The Future of TV: From the Mouths of Bigwigs

February 14, 2007

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At last month's Consumer Electronics Show, CBS President and television visionary Les Moonves stood before the crowd and declared that his network will henceforth be pursuing technologies like "Clip and Sling" (sending segments of shows to your friends...) and "Second Life" (users are able to "live" in a virtual "Star Trek" universe...). It may not have been Moonves that decided these trends are the future of television, but his voice certainly resonates.

I’ve been been scouring my notes from last month’s Television Critic’s Association press tour. It’s a weird time to love television, with new advances coming almost by the hour. But here is the first round of what I believe to be the gamechangers of the next few years. I’m not nearly as eloquent as the Presidents of the major networks, so I’m just going to quote them here:

CBS President of Paramount Network Television Nancy Tellem on online video:
“Every day is a challenge, whether it's from the type of content you put on, you know, how long you put it on, what platform, whether it's mobile, whether it's online, does it change, trying to get as much information as we can from the viewers and consumers as to what they want, what they don't want; from a mobile standpoint, what consumers are going to tolerate, what they're not going to tolerate. But all of this is -- when you look overall at the landscape, we all view this as kind of an additive and incremental benefit. In no way have we seen any type of cannibalization of what we're doing on our television platform. And as I said, it gives everyone an opportunity to sample our content and, again, drive it back to the television.”

ABC Entertainment President Stephen McPherson on the future of television:
“I think there's a lot of interesting people working in comedy coming from -- whether it's the YouTube arenas or comic books. And I think there may be a way to kind of use the Internet as a little bit of a feeding ground, give people 50, a hundred thousand dollars to go out there and shoot shorter segments that are good for the Internet that maybe then can migrate at some point, or at least that talent can migrate onto primetime.”

McPherson on improving measurement of who is watching what; “I think we just have to figure out a much better way to kind of document exactly who's watching. I mean that is the advantage of the Internet over, kind of, broadcast TV, is that there's a much more specific consumer relationship that we can tap into. So I think once we get that technology, you're going to have a much more accurate measure of exactly who's watching.”

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