TV Is a Service

Today, "TV" proximally means one or both of two things:

1. A large glass panel on which moving pictures are displayed, and/or
2. A network of distribution interests responsible for choosing which of those pictures should appear on which of those screens at which times.

Both meanings are shallow; they tell us very little about what TV is for or why anyone cares. The first is purely a technical description, and the latter says more about entrenched economic interests than it does about problems to be solved.



TV is not a device, and it is not a network. TV is a service. It is the service of delivering video that people want to see at the time and place they want to see it. The purpose of this service is to entertain, educate, and inspire people by engrossing them in a comfortable environment for an extended period of time.

Boiling down the nature of the service in this way can help us understand how TV as an industry is transforming and will transform in the future.

First of all, it becomes immediately clear that TV-the-device is not the core of the service or of the experience that the service creates; it is an accessory. It is an enhancement to the experience in the event that certain conditions are met: the viewer is in a certain place for a certain period of time with a certain threshold for distraction. But these conditions are not always met. A handheld or laptop device may deliver the same content with a better experience when conditions are different.

Second of all, it is likewise clear that those who provide great content on demand on whatever screen each viewer is currently using will succeed. Those that continue to believe in television sets and Prime Time will fail. Those that believe that it is acceptable to deliver a lot of dross as a condition of delivering a little bit of gold will fail. And those extraneous hangers-on who believe that they can interpose themselves between the producers of great content and the people who want to watch it will likewise fail. Netflix gets it. HBO is headed in the right direction, but they've got the albatross of the cable companies around their necks. And those cable companies are just straight-up screwed. They are what AOL was in 2001: sad remnants of a bygone age holding their customers and the industry back until their inevitable collapse.