Tomorrow's world: the television revolution coming to a screen near you

Next year the way we consume media will change beyond recognition. We’ll be able to watch what we want, where we want and when we want it — with screens on everything from our wrists to reading glasses — and the experience will be more multidimensional and interactive than ever before. Stephen Armstrong on the small-screen revolution
Steven Armstrong13 December 2013

When Doctor Who celebrated its 50th anniversary last month, it achieved a respectable 10.2 million viewers — not bad but no Strictly. Elsewhere, however, it was a different story: a record-breaking 1.3 million iPlayer views in the first 24 hours, 77 million viewers worldwide, the most tweeted-about drama ever, with a total of 442,692 tweets, peaking with 12,939 tweets a minute during the show’s opening moments.

And then there are the cinemas: big-screen showings took £6.25 million worldwide, making The Day of the Doctor the third highest- grossing ‘movie’ of the weekend behind Gravity and Hunger Games 2. You could argue that this captured an entire industry’s regeneration — the moment the old ways died off and the new ways emerged, dusting off the debris with a merry twinkle. From 2014, an awful lot of entertainment will be watched on smartphones, watched online, watched in binges or even watched on the big screen — although the plethora of platforms may boost rather than threaten the TV set itself. But how to negotiate all this change? Well, start here...

BOX FRESH

2014 is the year your TV set tries to kick your favourite broadcasters off its own screen altogether. For a start Apple is preparing to roll out its first TV, according to Masahiko Ishino, a media analyst in Japan, although: ‘It’ll probably be more of a smart monitor than what we think of as a TV.’ The 65-inch flat-screen device will wirelessly synchronise content with Apple’s other products. The dream is for you to listen and watch through iTunes only.

Elsewhere LG’s 2014 line of Smart TVs will come equipped with a similar set-up. AllJoyn is an open-source protocol that lets you share content with your mobile phone no matter which manufacturer is behind the TV set, or which mobile OS the phone is running. Samsung, on the other hand, is looking to provide you with programming. The widget-maker now has a programme acquisition team: there’s programming from Smartmove and Ministry of Sound on new TVs and the company recently tied up a deal with the BFI for a smart TV app offering Samsung customers the film institute’s archives, which feature the first ever film of a reigning monarch (Queen Victoria). Should you care? Maybe. LG Smart TVs collect data on your viewing, which gets sent to Korea so the company can target ads specifically at you.

It’s a desperate move — Smart TVs are the panicky best hope for TV manufacturers this year. TV sales are falling; in October Toshiba announced it would halve its TV division staff from 6,000 to 3,000, and close two of its three TV manufacturing plants. This is mainly down to phones and tablets, which account for two per cent of real-time TV viewing, 13 per cent of all online viewing and 40 per cent of iPlayer viewing in 2013.

EXPERIMENTAL FORMATS

The good news is that, as the House of Cards/Breaking Bad elements of the Netflix model suggest, high quality will do just fine. Indeed, US documentary giant the Discovery Channel has just started commissioning expensive drama. All told, 63 separate TV stations are hunting for drama scripts in the US, with Sky’s increased budget across Sky Arts, Sky Atlantic and Sky 1 offering a similar boost here. Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s production company is also expanding into television with half a dozen new scripted series being developed.

And 2014 will see two bold experiments where broadcasters are reminding us why TV stations can outpunch websites — in terms of budget, spectacle and cross-platform ambition. Channel 4 is showing Russell T Davies’ eight-part hour-long drama Cucumber about the passions and pitfalls of 21st-century gay life, following 46-year-old Henry and his boyfriend on a disastrous date night.

Cucumber’s sister series Banana — eight half-hour episodes — will follow the lives of Cucumber’s younger characters in more detail on E4, while Tofu, an anarchic online guide to sex inspired by the dramas, is updated each week. Davies explains how his inspiration came from a scientific institute that divided the male erection into four categories, from soft to hard: ‘One, tofu. Two, peeled banana. Three, banana. And four, cucumber. Right there and then I knew I had my drama.’

Over on the BBC there’s the launch of the First World War season — an astonishing 2,500 hours of dramas and documentaries across TV, radio and online that play out over the next four years marking the centenary. ‘Some aspects of the coverage have been planned since 2011, but just after the Olympics ended we began looking for projects we could imbue with similar scale and this proved the obvious candidate,’ says Adrian Van Klaveren, the former Radio BBC 5 Live controller whose job title for the past 12 months has been Controller, Great War Centenary.

This sort of blockbuster programming or ‘eventisation’, as the TV industry calls it, is a weapon in its own kind of trench warfare; between the beleaguered broadcasters and the aggressively expanding newcomers such as Netflix and YouTube but also TV manufacturers like Samsung, which has started buying up programming to run its own direct-to-viewer downloads and cut out cable, satellite and terrestrial altogether.

Newspapers, however, are fighting back and the newspaper you are reading is leading the charge with London Live, a full, highly localised service — a TV station launching in March with online, tablet, mobile, outdoor media and even taxis offering a 24/7 entertainment channel by and for Londoners. Standard journalists will be filing constantly using mobile-phone cameras and making full use of social media.

‘What’s surprising is that it’s taken so long to launch a station from here,’ explains Stefano Hatfield, editorial director at London Live. ‘New York, Toronto and even Geneva have one. We’ll make sure we’re going to where the viewers are, not expecting them to come to us — whether that’s phone, VoD or television.’

THE NEW GUARD

‘Breaking Bad did exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to do,’ says Edward Waller, editorial director of TV industry bible C21 Media. ‘Drama ratings usually start high and gradually trail off. Breaking Bad’s numbers grew and grew. Mainly that was due to Netflix — word of mouth spread and you’d find, just before each season started, a huge binge in viewing of the previous season. When Lost went out its plot was so complex if you missed an episode, you tuned out for good. These days, catch-up TV is giving scripted TV almost total victory — even the Discovery Channel is making drama now.’

Netflix, launched as a flat-fee subscription video rental service that sent out DVDs in the mail, is now the world’s leading video streaming service. In 2013 it launched its first homemade dramas, headed up by Kevin Spacey in House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. Profits soared — over three months this summer the company made £19.8 million as opposed to £7 million the previous year. Global subscribers topped 40 million and it’s now launching in France.

The company tailors viewing recommendations based on customers’ choices, meaning you should get the equivalent of your own Netflix library. In practice, roughly 90 per cent of Netflix users binge-watch seasons of shows in back-to-back marathons. But it’s not just Netflix: there are a ton of companies out there with similar offerings, including Tesco’s Blinkbox, Xbox, BT, Sky, iPlayer, even Google, which secured an exclusive deal with HBO for Game of Thrones, Girls, True Blood and Veep episodes on Android devices at the end of 2013, with the shows rolling out next year.

This is partly why DVD sales have plummeted, except for the kids’ market where people like to control what their children are watching. According to recent figures (January 2013) from the Entertainment Retailers Association more than a quarter of the entertainment market is now digital. At the start of 2013 sales of CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays and video games had fallen by almost 20 per cent.

But it’s not just catch-up TV that’s snatching your attention from the DVD boxset this year. Tesco, for instance, isn’t just bundling Blinkbox movies, snacks and drinks in a discount bundle for a Big Night In — it’s also made its own movies with the Jackie Collins rompbuster Paris Connections. Meanwhile, YouTube is giving up on videos of cute kittens as the centrepiece for a global business model. Over the past 12 months the company has been launching subscription channels, with payments from around £1 upwards buying viewers content from the likes of UFC, Sesame Workshop, National Geographic and Magnolia Pictures, as well as lending money to companies keen to launch their own online channels.

GOING VIRAL

At the start of 2014 there will be over one million channels generating revenue on YouTube, offering anything from investigative journalism through Arabic poetry to Hindi news. French broadcaster Canal+ starts broadcasting on YouTube next year, with 20 channels including film, news, and new web content from fledgling or mainstream artists — joining Big Brother producer Endemol, which is investing £25 million in its own channels in a bid, according to company president Tim Hincks, to bypass traditional TV channels.

‘It’s the old media broadcasters who are losing out as these new channels launch,’ says Sam Sniderman, managing director of Pulse Films, the British production company behind music videos from Jessie J and Coldplay. ‘They don’t understand how to create content for YouTube while YouTube natives — bedroom superstars or witty college kids — are now running their own programme budgets.’

‘The downside of this is that it’s harder for middle-ranking talent to break into the big leagues,’ explains Jon Thoday, joint managing director of Avalon, the comedy management and production company that handles Russell Howard, David Baddiel and Chris Addison. ‘DVDs gave comedians revenue and reputation. At the moment sites like Netflix don’t offer the same money, aren’t in the same number of homes and don’t really have a library significantly better than, say, Sky Movies.’

The upside for Thoday is the boom in live audiences across borders: ‘Russell Howard doesn’t have a TV show in the US, but he’s gigging there and we’re selling out,’ Thoday explains. ‘That wouldn’t have happened ten years ago but Good News was pirated over there. You’re also seeing the reverse — US comics like Rob Delaney selling out London gigs thanks to one tweet. Of course, it’s hard to keep on top of all this as a viewer, whose ideal is to get everything through one screen for not much money — that’s not happening yet.’

2014 may see it happen, though, says Jean-Paul Edwards, executive director of futures at ad agency Manning Gottlieb OMD. ‘We’re coming to the end of a 30-year process of digitisation running from 1990 to 2020,’ he explains. ‘In 2014, most of the UK will get 4G mobile broadband, you’ll have fast streaming, and people will finally start using embedded intelligence like Siri properly.’

TURN ON, TUNE IN

This isn’t great news for some sections of the entertainment world — music radio, for instance. It was Sean Parker putting Lorde on his Spotify playlist Hipster International that broke her in the US. Over the past five years, radio listening by the UK’s 15- to 24-year-olds has dropped by two and a half hours per week. The drop isn’t in the car or at college, it’s in the home as teens turn to the internet.

‘The BBC has traditionally brought in younger audiences by playing new music on Radio 1,’ says Radio 1 controller Ben Cooper. ‘If that stops and a generation doesn’t get the BBC habit, it’s almost an existential problem for the corporation. There are some fundamental questions the BBC needs to ask itself if the Trust places that responsibility in our hands. The key one is what does radio look like on a screen? Because that’s where the listeners we’re charged with reaching are right now.’

NON DIMENSION

TV manufacturers predicted an explosion in 3D TV sets over 2012 and 2013 but it didn’t happen. The BBC put 3D programming on hold in the autumn, ESPN closed down its 3D sports channel over the summer and HBO spent most of 2013 reminding everyone it had no plans to go 3D. 2014’s answers to questions no TV viewers were asking are threefold: 4K or Ultra HD TVs, capable of displaying four times the resolution of current HDTV; OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screens that deliver richer colours; and curved panels designed to provide a more immersive experience. The only market that’s really growing is internet-connected TV, which will reach 759 million sets by 2018, according to Digital TV Research.

To be fair, it’s not just TV manufacturers who will be worrying about tablets and smartphones this year. New handsets from Nokia, HTC and LG will have larger displays and superfast quad-core hardware. Phones like the LG G Flex and Samsung Galaxy Round are offering bendable screens. And this year sees the launch of wearable tech. Following on from Google Glass (which gets prescription lenses this spring), Sony and Samsung will be delivering smartwatches, while Looxcie and VIO are offering wearable video cameras designed to capture real-time point-of-view video clips.

THINKING OUTSIDE THE NET

Established websites should effectively give up on the computer screen, according to 17-year-old software millionaire Nick D’Aloisio, who sold his news aggregator Summly to Yahoo for £19 million earlier this year. ‘It’s mobile first and only,’ he believes. More than half of Facebook use is by mobile and Facebook Home, a new strategy designed to turn your Android phone into a Facebook phone by stealth, which is annoying the pants off Google.

‘I think the web is undergoing a realignment — search was the organising principle of the web but now social has become the way people connect with news and information,’ says Jonah Peretti, founder of BuzzFeed. Seventy-five per cent of BuzzFeed’s traffic comes from people sharing his pictures, lists and news via social networks — with 50 per cent of them coming via mobile phone. ‘The network has moved beyond the bored-at-work audience to the bored-in-line audience, viewing on mobile while they wait for the bus.’

The UK is his fastest-expanding market — five million and growing, with specific UK content being shared the most. ‘Localised content that speaks to people’s sense of identity is so important for BuzzFeed,’ Peretti says. He’s planning on building an investigative journalism team in 2014, which aims to use BuzzFeed’s network to produce strong local reporting — competing directly with the newspapers that many of his users post links to.

Which is curiously consoling. With Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post, Peretti launching an investigative journalism team and gadgets-for-gadgets-sake (like 3D TV) faltering, it’s clear where the future of entertainment lies. On stage, on the phone, at home, in a cab, on paper, plastic or virtual reality headsets, Londoners still want the same thing they wanted back in 1963 with Doctor Who; 1863 when Collins Music Hall opened; and 1663 when the third folio of Shakespeare’s plays was published — a good story well told. ES

Watch this space

Stephen Armstrong rounds up the latest TV tech developments

A new Galaxy - Samsung Galaxy Round

The first of a new generation of curved phones designed either to replicate the effects of immersive TV or to hurt less if you sit down with one in your back pocket. Rollingthe phone from side to side on a table accesses different menus, which may become more useful over time. Samsung is aiming for foldable screens next.

Game theory - Xbox One

Technically the Xbox 3, despite its title — the ‘One’, presumably, implying the Next Generation. Gaming, cable TV, music and movies all in one surprisingly large box that will squat beside your telly like the 2001 monolith. Expensive and, well, not bad. Games and content have some proving to do, however.

Play time - PlayStation 4

If you can find one, the angular design and complicated powering-up routine are the first features to deal with. After that, flicking between Amazon and Call Of Duty is as simple as navigating a hotel TV menu. Indeed, that’s a teeny bit what this feels like.

Appy and you know it - Google

Google is literally in your face this year, especially if you buy Google Glass. Android dominates the smartphone market, and the company’s app store now includes exclusive programming. Google TV — which analysts expect to be rebranded Android TV in 2014 — spreads through Smart TVs from most manufacturers, and the digital media player Google Chromecast, a dongle that plugs into your TV and streams shows via Wi-Fi, will launch in the UK this year. The Google+ social network remains a bit of a tumbleweed zone but the company announced plans for a robot war with Amazon — sadly not presented by Craig Charles.

Flex time - LG G Flex

With a flexible plastic OLED screen, the G Flex doesn’t bend that much — it’s locked into a face-hugging curve. The back of the phone is made from self-healing plastic, which sounds alarmingly similar to the T-850 Terminator. The screen is a large six inches.

Take a bite - Apple TV

Reputedly Steve Jobs’ last great dream was the iTV, which works better as a brand outside the UK, of course. Apple TV currently applies to a box that streams iTunes content plus the usual suspects from Netflix to YouTube on to an HDTV set. Next autumn, according to rumours, full TV sets — a 55-inch and a 65-inch model — hit the shelves. Expect them to centralise everything and take over your entire life in a subtle, discreet way until ultimately you crave submission.

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