The TV industry is ripe for disruption and it’s holding on for dear life. The traditional content producers (studios) and the cable companies are holding on to that old business model till the last dollar is squeezed out of it. Unfortunately for them, the market is starting to dictate how things will play out and just as the music industry was made to adapt, the television industry will have the same fate.
Let me clarify what adapt means, it means television viewing will go from analog delivery to digital media, we will become more immersed in social media connected viewing along with second screens and we will watch what we want to watch, when we want to watch and from any device we want to watch, no more cable bundles and set showtimes.
The best examples of the future of TV is Netflix.com, Hulu.com, Apple’s iTunes and Amazon.com’s Video on Demand. We have the option with these stations to watch whatever we want to watch based on their offerings. Ala Carte channels and not bundles will become how we choose our channels, which is vastly different from our current cable company offerings.
Likewise, as the internet continues to infiltrate every aspect of our lives, we find that we are able to connect from more and more places with faster broadband and mobile connections, thus that gives us the ability to consume more media anytime, anyplace from any internet enabled media device.
Currently, Internet television devices such as the Roku, Google ChromeCast, Amazon Fire TV, Apple tV or Xbox are just getting started in changing our living room experience. But what if in the future the living room TV device watches us, allows us to connect with social media and actually knows us better than any Nielsen device. It will know our watching habits, what our eyes do during commercials, what we talk about during shows as well as our demographics. This will be a goldmine for advertisers and they will monetize this information, which will in turn motivate the content producers which will motivate the cable companies. That is the final piece in helping the content producing studios (and even cable companies) in moving to this future television experience because now the financial benefits are realized.
Now how does the church get involved, well they can now get on Internet TV enabled devices such as Roku or Amazon Fire and establish channels so that when the public continues this migration, they will be used to consuming church media from these devices.