Gareth Capon, chief executive of real-time video sharing company Grabyo, and Ben Moore, managing director of personalised video service Positive Image, led a discussion on the current and future state of television in a seminar at the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium that was attended by delegates from companies including Sky, NBC Universal and UBS.
Capon pointed out that the impact of mobile is still largely being underestimated, and worse, misunderstood. The entire ecosystem around TV is undergoing a radical change, with some major new players, such as Netflix, Google and Amazon, positioning themselves in the market.
Long content is also increasingly being consumed on mobile devices, especially tablets. The common component between all these new offerings is connectivity and increased choice, leaving customers to decide what, when, where, and how to consume.
As an added advantage to consumers, initial and running costs will be massively reduced, as Netflix and others have cheap flat rates, and devices such as Chromecast allow people to connect many TVs to the internet at low prices. As rights move into the cloud, it will also become increasingly easier to watch content across devices once it has been purchased.
Moore meanwhile noted that content will become much more personalised and measurable. With the advent of 4G, and UK infrastructure gradually improving after being behind the US market for a long period, ubiquitous video consumption is becoming increasingly viable.
Finally, the consensus among seminar attendees appeared to be that the idea of a primary and a secondary screen is a concept which will not last, and that in order to survive, providers will also have to re-educate consumers that an ever-growing catalogue without any price hikes is unsustainable.
Big companies, like Sky with Now TV, are certainly making a play for unbundled online content, but there are, perhaps unsurprisingly, still more questions than answers for the TV industry.