Tag Archives: Social Media

Facebook Pages: No one is talking about you!

About 3 – 4 years back, Facebook Pages was a hot property. Till just some time back, every brand, every advertiser wanted as many “Likes” as possible. At peak of this trend, some brands even did press releases on reaching 1 Million Likes.

Here is some bad news for Social Media Agencies, Consultants and every concerned with Social Media, Facebook Pages as a product has reached end of its life cycle and is no more valuable for brands. Why do I say this?

Check the metrics for some of the most popular internet brands in India and also International brands.

As defined by Facebook, the ‘People talking about this’ includes – likes, comments, shares, answering a question, responding to a event and claiming a offer. The average ‘People Talking about This’ is drastically reduced to just about 2%.

Why is this happening –

Facebook has two current priorities – Improve (and retain) User Engagement & Grow Revenues.
In a attempt to retain user engagement, Facebook wants users to engage with each other (people to people) and not with applications or pages.
To grow revenues, Facebook wants you to pay to reach its audience. If the natural viral factor is high, brands no longer have to pay Facebook.
More pointers on this in my earlier post, where I said Facebook is no longer a powerful distribution platform.

What this implies –

Most pages listed above are currently (probably) not advertising on FB. It effectively means that the natural engagement of a Facebook page is now at a average of 2%.
If only 2% of your page audience is going to engage, the ‘viral factor’ that introduced new users to your page will be a minuscule number.
If a brand has gathered Facebook Fans / Likes by doing advertisements for its pages, value of the money spent is $0 today.
In case you are running any advertisements to get Likes to your page, consider halting it.
The only way to reach your own audience (people who have liked you) is using advertising tools like ‘Boost Post’.

So why is it a dead product? If a Facebook page (as a product) that has over a million users connected to it, but generates only 2% engagement and possibly even less viral factor is as good as dead. As a transaction product (like ecommerce) the conversions from Facebook Page will be further down since your posts reach a smaller percentage of ‘your Facebook audience’.

Going forward if the audience that you are building through Facebook Page is never going to engage with your posts, it might be a better option for advertisers to consider simply running CPC advertisements to target the necessary demographic, take users to their website and engage them there (back to pre-social media days of Facebook).

If you are a start-up building products around Facebook Pages or anything that concerns with distribution through Facebook Pages or even through Facebook, take a hard look at the data / funnels.

Some exceptions above are Mashable, BuzzFeed and 9GAG. Why? Because they are in the content business (yes Mashable too, in my opinion its no more a social media site) and for the fact that they have exceptionally high engagement numbers is probably because they are the only ones doing content marketing right on Facebook!

For everyone else, no one really is talking about you on Facebook. Not unless you are paying for it!

15 Steps towards Building a Great Product!

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Note: I recently gave a talk at The Startup Leadership Program and shared thoughts on Product Management and how to go about building great technology products. The deck I shared is embedded w/t the post.

This for all founders & product geeks (that includes me too) who want to build the next great product. Sharing all this for #StartupKarma (Heard this from Bowei – ‘Continue to give away and help other entrepreneurs with a hope that it comes back to you someday!’)

15 Steps towards building a Great Product! from P J

The Background:
As a startup founder, one gets bombarded with advice on pitching, raising investments, growth hacking, marketing and so on. It comes to us through one-on-one interactions, posts we read or multiple startup events and meetups. Unfortunately there is very little or no advice that actually helps you build your product.

Over months, I have studied product patterns in several successful products (like Facebook, Twitter, Quora and so on). This has made me believe that building great products is not just about picking random ideas and shooting in the dark, its a art and science both put together.

Here is a step by step guide for building a great product. I have taken Twitter in this case to demonstrate the examples, however you will be surprised to see the similarities with other products.

Note: Don’t proceed without understanding #0; and without finishing #1 & #2.

#0 | Think: Product does Marketing
The thumb rule for any great product is that you don’t need to market it; it requires zero marketing spends. Instead, it is the users who spread the word, acquire more users which leads to high growth. High virality and strong engagement are the two striking characteristics of a great product.

So here is the step by step guide towards building the next great product!

</end 0>

#1 | Think: What product are you building?
Have clarity about the product you are building. Make your product statement!

Here are the rules:

Define your product in < 10 words. This is not your pitch statement, its your “product statement”.
Be grammatically correct, include name of your product in these 10 words.
No references with other startups / products. This cannot be “AirBnB for Cars” or “Facebook for Companies”.

Share this product statement with others. Does it communicate ‘everything’ your startup is going to build? If it does not, work on this again!

</end 1>

#2 | Think: Vision
Most startups have beginnings over a random idea (usually this sounds like a billion dollar idea then). Once those ideas get built in 3-6 months, the founders are lost and clueless on what next!

Have a vision around this product you are building. You can run out of ideas, but you can’t run out of vision. Build a product roadmap around this vision. (I mentioned it last year too – point 5 )

Make a note of the vision for your startup / company. Check if the product statement you wrote in Step 1 is the right to achieve the vision you just stated.

Now lets start with building!

</end 2>

#3 | Think: Atomic Unit of Product
I picked this up from Fred Wilson’s post which got me thinking for days on my our own product and even inspired me to rethink on our product / vision.

What is the atomic unit of your product? Example; Atomic unit of Twitter is a ‘Tweet’. For Facebook it is a status update. For Instagram it is a photo. For Gmail it is a email. For YouTube it is a video.

Simple rules about Atomic Unit of your product:

It has to be owned by you.
It should be only one. More than one atomic unit? Signs of trouble!
Your product statement and vision should be centered around this atomic unit.

</end 3>

#4 | Think: Features

Were always confused on figuring out which features to build and which to let go? Answer is simple – build features only around the atomic unit of your product.

Example., Twitter’s core features – reply, retweet, favorite & follow (a user who tweets) are build around its core atomic unit – “tweet”.

Rules to remember:

List down all features you can think / build around the atomic unit of your product!
Strip down all the features you have on your product that are not centered around this atomic unit.

</end 4>

#5 | Think: Engagement
Want your users / customers to engage with your product – ensure that features you have selected to build around the atomic unit lead drive engagement.

Example., In case of Twitter, the engagement is Retweets, Favorites and Conversations that one can have around the atomic unit ‘tweet’. Similarly for Facebook it is – Likes, Comments, Shares and so on.

Don’t getting fascinated by engagement features around popular products and force-fit them on your product. Example., force-fitting the favorites like functionality from Twitter on your product.

Rules to remember:

Drive engagement around the atomic unit of the product.
Be innovate. Try multiple options to figure out the perfect fit around your product.
Engagement should be measurable! (Example., 35 Retweets)

</end 5>

#6 | Think: Flexibility

Most startup founders I meet are not flexible. They don’t want to change their product and want users to follow a certain flow which they believe which is right. When asked why, most of the times the answer is “we don’t want to let user play around the product”.

Think twice. Your product should be flexible and your users ‘must play’ with your product. Your product should be flexible at its core – at its atomic unit! Example., Twitter lets you tweet text, a photo, video, post, location & in multiple languages. Others., Facebook lets your post a status that is a text, photo, video and so on. Same for Quora, Tumblr and the rest.

Rules to Remember:

Give freedom to your user to play with your product.
List down all formats in which a user can express the atomic unit of your product.

</end 6>

#7 | Think: Distribution

Key to success of any platform – distribution. Why does this come so late? – You need to build your product right before you even think distribution.

Most founders think distribution is ‘sharing on other platforms’. It is not! Before you even get to allow users to share & distribute to other platforms like Facebook or Twitter, get users to distribute on your own product.

Example., Retweet on Twitter, Share on Facebook, Upvote on Quora, etc are the best examples of on-site distribution.

Rules to Remember:

Distribution should be centered around the ‘atomic unit’ of your product.
If a user has not distributed anything on your product, very rarely would be distribute something outside of it.
Don’t force-fit social in your product. Users will figure out way to share if they like something!

</end 7>

#8 | Think: Endorsements
Don’t we breath and live endorsements in our every day lives? Why do we forget to build that in the products we create. Great products use endorsements in every element – it brings out relevance & context to information.

Example., If you notice every element of Twitter has a endorsement if you are logged in. This includes – Retweeted by, Follow Suggestions, Profile Views and Search Results.

Rules to Remember:

Endorsements work 100% of the time. Build them in your product.
Anything that is not context is spam. (Said this earlier)

</end 8>

#9 | Think: User Psychology
Most entrepreneurs want users to love their product. Truth is, users don’t love your product. They love the content (or data) on it!

Example., We love to express ourselves on Twitter. Discover best answers on Quora. See moments shared by friends on Facebook.

So if you are building a product, remember to allow users to create their own content and discover relevant content. Don’t try to get users forcefully share something to Facebook or Twitter, it will not work.

Rules to Remember:

Content should be expressed in the atomic unit of your product. Nothing else.
Creation of content is much more valuable than sharing of content.
If a user has created some content on your product, has something he owns – he is engaged.

</end 9>

#10 | Think: Content Dynamics
Once you let users create content on your site, ensure you understand the content dynamics – most importantly that user’s need for that content to be seen! This is step 2 of user psychology – he needs activity around it that will keep him engaged through the features you have built around the atomic unit.

Example., If I tweet something on Twitter, who consumes that content? Not all of my 1000+ followers on Twitter, many of them may never notice it. But there are few followers who will retweet that and amplify the tweet.

You need to have features (again around the atomic unit of the product) that amplifies / distributes the content. And users who do these are your content curators! That is all one needs to know about content dynamics!

Rules to Remember:

Great content is created by just 1% of your users; That is amplified by 10% content curators – their actions make things go viral!
When content from your product goes viral, in in true sense your product goes viral.

</end 10>

#11 | Think: One Point of Discovery

Building product with above elements is important, and now crucial is to package that all in to a exemplary product design. The thumb rule here is simple – user should be able to do everything that has been mentioned here (till now) on one screen.

Example., the logged in interface of Twitter, Facebook or Quora (though imo Quora still needs some improvements).

Rules to Remember:

Don’t build a product around design. Build design around the product.
Minimize page views, clicks. User should be able to complete 75% tasks / actions of your product from the screen he is displayed where he logs in.

</end 11>

#12 | Think: Privacy
This point is intentionally left blank. That is all I have to say about privacy!

</end 12>

#13 | Think: MVP
Stop building minimum viable products, users won’t adopt them. Instead build more valuable products, I wrote a full post on this topic – the minimum viable product trap!

Still not convinced, here are some examples –

Bing is a good search engine (if you have not tried it lately, you should). Still we continue to user Google regularly and did not shift. Why? Because there is nothing more valuable it has compared to Google.
Outlook, is now probably as fast as Gmail and with most (of the commonly used) features that users would expect. Yet Gmail continues to lead because Outlook provides nothing more valuable than Gmail.
We did not move from Dropbox to Google Drive. Same., not more valuable.
While in case of WhatsApp, we all moved not just from text messaging to WhatsApp, but also dumped Facebook Chat, GTalk and many other products. Why? – because it is more valuable!

Rules to Remember:

Build something of value to users, that will drive adoption of your product.
Build your product for real users, not for early adopters.

</end 13>

#14 | Think: Growth
If building the right product is the toughest thing to do for a startup, distributing it right is even more tougher. If your distribution plan includes advertising or spending $$$s – then you need to rethink your strategy.

As a startup, you need to completely rely on any existing network to bootstrap your initial growth. Even the existing successful products have, some examples –

Twitter: Live tweets at SXSWi conference displayed on large TV screens.
Facebook: Opened initially in Harward, and more schools later.
YouTube: Nike Advt went viral. Plus many users embedded YouTube videos on then popular MySpace.
Gmail: It was a mail service from Google. Invitation Only. Anyone searching for email services on Google.com was shown advts for Gmail.
Quora: Initially opened to Facebook Alumni network
Zynga: Facebook Feeds.
Dropbox: Invites by Email + Connect Facebook & Twitter accounts.

Rules to Remember:

Bootstrap your growth on other existing successful & large networks.
The networks could be online or offline. Focus on only one!

</end 14>

#15 | Think: Shipping Fast
Many entrepreneurs / founders keep delaying their public beta as they wait endlessly to build a perfect product. This can be very frustrating since the perfect product is always 2 or 3 more features away. Some of the common reasons I hear is – “What if early adopters don’t like the current version of product? what if they rant about it on Twitter?”

Founders should also know that early adopters are very considerate – they know this is the first version of product that is being shipped. In my case, I rarely rant about early stage startups. To communicate something or to share feedback I shoot a email to the founders. In case I really like a product I spread the word for it. Yes, but I do rant if a startup has raised a Series A, in this case I assume you should have a product where silly mistakes are not acceptable 😛

Rules to Remember:

Ship a Imperfect Product. Its OK!
Collect feedback and ship changes fast. Ensure your write to your users and update them when feedback is implemented.

</end 15>

Concluding Notes:
Building products is not easy! Most of the time its shooting in the dark with no clear modelling that lets the product manager believe if a feature you are building will work or not. As startups, we are pressed on time and a wrong feature can cost us time & money.

It took me quite some time to study and understand these unique patterns in several successful products which includes Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Quora and others; finally had a chance to put that on a deck and now on this post.

While this product management process has been personally very helpful for us at Wishberg; I plan to update this over time as I learn, understand and implement more. Would also want to hear your thoughts on this, please write to me on pj @ beingpractical.com on your learnings and inputs.

Thank You!

Social Commerce is Simple

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Social Commerce is Simple. Here is how you solve it in 24 hours!

The Context of this post: Have been hearing & participating in some awesome conversations lately about Social Commerce. Someone explained me this – Transactional eCommerce is Big. Social media is where all users are today, it is already very Big.

So, Social + eCommerce = Social Commerce = Very very big!

Hence there is lot of interest today in products and platforms that are trying to bridge the gap. Analysts are predicting that its the next big thing and stating it is reaching its inflection point.

Completely agree with all that. But Social Commerce is simple, here is how you solve it.

Social commerce is Simple

View more presentations from P J.

Oooops, btw did I tell you that more than $50 Million has been invested till date to solve this Social Commerce problem that merchants can do it themselves in less than 24 hours!

The following text is not included in above presentation.

Some key insights for players in Social Commerce:

Existing ecosystem of eCommerce and Social Media is sufficient for building a Social Commerce without intermediation of players who do not add any value.

It will be difficult for a:

Existing social player to exploit potential of social commerce by introducing a new ecommerce service
(Facebook or Twitter trying to build a Amazon)
Existing ecommerce player to exploit potential of social commerce by introducing a new social service.
(Amazon trying to build a Facebook or Twitter)

Most current players who are trying to build solutions are concentrating on building their own ecosystem of users & products – which is not impossible but extremely challenging. Reason being – such players do not own the products or the users (users that have more tight social connections as on Facebook & Twitter)

Unless a third situation happens – someone builds a valuable middle layer that provides affinity to both – social & commerce. As an platform in this case you need to provide enough value to users (either users from Social Media or users from eCommerce).

One such promising player is FourSquare. They add a new value of – “checking in” to its users that are socially connected. Their current efforts are concentrated on getting these Social Connections to checkin to venues – which is demonstrated by its 6Mn+ users.

For purpose of this presentation I have kept other Social Models out –

Foursquare: Because its reach is still 1% compared to Facebook’s 600 Million users.
Groupon: It is a commerce player, but not social player. Groupon is not user engagement – view Fred Wilson’s comments here: http://t.co/p78buu0

Drop me a mail, Available for Coffee and endless Product Management Conversations on weekends 🙂

Twitter Business Model – 8th Wonder of the World

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Twitter – the microblogging platform that revolutionized social media. Tons of businesses today are revolved around the tweetoconomy (tweet economy) – right from developing applications, social media agencies, and so on.

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While it might be an billion dollar economy that revolves around twitter and social media today, unfortunately Twitter still is trying to evolve its own business model. My argument here is that although the Twitter ecosystem is valuable, its going to be very challenging to monetize it. Twitter may have some business model (as it now has – promoted tweets, trends and users) but it will not justify the investments made in Twitter and the valuation it has today.
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And discovering that business model which justifies the valuation & investment may be as good as finding the eighth wonder of the world. Here is why:
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Twitter ecosystem consists of three factors:

Users – who tweet
Tweets – the 140 character messages which users write
Applications – all applications that allow users to write these tweets

All other functions of twitter – search, trends, lists, etc are functions of these 3 factors.
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Twitter has 175 million users; 75% of all tweets are outside of Twitter website and about 40% of them from mobile devices. Growth of twitter was propelled by three factors:
– Acceptance by celebrities and big brand names, which lead their followers to come on-board twitter
– Twitter became a pet of mainstream television and offline news
– Widespread development of applications by developers across the world. The twitter API was easy to implement and build quick apps, many innovative applications where built by developers which would have taken twitter ages to come out with.
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As per twitter website, as of Sept 14 2010 – there are a whopping 95 million tweets a day. (Imagine the monetization Google will achieve with 95 million search queries!). However most tweets are irrelevant; according to a research report by Pear Analytics – 40% tweets are Pointless Blabber, 38% are conversational, 9% have pass-along value, 6% are self promotion, 4% are news while rest 4% are spam.
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Tweets get a very little attention span. A study did by Sysomos revealed that – 71% of all tweets generated get no reaction – 23% get replied – 6% get re-tweeted.
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The life-span of a tweet is another big issue – and every tweet gets a fractional life-span before it gets lost on tweet streams. To put it simply, fractional tweets are seen, more fractional tweets are read and even more small fraction of them are responded.

The life-span depends on factors like
– number of followers you have
– % of followers online at that time
– rate of tweeting of people followed by your followers at that time for them to notice your tweet
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Twitter’s Business Model

Few months back – according to internal documents leaked and published on Techcrunch, Twiiter was expected to reach an revenue of $140 million for 2010. The documents were leaked in 3rd quarter of 2009 – post which Twitter launched its 3 business offerings – Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends and Promoted Accounts.
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Was Twitter referring to these 3 offerings to generate an revenue of $140 Million. In that case assuming 33% contribution towards revenue generated for each of them, they have to generate $46 Mn per year – at rate of $125,000 per day.
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Thats very expensive! Should twitter be charging $125,000 per day for these offerings? The answer to this question may surprising be Yes!
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Reports mentioned on sites like Clickz, Mashable, Wall Street Journal, The Next Web, Read Write Web – and many others have indicated that costing of promoted tweets is upwards of $100,000 per day!
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Such high costs are not justified as the business model is still not proven. Advertisers paying for these should be aware that these features are mostly available on twitter.com, while 75% activity on twitter happens outside of Twitter through applications and mobile devices. While there is no or very little context and relevance in which these promoted tweets, trends or accounts are served.
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Twitter’s ecosystem cannot be monetized!
Twitter’s ecosystem may be valuable, but cannot be monetized! Here is why was we summarize each of its component.
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Tweets:

Most tweets are blabbers, pointless
Most tweets do not have any intent like search keywords, and even if they have any intent – it will be momentary.
Most tweets are meant for others (for followers). Finding intents specific to self may be difficult task.
An user’s tweet can be completely different than his previous one – hence establishing relevance or context and validating seriousness of that context is not possible.
If Twitter is able to build an killer-product that deciphers user’s intent and in real time shows and advertise to the user, the only relevant format in which advertisement can be displayed to user is by tweeting a reply. This will lead to tweet-spam and users will protest!
Is the advertisement will include a link (of say ecommerce website) – chances of users to complete a transaction may be very less. Visitors from Twitter are known to have highest bounce-rates with a huge majority of users not exploring beyond 1-2 pages.
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Trends:

Trends are collective tweets of a large set of users. Most of the times trending topics are consequences of large offline news events and big announcements made by brands, companies and individuals (celebrities)
Its understood by commonsense that a promoted tweet may not cause same impact amongst users as a natural trend. The viral factor in a natural trending topic will be 1000X of promoted trends.
If twitter continues with promoted trends – at a costing of $100,000 per day – this model is not scalable and will not appeal to small segment of advertisers
Its not even possible for Twitter to monetize natural trending topics as they are usually related to subjects or topics that cannot be monetized. Twitter cannot predict a trending topic; and for an current trending topic which has potential to be monetized, it might be difficult for them to get find an advertiser before the topic stops trending.

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Users:

Most followed Twitter users are celebrities or big brands that have pulled more users to Twitter. Twitter will not have been at this scale without such users.
Twitter will continue to offer featured users and verified accounts for free, they may not be a business model here.
Promoted Accounts is being offered without much reference to user’s behavior or interest. Hence there may be little value to businesses for ‘promoted accounts’ to gather users to whom their tweets may not be relevant.

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Applications:

Twitter has indicated it will not allow applications to monetize tweets
Twitter cannot charge application developers. With 75% tweets coming from applications, Twitter is more dependent on them.
If Twitter starts monetizing individual tweets, they will also need to credit the applications that completed the monetization action.
While there are few benefits associated with applications like Quora to integrate with Twitter; stand-alone twitter applications will also need to have a way to monetize. If they are not able to monetize and generate revenue by themselves or through Twitter – they may start loosing interest in building or maintaining applications for Twitter..

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Twitter’s Speculated New Business Models:
Business model speculation and criticism is not new for Twitter. There were reports that Twitter may be be coming up with an eCommerce or News related business model. Here is my take of them:
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eCommerce:

There are few tweets shared between users about product recommendations, purchases and reviews. Tweets work in an open environment and Twitter may not be able to add more value to such conversations that are already happening.
Example., if Dell continues to generate millions of dollars revenue through Twitter, there is not much Twitter can do to get a share if that.
In event if Twitter is forcing upon some business model related to eCommerce on to large brands on-board, there are multiple small accounts that will continue to converse as always. A business model that cannot be expanded to cover all its users equally will not last for long time.
Twitter itself is not an eCommerce seller like Amazon and can never be one. Neither can it act as an affiliate

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News:

Twitter is used by meaning leading publications and individual users to break stories. Once the story is pushed to twitter – its responded by followers, a huge story ends up becoming a trend and initiating conversations.
The process of publishing a twitter, spreading to follows, building conversations over it happens in a very short span of time. Twitter by itself is not a news service, any attempt to be in this domain will mean competition from well known and well followed media organizations. For a user – he is still very happy with the existing news publishers on Twitter.

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Concluding Remarks:
Twitter has always remained in the spotlight and seems like raising more capital is not a problem for them. For the fact that VCs have invested over $360 Million, Twitter is surely bound to give their investors a good exit and their quest of finding an business model will be going on for some time.
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Right now, its not clear if Twitter is or is not under great pressure to show an convincing business model, but some point they will have to. Twitter team is no doubt struggling to find a revenue model that fits its ecosystem – an ecosystem which has value for its users but is extremely difficult to monetize for the company that owns it.
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While Twitter is not ready to accept proven online business models like search and display, Twitter’s discovery for its revenue stream will be as good as finding the eighth wonder of this world!

Twitter Business Model – 8th Wonder of the World

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Marketers Wishlist for Facebook Pages

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Lazy Sunday – Started checking on how the multiple Facebook Pages I have created have performed over time – was surprised at the level of analytics provided by Facebook to page administrators – it is just about OK!

This is not surprising. Facebook was always centric towards more user engagement with his/her contacts – more features and capabilities for users to interact, share and discover content. While in between this – Facebook created Pages (earlier Fan pages) about 2 years ago. Marketers were quick to understand and grab on to creating Pages, and promoting user to be a Fan (or ‘like’ the Page) – now to an extend that value of a brand is getting judged by the amount of users who like the Fan page.

(Still stuck with old terminology – For further notes, Facebook Pages will be referred as Facebook Fan Pages and its users as Fans)

Facebook today is rumored to be touching revenues of 2 Billion USD, to my judgement a significant portion of that revenue is contributed by brands & marketers promoting its Fan pages to users. That means – huge revenues are generated for Facebook without moving traffic out of Facebook (smart move..huh!).

Facebook did two version of Insights for Fan Pages – the newer version with simplified graphs of old information with few minor updates. However, when it comes to level of engagement that a Fan Page can offer and level of Analytics that can be made available about the Fan Pages and interactions happening on them, Facebook still has a long way to go. The pace of innovation and development on Facebook Pages is far less compared to attention (and revenues) received by it from digital marketers.

Based on my experience with managing Facebook Pages, here is a marketer’s wishlist for Facebook – Features, Interactivity and Analytics that should be introduced.

Marketers Wishlist for Facebook Pages

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The Future of Television

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Writing after a long break… Started writing this post over a month back!

On 20th May 2010, Google announced new Google TV in US, that was late evening by Indian Time. Incidentally, same day morning – my very good friend working in an Television Channel was discussing about how TV programming will shape up in next 10 years. Below is the extract of the same mail I had sent to her and followed by the presentation on SlideShare with some concrete ideas about the Television of future.

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“Past Few Years:

Television as hardware device – evolution from standard television box to slimmer versions

From Regular to Flat Screens
From Flat to LCD
From LCD to LED
The evolution will continue towards personalized broadcasting.

In future the televisions will act as display devices,that could be plugged in to any input devices not necessarily only satellite or cable channels.

They would be used to stream information. In US time spent by consumers online is today much higher than on televisions. Consumers are willing to view video streaming online for TV shows, Sitcoms and also movies. If that happens and continues over a period of time – TV business (as a hardware will go out of business) which large players like Samsung, LG will not want to. Simple because when users would want to spend time online and consume same content online – the players who will gain most are the laptop and desktop manufacturers – HP, Dell, Apple and others – among which LG and Samsung dont have much share.

So to keep TV in business they would reinvent the use of TV box. So expect devices like TV to get IP addresses and WiFi features that could be hooked on to the Internet. Consumers would want to create playlist (of youtube videos?) or information streams (twitter, facebook) or photo stream (family albums, etc ) that could be broadcasted over the internet to their TVs or personal devices.

Unlike what users see today – a choice of channels that they browse on TV, they would create their own broadcast and stream it to televisions. So users end of creating their broadcast, they would access it from wherever they want to. Like you are on a vacation, and you have a TV at your hotel, you would connect that to your own broadcast and view entertainment of your choice.

So media channels and networks will not just face competition from existing television competitors – but anyone would could participate in these broadcast of consumer’s choice – even a small website. These broadcasts online will be standardized to any web content format or APIs or anything as simple as a XML or RSS feed.”

Below is the presentation format of the same ideas.

The Future Of Television

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