The Future of AI, Television, and Virtual Reality

No one including those who own linear television networks sees anything but a bleak future for linear You TV networks and MVPDs should have listened to me in the 90s today television would be programmatic addressable interactive with ROI measurement built in and digital would never have bounced back so high from its turn of the century bubble nor would the dollars have shifted to digital out of television digital would have come out of promotion budgets rather than media budgetsHowever itamp8217s not too late By thinking smarter television stocks can arise again First of all in the context of the future what is televisionTelevision is the part of media where you commit yourself to specific periods of time to immerse yourself in a leanback way where you donamp8217t need to do any work You get entertained informed you feel emotions itamp8217s pretty to watch and sometimes you get so caught up itamp8217s like living through a character other than yourself whom you identify withDigital is the leanforward part of media where your eyehand coordination is in action all the time You get entertained informed and the novelty reward system in your brain and glands peak over and over again continuously dopamine and maybe even oxytocin making you feel good all because the brain is programmed to prefer novelty ie something new every minute or every few secondsVideogames are another leanforward part of media where your eyehand coordination is even more intense than in digital You are much more the actor than the audience in this media type Virtual Reality will grow out of this media type When VR comes along in a big way todayamp8217s headmounted units will first shrink to special glasses and finally to an almost weightless tiaralike unit on your head with direct neuro linkage Haptic suits will provide a sense of touch to the whole body Some television shows will become VR interactive as illustrated in this fictional chapter from an upcoming novel of mine in the Agents of Cosmic Intelligence seriesEven with todayamp8217s videogames this media type has a large share of audience Nielsen measures videogame usage as part of measuring everything and reports that videogames among males 1824 peaked at a 30 share of audience in Q4 2018 on a 247 basis currently still high at 20My point is that these three forms of media usage are not going to go away one of them is not going to eliminate the other two entirely Even as new generations come along who are even more attracted to high touch high tech there will be times when these new people will simply want to be able to lean back and take off the cognitive load to a degree that isnamp8217t offered by the leanforward media typesThe fact that the leanback medium is going to be digitally delivered and called streaming makes not a whit of difference There will always be television the leanback screen media typeWhy is the streaming conversion hurting television stock prices and revenue growth Because the main audience of streaming is young energetic fickle price sensitive wants to be amp8220with itamp8221 and wants to try all possible experiences so except when you have a series that resonates they watch the medium without much program loyaltyWhen a person cuts the cord and shifts to fluent streaming usage the traditional TV networks are going to lose a certain amount of that personamp8217s time This is one aspect of what is going on right nowThe solution is to make better programs that are irresistible to the largest possible audience Yes that means larger investments However the success rate can be radically improved by more intelligent use of pretesting human and AI and more intelligent use of tuneinThe other major aspect of why streaming is hurting traditional television at the moment is because the decision was made to cut the commercial load in streaming down to 5 minutes per hour from about 14 minutesThe best way to deal with this is to offer tiered streaming choices with free adsupported at full linear TV commercial load low monthly subscription fee plus 5 minutes per hour commercial loads and commercialfree at a higher subscription priceGetting the pricingpackaging right and also leveraging oncamera talent think Influentials and production quality to beat the digital video players at their own games with services like YouTube or TikTok that are just as free but more glamorous and enticing making the product better and the tunein better by applying science and AIamp8230these are the prescriptions to making it through these hard times turning the great ship in the water Once you get to this other course the sailing will be much smoother Half or whatever proportion of leisure time will be lean back and television stock will be riding high for the rest of historyAI is involved in all of these processes of improvement which are needed to ensure better television programs with more effective tunein The television czars have never been particularly drawn to science math and technology They come out of the cinema tradition which is seat of the pants auteurism uber alles If they had been a bit more oriented to science they would have invented digital and everything would be different this was what Next Century Media was attempting to bring about in the 90sFive companies have each grown to dwarf the television companies because they embraced science technology math and are now among the leaders in AI Apple was the first Now they are known as the FAANGs Meta is the amp8220Famp8221 for Facebook Apple Amazon Netflix and Google aka Alphabet and there are others like Microsoft Ali Baba TikTok et alIf the television companies continue to think last century the science and AI driven companies will take over lean back tooItamp8217s not too late Hollywood Bollywood Pinewood Cinecitta Huace and all of you making television and cinema what it is you are among the greatest creators of art in history itamp8217s time to bring in much more of the science part now or others who do will supplant youPosted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership selfpublishing platformClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillageorgMyersBizNet

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The Future of AI, Television, and Virtual Reality

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Bill Harvey

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