Journalists just love portents like these and Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology, has set the pack off again with yesterday’s keynote at the Internet Television Technology Conference: “On the surface, television as we know it looks dead,” he opined. Only to quickly add: “But the future of television is actually pretty bright.”
The explosion of choice and the arrival of new technologies, such as DVRs, which are helping audiences be more selective about the bits they do (or don’t) want to see are re-inventing the business models on which the linear TV business is built, Dureau added. Thankfully, there’s always Google to help a screwed up business fight its way out of a crisis, with a little internet know-how.
So TV execs, are you listening? 🙂 Time to close down those dusty old networks and plunge into the interweb. But don’t forget your water wings.
Curious though, could this be the same Vincent Dureau who as recently as February, warned delegates at another industry love-in that: “The Web infrastructure, and even Google’s (infrastructure) doesn’t scale. It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect.” Ouch.
The Beyondness of Things 