The New Music TV?
By Angel Gambino on Jul 23, 2009 with Comments 1
I recently wrote an article about the inevitable transformation of the current passive and limited interactive TV experience into social TV of the future where widgets we use on our iPhone’s are transported to our TV screens. See http://www.nma.co.uk/opinion/the-union-of-social-media-and-tv-has-a-bright-future/3001681.article
For music, this becomes especially intriguing given the current state of music programming on TV. In the US, MTV is more R(eality)TV. Outside the US, MTV is still a credible music aggregator brand for music TV channels catering to the older iTunes demographic who were excited by the original launch of MTV. In more mature international markets like the UK, the transition to the US model is underway leaving the traditional business to Channel 4.
In certain markets digital radio is the new music TV, but altogether uninteresting as a visual experience. Now, imagine all your favourite music widgets and applications on TV? Think of how these can be tied into the programming itself. Even non-programming related applications such as basic tour date alerts arriving on screen when you’re not media multitasking with your mobile and Mac, become a true value add when you know tickets will sell fast.
One of the hot topics in social TV right now is recommendation engines. There are many digital music start ups that provide good recommendation tools for audio, events and video either through their social tools – recommendations from friends or people with similar tastes on last.fm (who’ve struggled with the evolution to video much to the dismay of CBS) or lots of (arguably) manual muso input on pandora for audio or machine learning for events on songkick or self publishing software as a service data input on spoonfed through to sophisticated data analysis platforms infused with human input for audio and video by the filter.
If you can visualize these services bringing you your music to TV, recommending you stuff you’ll love without having to re-program and re-register, you can see bliss ahead. Your TIVO knows you by now, but does it know you as well as some of your online favourites? Does it bring you as much functionality as some of your favourite websites? There are a number of music TV opportunities headed our way.
Some of your favourite digital music companies may not only help you navigate the limitless world of music, but also become your preferred TV EPG guiding you to your favourite enhanced programmes without you doing anything at all. Now that’s passive TV!
Other readers also read:
Pandora – The Elusive Box That May Save The Industry
Michael Jackson, and The Media
Muzu.tv Signs Deal With Universal Music
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Interesting article Angel.
Music engines tend to base their results on similar artists/labels (Scrobbler on Last.fm), and sometimes they venture deeper into the DNA of individual tracks (Music Genome Project on Pandora).
I wonder how this would translate to video programmes? Sifting by writer (think Aaron Sorkin)? Actors? Jokes per minute? Advertisers? Other viewers via their remote (how many ‘profiles’ would that require? one per channel? yikes!)?
The universe of traditional broadcast TV content strikes me as much smaller than that of music, and so I would think avid couch potatoes already know pretty much what is out there in terms of that type of programming.
However, I suppose when TV distribution expands to include non-traditional content (e.g. Youtube clips) and all other manner of video (god forbid, corporate videos) then I can see video recommendation becoming as critical for digital TV as it has for digital music. Basically, when we move from “The Wire” to “A Clip” the game changes entirely, and the EPG will quickly begin to look completely antiquated indeed.
At that stage, all this “other” type of video content begins to look like “unsigned indie” music online. Important perhaps (or at least, to somebody), but without a marketing effort behind it, it’s anonymous and very hard, if not impossible, to find.