What will happen to television the coming years? Lots of people in the industry are experimenting with new ways of producing and broadcasting. The key element is creating a dialog with us, the viewers. Television becomes personalized the way all mass communication has become over it’s history. But to become personalized, lots of the way television works has to be redefined. What will this dialogue look like, Television will not survive as an isolated box. Television is no longer the star of the show. It’s just a member of the cast. Television is still like going out to dinner with somebody who just talks all the time. Television has got to learn how to be part of a conversation, until it does that, it’s going to continue to become less and less relevant.
More and more young viewers are leaving television for what it is and turn to the Internet. I think the role of the isolated television as it is will be for big events that involve us all (Iraq, disasters, elections etc.). Next to that there will be hundreds and hundreds of smaller niche voices that try to reach out to small interest groups in the audience. Simultaneously the audience itself is going to be assembling itself into those groups, defining their common interest. It will be sensible for television companies to expand by growing into collaborations with the audience. Consumers should be able to dictate or indicate what kind of content they want. This can be done through interactivity, co-creation and dialogue. I wonder what this looks like.
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What are you talking about when you say ‘television’? Is it the business, is it the content, is it the infrastructure? How do you define ‘television’?
I think that is important, because television will evolve in very different ways on these levels. For instance, if you talk about a television show like CSI. The fact that you can now see those episodes also in your video store, did change the business, but not the content…