OnTelevision
ThoughtStorms Wiki
Context : OnMedia / MediaSystem
Recent
Why it's so bad at covering ClimateChange : https://gizmodo.com/why-tv-is-so-bad-at-covering-climate-change-1847283248
Granularity not naturally 30 mins : http://longtail.typepad.com/thelongtail/2005/05/natural_portion.html
Long lived
Quora Answer : What is the future of television?
Rule number one : you can't be a technology / infrastructure company AND a content company at the same time. Too many tensions between the business models. Different skills, time-scales and attitudes needed to be a company which is great at both.
Everyone who thinks they can be an equal partnership of the two (Sony, AOLWarner etc.) fails at at least one.
So. You can either know that you're one kind of company that does a little bit of the other thing. (Good example, Nintendo is a content company that just happens to make innovative infrastructure when they need it to support their games.)
Or you can be a naive company that thinks you can do both and wastes a huge amount of money on doing one of the things expensively and / or badly.
Which brings us to ... GoogleTV ...
Google is an infrastructure company. It's got some interesting ideas about making a new kind of TV operating system / programme guide. WTF its doing messing about with social gaming companies etc. is beyond me. Google is not going to get good at the content business. It's not going to be a gaming company. (Nor are Apple or Facebook who are similarly infrastructure businesses.)
The bigger question is which content companies (apart from Nintendo) are technologically smart enough to innovate TV forward.
I'm sure, at some point, someone is going to finally manage to create a mutant cross-breed of "reality" TV, audience participation and social gaming that really works. (Think Zynga meets Simon Cowell). It will probably be from some kind of scrappy startup rather than an established media company; but will become horribly compelling and successful.
Of course ... this only lasts as long as the paraphernalia of western civilization holds up. At some point peak oil and climate change are going to trigger further financial shocks that kill off our TV obsessed culture, Right before the collapse of the food chain kills off half of humanity. So maybe it's better to spend our time concerned with other problems than TV's future. Long term, it doesn't have one.