TV in the Future: Why Recommendations will be Key
Right now we are slap bang in the middle of TVs biggest change since black and white to colour. No, not analogue to digital but scheduled television to on demand.
No longer are we tied to listings and repeats for our telly watching, we can now view shows when we want and how we want. This change has been happening perhaps without you even knowing it. When we stopped recording shows on VHS, recordable DVD tried to fill the gap but another way of recording took over our living room the hard drive and along with it the electronic programme guide. Or, as we all know and love it, the EPG.
These two things have freed us up to watch television when we want to. Not home in time for EastEnders? No problem, record it for later. Missed Hollyoaks? It doesnt matter as it is stored on your hard drive ready for when you want it.
Demand for On Demand
This was primer to what we are now calling on-demand television. The idea of watching television through the internet was something of a hard sell before the BBC iPlayer came along. Now, as long as you have a half-decent and plentiful broadband connection, most people have piped a show through their router. In fact, the Beebs own stats reckon in January of this year there were 272 million requests for shows a phenomenal amount that shows just how popular on demand is.
Thankfully in recent years set-top box manufacturers have gotten wise to this rise in on demand and have begun integrating many on-demand services into their boxes. Some, such as YouView, have even added deeper integration so that you can search backwards on the EPG, find a show you may have missed and simply click to watch.
And this is only going to get better and easier. Once more channel providers understand the immense power of streaming, these services will work in unison with your set top until you simply dont care where your TV comes from be it aerial, cable or satellite as long as you can watch the shows you want when you want.
This is the inevitable and exciting future for TV. This isnt a future that programme makers and channel bosses should fear but embrace. The quality of the content will incrementally rise, we are already seeing 4K televisions coming to market, but the big thing that everyone in the TV business needs to make sure happens is how we find the content we want to watch.
The future of TV means things like programme listings will need to evolve and adapt. Things like ratings will need to completely change - this is already happening with Nielsen in the US using Twitter retweets to measure a shows success. Algorithms will also need to improve so that our TV tells us what to watch next, rather than us telling it what we want to watch.
The rise of more things to watch, and more ways to watch whether new or from archives means that we will be spoilt for choice. However, if TV manufacturers dont figure out more sophisticated ways to recommend the viewer things to watch, then this choice will unfortunately be spoiled.
Marc Chacksfield is Deputy Editor of TechRadar, the biggest technology website in the UK and has written this blog especially for YouView. www.techradar.com
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TV in the Future: Why Recommendations will be Key
