Conspiracy against CATV Industry?

importantly, its very longevity implies inexorable momentum. There is only just now an incipient awareness of the emergence of Third Generation Television. Our televisions are becoming dual function devices. On one hand they remain TVs as we have long known them, but on another they are giant windows into the Internet Cloud.

Contrary to the cynics, the current state of affairs does not represent a sinister plot on the part of Hollywood producers, appliance makers, and computer manufactures against the Cable and Satellite Television industries. To the contrary, it all started in the early 1980s as TV makers sought to accommodate the CATV industry by offering more connecting sockets for attaching Cable set-top boxes to the TV. At the time, the Cable industry was expanding exponentially into urban markets whereas earlier it was limited to secondary territories.

Gradually more devices designed to mate with TVs were introduced. Examples include video tape recorders, video game consoles, DVD players, camcorders, and digital cameras. As a result, connection panels like the one pictured above became the center-of-gravity for the transformation of television.

Today the ever growing variety of connection jacks in the panel facilitates the attachment of Internet Connected devices such as laptop computers, iPods, iPhones, multiplayer video game consoles, TiVos, and dedicated appliances like Roku and Apple TV. The recent appearance of HDMI jacks is particularly significant because they permit the transport of High Definition video and audio in a single cable.

In sum, even the most unlikely of today’s devices can exhibit Internet content through connections to the TV. For example, consider the iPhone. Since the unit has a built-in iPod it can purchase, or rent, movies from Apple’s iTunes online store. Alternately, it can download free video podcasts, some of which include popular TV shows.  Yet the iPhone will conveniently attach to a TV thereby providing a big screen display for the unit’s videos. As a number of instructional videos demonstrate, generally only the uninitiated insist that the set-up is too complex.

An inevitable result of the increasingly versatile TV socket panel is vigorous growth in the practice of viewing Internet content on the TV. The proliferation of video rentals at iTunes and Amazon.com is only one example. But it is an example that portends the death of Blockbuster. Consequently, the amount of time consumers spend watching CATV, Satellite, and Broadcast TV must almost certainly decline. In our analysis, consumers will ultimately spend more time watching Internet content on their TVs than in watching conventional television.

To learn more about how your business can exploit or adapt to such changes, feel welcome to contact us. You may also want to consider buying our research reports Third Generation Television and Future Developments in Video Advertising.

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