facebook executives and Facebook press releases are purposely vague about their future plans, especially as far as television is concerned. Which often leads TV folks to expect the worst.

We don’t see it getting better either, because neither side is prone to give in. The TV execs don’t need to: they have what Facebook wants which is both hundreds of hours of current programming and hundreds of thousands of hours of library programming. That’s something Facebook won’t be able to reproduce for decades and right now it’s not for sale.

And Facebook is doing fine without TV. They offer advertisers a high level of brand safety and an audience of billions. If their TV offering never moves beyond ten by tens, then they are likely fine.

The challenge for Facebook is to remain in the game even if the networks don’t want them to play, something Apple was unable to do—they let Netflix and Amazon and even Roku get ahead of them and now Apple is more or less irrelevant to the TV industry. (Though with a $250 billion cash reserve, they can easily change that.)

The next two to three years will be telling in terms of how the potentially lucrative relationship between Facebook and television plays out, whether they’ll find a way to cooperate or whether they’ll freeze each other out.

Stay tuned.

Originally published at TVREV.com