Here’s a fascinating data point. Speaking at a London conference this week, BBC’s Daniel Danker shared how the network’s video platform, iPlayer, gets four times as much traffic from its iPad app than from its connected TV apps — even though there are twice as many connected TV app installs. He took the opportunity to urge connected TV makers to simplify their offerings, build user interfaces that work for TV and stop pushing firmware updates.
“If connected TV is going to be mainstream, you have to go back to basics,” he told delegates at the DTG Summit 2012 in London, adding that he still remains bullish about the promise of connected TV.
Here at Lost Remote, we’ve been covering interactive TV off-and-on for 12 years, and while the technology has been there all along, the complexity has kept it from scaling. Different technology in different set-tops working in different walled-gardens that seem to get upgraded every few months without any backwards-compatibility. So when Apple’s iPhones and iPads came along — and to a lesser extent Google’s Android platform — it offered a standardization and scale that developers could count on. Hence, the second screen and a new promise of interactive TV.
Similar to interactive TV, much of the challenge of connected TV to date — other than a few “big” apps like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube — is the lack of a vibrant developer community that will invest in applications that 1) become outdated in six months or 2) few people will use. Without developer buy-in, we won’t see connected TV apps that take advantage of the medium; instead, we’ll see extensions of mobile apps to TV. Or in some cases, few apps at all. While Android’s TV apps have helped solve the compatibility problem, they’ve yet to achieve scale with Google TV (still under 1 million devices, according to recent reports). And everyone’s watching Apple to see if they’ll unlock iOS apps for TV, which could be a defining moment in the industry.
Connected TV makers are working on these problems, and a new marketing association formed to help simplify the value proposition of connected TV. In the meantime, most media companies are focusing their precious development resources primarily on mobile and tablet experiences, waiting for connected TV to reach the simplicity, scale and consistency to justify the development investment.