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The future of wireless connected television

This article is more than 14 years old
Ashley Mackenzie
Ashley Mackenzie

The big challenge for the TV industry will come when we get wireless -enabled, internet--connected TV in the -living room. You'll just turn on your TV and it will talk to your wireless router. You won't automatically go the channel you were last watching but you'll have more of a computer desktop experience with a suite of icons available for you to click on.

That's when our current broadcasters will no longer be the gatekeepers of the living room. That's perhaps 10 years away, and for now we'll still see television content funded by advertising or the licence fee.

For web-connected television to be meaningful, you need 10m web-enabled TV sets in the market, not 200,000. When a typical viewer is comfortable turning on a web-enabled TV and clicking on either the iPlayer icon or something they've not yet heard of called Blinkbox, because it has content they want to watch on it, that will spell -enormous change in the economics of the TV industry.

Today producers have three or four major customers in the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 or Five. As web-connected television takes off, producers will be talking to more and different players. In the meantime, we'll see new services come and go.

Over the next three to five years -producers will continue to go to the main commissioning broadcasters to make money. You've only got to look at the numbers of people watching X Factor on ITV to see that traditional broadcasters still gather mass audiences at particular moments in time. But if producers have the capital to spare, they should be investing in online opportunities because change is inevitable.

Today, in the UK, online distribution is about exploiting your back catalogue, and producers can make thousands if not tens of thousands of pounds a month by doing that. I have yet to see a decent business case for original production for online distribution because there isn't yet a -critical mass in online viewing. However, that might change – within 10 years we may find that more money is generated from people paying to view programmes such as X Factor than the amount received through advertising.

Interview by Lucy Rouse

Ashley Mackenzie is chief executive of myvideorights.com

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