Speaking at iTV Con on Tuesday, a trade conference dedicated to Internet television, Google’s Vicent Dureau told industry players and reporters that traditional television is facing an identity crisis that means it is close to death.
“On the surface, television as we know it looks dead. But the future of television is actually pretty bright,” he said, referring to add what an internet-based vision could offer.
Learn From the Internet
Citing the boom of multi-channel television on cable and satellite, advert-skipping technology and the fragmentation of the viewing audience as the biggest problem, Dureau explained that TV execs might well want to take a leaf from the Internet’s book for the solution:
“Audience fragmentation is a good thing for advertising, not a bad thing. You can make your audience more specialized,” Dureau said. “With more specialized channels, you can actually insert more relevant content that’s more likely to reach the intended audience.”
Use of Web-Based Technology
He suggested that the solution lay in placing web-based technologies into set-top boxes that can track viewers’ activities and cater advertising specifically to them.
Additionally, he reckoned that the net was a prime location for discovering new talent for mainstream television, referring to the likes of CurrentTV and MTV Flux as examples of choice user-created content.
“What that tells us is that users are discovering shows on the web and then watching them on TV,” Dureau said. “The web is not there to hurt television. It’s actually there to promote it.”
In other words, TV bosses – as the saying goes, Google is your friend.
[Via The Register]
