Tag: personal

If your TV was like a Book

Last month, Apple released their latest device – the iPad. It is capable of many wonderous things, and has many fabulous properties, but of all of them, for now I am interested in just three: its screen, its weight, and its ability to show video.

As various other manufacturers rush to market with devices to compete in the segment that Apple has just legitimised, they will most likely produce things that share those same three properties. However, as it is still early days, we don’t yet know for sure what people will end up doing with these devices. That’s why it’s so much fun to speculate!

The iPad has a 24cm (diagonal) screen, weighs about 700g (WiFi version) and can deliver TV quality video from the Internet to practically wherever in the house you decide to sit yourself down with it. If you hold it up in front of your face (about 60cm away), it’s as big as if you were watching a 120cm (diagonal) TV from 3m away. And, while lighter than a 120cm TV, it’s going to feel heavy pretty quick.

However, 700g is not very heavy if you’re willing to rest it on your lap, and there’s another category of content consumption “device” that is comparable in this regard: the book. I am willing to spend hours intently focused on a book while reading it, and a quick weigh of some of my books (using the handy kitchen scales) suggests the iPad is not unusual…

Which provides some legitimisation of a “TV-watching” scenario of a family in their lounge room, with everyone watching a show on their tablet device. (Assuming that you have overcome issues like individuals’ TV audio interfering with others and ensuring adequate bandwidth for everyone.) However, this scenario feels strange, even anti-social.

I am perhaps conditioned by the ritual of people coming together to share a TV watching experience. And before we had TVs, people came together to share a radio listening experience. But before broadcasting technologies, what did we do? In reality, this sort of broadcasting experience is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before that, presumably we all sat around in the lounge room and read books.

I’ve previously written on the idea that people prefer the personal, and that a personal TV experience will be preferred to a shared TV experience. The iPad and similar devices have the potential to enable this, through becoming as light and portable as books.

“Netbooks” also have similar attributes to the iPad. However, they tend to weigh at least 1 kg and have screens that are smaller. So, while future Netbooks might have the right form factor, it certainly isn’t common yet. The iPad is the first mass-market device that properly fills this niche.

The issue of the scenario feeling anti-social is still a little troubling. While our ancestors might have looked up over their books and engaged in a casual chat, momentarily pausing their reading, this is harder to accomplish with a video experience. Not only are the eyes and ears otherwise engaged, making casual interruption more difficult, but the act of pausing and resuming is not as easy either.

I suspect that while we’re now reaching the point where hardware can fill the personal TV niche, the software is not yet ready. We may need eye-tracking software that pauses the video when the viewer looks away, integration of text-based messaging alongside video-watching, and other adaptations to the traditional video player software.

I’m keen to see what competition in this new segment produces.

People prefer the personal

Following up on my last post, the reason that the big TV on the living room wall is going to become less relevant is because it’s a shared device. The way of the future is personal devices.

It’s sad but true – we prefer to have our own personal versions of things rather than share them with others. Maybe this is a particularly Western trait, but I suspect not. For example, despite the additional cost, most people prefer to travel in their own car rather than use a taxi or use public transport. Car sales are booming in China, showing it’s not just something that happens here.

When it comes to video devices like TVs, pretty much all actors in the economy are benefiting from move to selling household video devices to individual video devices: the screen manufactures, content providers, telcos, and most of all, the viewers. It’s part of a larger trend. Initially, all households in a city got the pretty much the same video content at the same time, broadcast from TV stations. Then, with the uptake of VCRs, DVDs, PVRs, and so on, different households were able to get different video content at the same time. Now, with PCs and iPods, individuals within the households are getting different content at the same time.

We saw the same thing happen with audio devices. The Consumer Electronics Association in America published this year in their Digital America 2008 report that

U.S. factory-level dollar sales of portable audio products, consisting overwhelmingly of MP3/portable media players (PMPs), exceeded the combined sales of the home audio and aftermarket car audio industries for the first time in history in 2005, and again in 2006 and 2007, according to CEA statistics.

Another aspect to consider is that portable media players and PCs are increasingly becoming connected to the Internet, and support communication as well as media consumption. There will be growth in triggers to watch video content, received over those communication channels (such as friends sending you email, IM, or messages from Twitter or Facebook), and given a desire for immediate gratification, people will not want to wait for a shared device to become free, so will watch the video content on their personal devices, even if the quality of experience is less.

I don’t think shared video devices, like the expensive LCD or Plasma set that takes pride of place on the wall, will ever become completely redundant. They will simply evolve to niche uses when it is more convenient or appropriate to use a shared device, such as when hosting a video / games party with friends, or displaying a loop of video to display in the background.