In the previous two posts (part 1 and part 2), I discussed my problems with modern TV as it exists today and the history of how it got there.  Everyone knows that you don’t complain about problems without offering solutions. Any one of these solutions could be a blog post on its own, but I wanted to touch on all of the high-level ideas since I haven’t seen them written down anywhere all in one place. Let’s brainstorm. Many of these topics overlap a lot. This is part three of a four-part series.

A La Carte The single most important solution that will save TV is that access to content needs to be way more “a la carte” than it is now. If programming is increasingly getting more expensive, then the only way consumers will continue subscribing is if they can pick and choose smaller packages of content. There’s several ways to break up content. One is smaller groups of channels. This would be the easy way for the industry to handle this, but would probably not fully satisfy customers. The second option is to allow subscribers to pick individual channels. If you polled consumers, I would guess that this would be the overwhelming choice. Media companies and others argue that this would cause niche (less popular) channels’ content to not survive. I would argue that this niche content should move to the web or on-demand and not exist as a channel anyway. The current form of live TV channels will soon pair down to only mainstream content that is highly popular across all demographics. This will allow media companies to maximize the advertising on these channels. For their niche content (some might argue “quality” content), they can target advertising specific to the audience on the web or on-demand. 

The other form of “a la carte” (and most exciting option for me) is breaking down content by TV show. This is actually the Netflix model. Netflix buys the rights to various TV shows (along with movies) and gives its subscribers access to all episodes of these shows. I can see additional Netflix-like content providers in the marketplace, each specializing in different types of content. One might specialize in high quality documentaries and timely in-depth news coverage to dive deep into relevant news stories.  Another might offer access to old, critically-acclaimed TV shows that have yet to be offered anywhere else online. If the quality was good enough, they wouldn’t even need to be the size of Netflix. I personally could see myself subscribing to anywhere between two and four Netflix-like content providers at $8/month each, depending on the quality of their content. Many of the major professional sports leagues (MLB, NBA, and NHL) have figured this model out and offer access to all games live and on-demand for a monthly or annual fee.

Access Access to TV content needs to be everywhere for it to really work for consumers today. Gone are the days where the family huddles around a TV in the living room. Today, media is everywhere the Internet can go: smartphones, tablets, desktops, laptops, wearables (i.e. Google Glass, watches), even refrigerators, and of course traditional TVs. Outside of being on cable/satellite providers’ channel packages, the minimum a content provider must do is have apps on the major smartphone OS’s, the major tablet OS’s, and have Web access to its content in order to survive in today’s highly mobile world. Successful companies go beyond that to the less popular mobile OS’s, have mobile-web-friendly web sites, and have apps on Apple TV, Roku devices, and “smart TV” apps on TVs.

Consumers today expect instant access to everything. When they hear about a new show from a friend, they want to watch it on the way home on the subway. When they don’t have access to it, that’s when many turn to piracy. It’s interesting that Netflix looks at torrent sites to determine what content to provide to users in different countries. It only makes sense that if this content was easily available to consumers of a paid service, piracy would go down. According to Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, three years after Netflix launched in Canada, there is evidence that traffic to BitTorrent has halved.

Access to content also needs to be fast. From the speed of the network down to the speed of the devices and even the speed of the remote controls, everything needs to be improved to give viewers quick access to the content they are paying for. With widespread broadband Internet and the power of our modern computing and mobile devices, YouTube videos start in fractions of a second. The painful slowness of navigating to content on the antiquated Scientific Atlanta cable boxes is frustrating. It caused me to build a Windows XP Media Center as a DVR about seven years ago. The speed of navigating through the TV channel guide or through recorded shows was light years ahead of the 3-7 second delays of the old cable box. I had to give up on this setup several years ago when the cable companies went all digital. The saddest thing is that for the vast majority of cable subscribers, these small boxes are still in their living rooms, providing the sub-par experience compared to their computers and smartphones. The technical hurdles and content limitations of building your own media center is no longer an option.

With technical innovations happening all the time and user requirements evolving, the performance and feature requirements of devices is always a moving target. The mobile phone industry has matured to meet these needs through the current model of subscribers typically upgrading their smartphones every 1-3 years. The carriers typically subsidize the costs of the device (with a “locked” phone) and lock them into 18-24 month contracts. Or, subscribers can buy their own “unlocked” phones at full price and in some cases get a cheaper contract plan or a month to month plan with the mobile service provider. Either way, smartphone users are able (and encouraged) to upgrade their devices every other year. TV media devices need to be treated the same way. Technology improves every year, so these devices need to be upgraded every couple of years. This ensures the performance, quality, and usability stays up to date with the latest technological innovations. 

Experience After “a la carte” and “access”, the third pillar of success for the TV industry is experience. I was originally going to call it user interface, but UX is not UI. Interface is certainly a component of experience, but interface won’t solve the ability to continue to get a dependable video stream when your smartphone switches from 4G to 3G. Experience is about usability, dependability, and delight-ability when and where it makes sense.

For live TV, there is a beautiful simplicity to the action of changing the channel up and down. Wired expressed this well and suggests Netflix should adopt this. For several decades, this was the only interface that consumers knew.  It is passive, nearly effortless, and relaxing to the core and causes viewers to stay glued to their TVs for longer since they don’t have to think much. But over the years, a problem has caused this model to break: channel creep. In the days of 5, 10, even 60 channels, channel up and down worked wonderfully. But with hundreds of channels, viewers can no longer use it and have to rely on the programming guide. The channel up and down needs to evolve. If I don’t subscribe to channels, I shouldn’t see them (yes, I know this would lower subscribers signing up for new channels, but there are much smarter ways of advertising). If I am watching on an HD TV, auto-hide all of the non-HD channels and don’t have the HD channels start at 801. Viewers still rely on channel numbers and having them reset their brains around adding 80- to any channel is a usability nightmare. 

The categories of live channels need to get smarter. Reorder channels around their primary content categories. I shouldn’t see sports channels throughout the 700s, 805, 821-824, and 845-849, among other places. And if I don’t watch sports, I should be able to hide the entire sports category or within sports, choose the subcategories within sports that I care about. Or better yet, based on my sports viewing history, you should know what sports channels and content I’m most likely to watch and put it front and center as I am browsing and hide what I am unlikely to watch. I know this causes many to be concerned that it would turn us into robots, always watching the same thing over and over. I would say that the majority of us are already robots, watching the same thing over and over, especially as we age. But there are many ways to expose hidden content in ways that delight viewers. Treat content like a Costco treasure hunt and you might even drive some impulse purchases.

Even though channeling up and down is one of the best passive ways of enjoying content, today’s instant Web-centric world no longer purely wants to sit back and channel up and down. They want on-demand access to easily findable content. This is where Netflix has shined. One way to embrace the simplicity and usability of channel up and down is to make each channel an immersive app. And they should utilize the large screen real estate now afforded with our big-screen HD TVs. For example, when I channel up to ESPN, I should see the live broadcast in a smaller square on the right side (roughly 1/3 the size of the screen) with scrollable content on the rest of the screen (using the arrow keys of the remote). I can arrow horizontally to the live broadcast to expand it fullscreen or it might even auto-play after 10 seconds of idling on this channel. Timely sports news videos typically found on the web can be mixed with other live sports coverage within this scrollable content to provide infinite possibilities to delight users with content. These "immersive app” channels would even cut down on the number of channels problem by condensing the channels down. The multitude of ESPN channels might be condensed down to two “immersive app” channels that make the most sense. 

But this isn’t limited to sports channels, all other channels’ formats could work with this model. For example, when you navigate to the AMC channel, you might see their live broadcast on the right-side of the screen with their popular shows in a scrollable format on the left. They can target shows to viewers based on their past viewing history of the channel and promote new shows that they are likely to enjoy. Because I have watched Mad Men in the past, I might see trailers for the upcoming shows of the new shows of Mad Men. I might also see advertising and trailers for their upcoming show called TURN.

Visual Netflix changed the game with their visual emphasis on content. Even before they offered on-demand streaming content, their mail-order DVD web interface highlighted the covers typically found on the packaging of DVDs. This emulated the experience of browsing real video stores before they disappeared. I remember growing up, I would love to browse the aisles at the local video store to look at the covers of the VHS and DVD boxes. Just imagining how good a movie might be based on the cover image was enjoyment for my young brain.  Today, viewers are still drawn to the visuals of movie and TV graphics. Netflix has further refined their visual interface when they moved to the big screen and continued to iterate. The ability to scroll through different topics, and movie/TV shows with still more and more content appearing emulates the “lean back” nature of the original channel up and down actions of TV and captivates its subscribers to find the right movie or TV show. The satirical website The Onion brilliantly encapsulated this in its video titled "Netflix Introduces New Browse Endlessly Plan”. Similarly, YouTube has also popularized the idea of visual snapshots of videos with its image-based interface for starting videos.

Despite Netflix being around for over 15 years, the vast majority of cable and satellite TV subscribers still see text only when browsing around for content. There are sprinklings here and there of channel logos and ads, but most of the interface is still typically in a blue background with blue rounded corner rectangles around movie and TV show titles. When I would navigate this sea of on-demand content of blue rounded-rectangle bubbles with sub-menus upon sub-menus of content, the UX designer in me wanted to scream at the makers of this horrendous interface. 10 years ago, I could sort of tolerate this interface, but every year it got more and more arduous.

It’s not just movie and TV show cover images that can improve the interface. Additional images and the strategic placement of content (depending on the device and screen size) is what defines successful UX design. Netflix recently upgraded its own UI to unify the UX across all of their different devices, add relevant content of why a viewer might want to watch the show (with descriptions and reviews), and to add additional and improved graphics for movies and TV shows, among other new features. Despite having a sizable lead on the interface and experience front of streaming video content, Netflix invested a lot of time and money into improving it across the board because they know that this is the differentiation that their subscribers look to them to provide.

Search-ability and Brows-ability Searching for media needs to just work like a web search. A search shouldn’t just turn up titles that match a keyword, or worse, titles that start with a keyword as they do now. Searching should bring up titles, descriptions, actors, actresses, directors, producers, production companies, other people/companies listed in the credits, channel the TV show originally aired on, and original air date or release date. You should also be able to search for advanced things like filming locations, character names, scene locations, viewer reviews, and other plot point keyword terms that might not fit into descriptions. This data needs to come straight from the content producers themselves. Some of the data can also come from sources like IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, or The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations. It needs to support boolean searching, misspelled words, misspelled names, and an auto-complete list of common searches based on what you have typed so far. Google has recently conducted some interesting research about viewers going “beyond-the-episode” in their search history and YouTube viewing history.

The categorization of content also has a long way to go before it’s usable. You should be able to go from “Drama” to “Historical Drama” all the way down to “Civil War Dramas” that can group all content across channels and sources and show relevant results. Netflix is notorious for categorizing its content down to eerily specific categories. Based on your viewing history, Netflix is great at guessing what you might want to watch next through its data algorithms and famously used crowd-sourcing to improve upon its algorithms through its Netflix Prize. But still, Netflix has a ways to go to improve the brows-ability of its categories and sub-categories to find categories or genres you might not have watched in the past but are still interested in.

Input TV providers need to re-think the ways viewers interact with the content they are looking for and watching. Yes, there still is a need for the channel up and down buttons for passive viewing and number keypads for users who love their channel numbers. But the vast majority of users would probably rather have a “smart” channel up and down. Instead of going up or down by channel number, it would go next and back with different content to serve up what the viewer might be most likely to watch based on a variety of different factors. For example, if I’ve watched 5 episodes of Breaking Bad in a row, chances are I want to continue watching this show. But I may also want to watch breaking news on a national or local level depending on what might be going on in the world. Or, a live sporting event that I’ve watched in the past. The possibilities are endless and need to be data-driven, context-driven, and most importantly, need to “delight” viewers. This takes lots of data on the back-end to power smart algorithms.

Tablets and smartphones are another great way of interacting with the TV screen. The TV guide and scrolling through categories and lists of shows are logical tasks for these screens. Comcast and others have started providing apps on iOS and Android for controlling their keyboard box and access to on-demand content. When I had access to it over the past couple of years, I favored using the Comcast iPad and iPhone apps over using the remote control. The problem with this is that it can’t control the TV volume, mute, power, and some other controls. It also can’t do real-time pause/resume of live TV, so you still need to constantly switch between the tablet and the remote. Any tablet/smartphone use for TV input needs to have full control of the entire experience. I realize this is no easy task with the need for IR blasters to control volume, but this needs to happen. TV manufacturers (like Samsung, Vizio, LG, and others) need to use Bluetooth or some other wireless control capabilities for control to allow other devices to easily control them without line-of-sight.

Typing on tablets and smartphones is another key feature to leverage. The Apple TV is a good example of this. When the Apple TV needs text input, I can fire up the Remote app on my iPad or iPhone and start typing quickly rather than relying on the arrow keys for typing. Arrow key typing is the worst and should be avoided at all costs.

Additional information (text content) on TV shows and movies are another key feature to add to tablets and smartphones. With the additional pixels and quick scrolling and swiping and closeness to the eye, it makes sense to add quick access to all of the data-centric text (program descriptions, actor information, plot points, etc.) (see above under search-ability) on these apps.

Voice Voice is the other powerful input that we are just starting to see breakthroughs around. On the mobile device front, we are seeing the power of voice with Apple's Siri, Google’s Google Now, and Microsoft’s Cortana. There is no reason why we can’t fully control our TV viewing experience with our voice. Voice-alone would not suffice, but it would be nice to have voice as an option. Searching and changing channels are the obvious use-cases for voice. Amazon’s latest entry into TV, the Amazon Fire TV, is the first offering to implement voice search. But voice has many possibilities beyond simple program or actor searching. If we correctly implement the use of “smart” channels that are essentially their own apps, each channel could have their own custom implementation for voice. For example, a news channel could allow you to search for recent stories by country, state, or keyword topic. Like on mobile apps, the possibilities for voice with TV are endless.

Web Video and Screen-Sharing Integration Mobile apps and web video are competing more than ever with TV watching. While viewers are watching TV, they are still using their mobile devices. They need an easy way to quickly broadcast the video content of apps and the web onto their HDTV. The Apple TV and Google Chromecast have emerged to fill this need. But this technology needs to be implemented everywhere on any device that might show TV content. A universal standard needs to be developed so that any device can be shared to any TV or connected-to-TV device. It needs to act like Apple’s AirPlay, Google’s Chromecast, or  Intel’s WiDi, but it cannot be proprietary or device-specific like these current technologies. A consortium of companies needs to be formed to create an open standard so that all companies can create this cross-device connection for video and screen-sharing and any desktop or mobile OS can easily take advantage of it. This is currently way more complicated than it needs to be.

Smart Advertising The horrors of TV commercials are very real and are getting worse and worse every year. The long string of pharmaceutical product commercials with longer lists of side effects makes watching the evening news a side-effect-inducing experience in its own right. The worst are sporting events with their male-focused pharmaceutical products with names that would block most web-filtering software (so I will refrain from using them). As a new father, I can’t stand exposing my son to this every time I watch sports. I wouldn’t mind advertisers knowing my age and some other demographic information to minimize the chances of seeing these commercials. Google provides relevant ads to its users as its revenue model and its users don’t mind and even get some value out of the ads. TV advertising needs to be beneficial for viewers. On Facebook, users can “like” advertisements. They can also hide all ads from a particular advertiser or say “I don’t want to see this” that would limit ads like the selected one. In short: TV ads need to be smarter and emulate web ads. If they don’t, TV will lose more and more ad dollars.

The content of TV programming can be used for smart advertising. For years, product placement in TV shows and movies has been increasing at a rapid rate. The camera angle showing the back of the laptop with the manufacturer prominently displayed is no accident. Advertisers can increasingly use second screens to promote their product placement to add even more value to their investments. Content providers that can offer this interaction will be the most successful with advertisers (and viewers). One interesting startup centered around this is The Take, which offers movie viewers an app that listens to a movie scene, offers a short clip of that scene, and allows the viewer to tap on various parts of the screen to find out more about the products and props used in the scene. The possibilities for advertisers are huge in this space and makes TV advertising relevant again.

Social The integration of social media into TV watching is the last major piece of the puzzle for TV. Viewers should be able to easily share what they’re watching on their favorite social network (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, etc.) along with their opinions. They should be able to share screenshots, short clips, or behind-the-scenes photos without fear of copyright infringement. Online sharing is one of the sincerest forms of marketing and content producers should want to make sharing as easy as watching.

Advertisers too can improve their social media effectiveness. Twitter is  making a huge push into the TV ad industry rolling out advanced analytics to show what users are saying about their ad campaigns. With share controls on the TV interface of their ads, they can drive real feedback and sharing into their specific ads.

TV media producers and advertisers both could benefit from improved feedback improvements through the user experience. They could provide fan surveys to poll viewers which characters or story lines are their favorite. Cast and crew members of the program can post messages that optionally show alongside the program or on the second screen (smartphone or tablet).

Remote watching with friends is another social feature that can delight viewers. Netflix used to have a feature through the Xbox 360 called “Watch with Friends”. I think this could be a useful feature in today’s age of real-time video gaming and chat. Friends and family no matter where they are could pick a movie or show and communicate via chat or voice (Skype, Google Hangouts, or other integration) no matter what device they are watching from. Popular or niche “cult" shows could hold viewing parties where fans watch and re-watch episodes to discuss the intricate plot points and character development. Again, the possibilities for this type of thing are endless and would only help drive paying viewers (and in turn, advertisers).

Glimmers of Hope

2014 and 2015 will only bring reports of even more cord-cutting news with increased media attention to viewers complaining about their sky-rocketing subscription TV bills and this media attention is important for change. In late 2013 and early 2014, there have been inklings of positive news in the TV industry. I believe that in 2014 we will hear a lot of rumors and we may see early releases from some companies and this will be covered more and more in the news. But I think in 2015, we will see some truly revolutionary advances that will bring many of these solutions to life and the content producers will increasingly license their content in new ways to help bring this to life. In part 4 of this blog series, I will cover all of the major companies in this space and the key companies that are most likely to take us there.

Photo credit from Flickr user schmilblick