What’s the point of an Android-powered TV - isn’t television supposed to be kind of dead anyway? Now, let’s be realistic. Dead looks like GM’s Hummer: a broad butted relic from those merry days, when the environment was something to train your four wheel drive in.
Sure, TV as-is gets into some rough spots: economic downturns and big corp ad spending don’t go that well together. Local TV has been an almost exclusive ad playground for local car dealers. Tivos are attacking scheduling and audience flows. But, guess what: people are still watching. Because, addictions are hard to break.
Still, we tend to mix the means of delivering content (broadcasting television) with consuming this content (watching tv). For peak audience content, broadcasting is still hard to beat (just look at the half a billion Dollars big G is supposedly shelling out for streaming YouTube’s vids). But descheduling and instant access, that’s is pretty much how consumer’s want to see their future tv. That’s why the toughest competitor to network tv is not a YouTube channel, but your home network.
I really mean it: if you’re running a tv network, treat home networks as potential affiliates in a different time zone. And that’s how we’re coming back to Android. It’s just a boring operating system, currently huffing and puffing inside some halfway decent smartphones. It’s free (hardware guys like that idea) and the potential trojan horse for one of the most aggressive data driven media companies (like phone book publishers in the 20th century) in the whole world. Which is a bad metaphor, as ye olde Greeks needed their one trick pony to resolve a 10 year long siege. But the Goog needs a whole army of tiny trojans to foster new markets to prevent itself from becoming the one trick pony riders of the contextual text ad.
Now, what’s good for Google isn’t necessarily good for the rest of us. If an 800 pound gorilla waltzes through the jungle, “do no evil” does not prevent massive collateral damage. But especiallly in the realm of TV and TV distribution, some creative destruction might be welcome.
I don’t believe in Android powered TVs as a home media platform. It’s bad practice to hardwire a piece of furniture (displaying device: life expectancy of roughly a decade) with a computing platform (tends to age in hyperspeed). But if my stupid Android-enabled TV talks to my Android-powered smartphone, we might be getting somewhere. Especially, if everything’s linked in the background by one mighty media company.
For developers, the beauty of a concept like Android for TV is easy: the days of the web as the all consuming platform are numbered. We’re entering a data driven world, with lots of devices and platforms, talking to API-enabled services. Look at Twitter as a poster child. Conten/data and presentation layer are not related in any kind of way.
On the other hand, the world of tv distribution and its related hardware is still a cumbersome hodgepodge of everything. It’s the old school of electric media, when radio was a humming thingy called radio, which was sitting in your living room, which you turned on to listen to: radio. Don’t expect anyone anytime soon referring to his tv or whatever device as an Android.
German pubcasters are the BBC on steroids. Moneywise, at least. Their combined annual budget dwarfs the GNP of a couple of lesser UN-members. And even hardboiled tax collectors blush at the methods of their fee collecting agency GEZ.
Don’t get me wrong. Strong and independent public broadcasting is an important asset. As seen in the US, a beggar’s banquet of impoverished do-gooders cannot counterweight a fully commercialized brainwash attack. State controlled tv is a terrific tool for thriving populists, post-imperial imperialists, and media savy dictatorships (and definitely not an option).
Still. If you want to collect billions and billions of Euros for the greater good, a well aged argumentation line from the black and white days of the tube won’t do you any good. EU commissioners want to pull the plug (commercial broadcasters will see to that). And the German publishers are finally starting to see a problem with those hidden champion media empires. Because it’s not about here’s print, there’s tv anymore. On the web, all media cats are prey.
The last political fiddlings ended with some strange solutions like this. Yes, the pubcasters can put some their video assets onto the web. But after seven days, they have to be removed. Weird. Even weirder: there are paid deals between mega publishers and mega pubcasters on video syndication. Uhum. Excuse me. Looking at organizational structures of German pubcasters, the micro money passed from WAZ to WDR most likely won’t even cover the process cost. So it’s probably all very strategic. Or maybe just helpless. Redefining public broadcasting for a networked, digital media world it isn’t. (Because, more likely, it will look more like this.)
It’s not helping anyway. Will Münchner Erklärung, the Munich Declaration of the big wigs of German publishing, kill public broadcasting? Nope. We’re more likely talking about assisted suicide anway.