I have been always fascinated by the idea of connected smart devices, i.e. TV, tablet (as replacement for a PC at home), and phone integrated by a common operating system that makes content interactive, i.e. blurs the line between content and apps.
Such a connected smart device platform covering the three screens would have many attributes of Apples iOS on iPhone, iPad, and iPod such as the hardware and app ecosystem. TV however is a different device – it is multi-user – and would need to be integrated in an intelligent way into such a system.
Making interactive content available – think multi-player games on a game console – would open up a complete new dimension for commercial and information apps. “Gamification” as strategy to enhance user engagement would become truly meaningful.
In a three-screen world an app developer ecosystem such as Apple’s would unlock the developer creativity necessary to produce the innovative content necessary to convince advertisers to invest and consumers to engage.
Reality however is that the TV has already lost being the “first screen” in the attention economy. People are wedded to their smartphones even at home and the device has become the entry point to social media, e-mail and apps (e.g. games).
Sooner or later an attention deficit to TV will change the behavior of advertisers and associated money flows. What comes next for today’s TV content has been illustrated painfully by the newspaper and book industry.
Coming back to why I would like to have access to the TV as app developer – commerce – reaching people in their living room with online shopping services.
Shopping on the web has become boring. Online an invisible crowd is going through a similar shopping experience in parallel. Through their collective activities analyzed by sophisticated data mining algorithms they are influencing our shopping experience and making it predictable.
Portals, search, comparison-shopping have turned advertising into links plus text or even worse annoying animated gifs. Targeting ensures that the same boring advertisement can follow us everywhere on the web and into our social feeds.
In the physical world window-shopping with friends is a fun pastime and presenting goods in an appealing and clever way is a good retail strategy. Translating such an experience online and into the living room requires the TV.
There is enough cool retail/advertising content out there but online it has been overtaken by links and harvesting of commercial value by convincing online users to click on them. We have developed a platform to change shopping on social and mobile as part of davai, but tablets and phones are still mostly solitary devices.
Commerce apps on TV would allow telling an engaging stories in TV style, with direct user engagement on social and click to purchase as in Web commerce.