The future is here - TV channels are becoming TV apps

For the last couple of years it has been increasingly evident that the future of a TV channel is to become a TV app. The success of TV apps among consumers and the stark contrast between the user experience those apps delivered compared to the typical pay TV experience, left very little room for doubt in my mind. On top of that people like Reed hastings and TDG Research have been saying it for a while and yet pay-TV operators remained by large very skeptical.

The typical pay-TV thinking is that as long as the vast majority of those apps are only available to pay-TV subscribers then there is no reason to be concerned. In fact the pay TV industry has been through the typical pendulum effect, with pundits projecting a massive overnight cord cutting back when OTT started to take off to the very same pundits saying that cord-cutting expectations were not substantiated and that the cost of content will keep the Internet disruption at bay.

The recent announcement by HBO (followed by similar announcements from CBS and Univision) suggest that the pendulum is about to swing all the way back and that we are to expect a massive cord cutting hysteria in the pay-TV industry.

Perhaps it is time to see things the way they actually are and leave both the panic and the skepticism behind?

I would like to suggest the following corollary:

If TV channels are becoming TV Apps then it follows that TV channel aggregators should become TV app aggregators.

A pay TV operator that realizes this simple truth and follows it strategically will discover that there is still time to make a difference and there is also a lot of room for innovation as an aggregator of TV apps.

Yet, I cannot help it but fear the worse for the pay-TV industry given that the only companies today that pursue a TV app aggregator strategy are Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, and so on.

Despite all that, we at TVersity remain committed to the pay-TV industry, and therefore we spent the last couple of years putting together a TV app aggregation platform to help pay-TV operators make a difference. I would like to call for operators that wish to act before it is too late to get in touch with me.

About TVersity

Established in 2005, with headquarters in NYC and R&D in Israel, TVersity offers a comprehensive software platform and a suite of solutions for operators, service providers and smart TV vendors that solves the PC to TV, Mobile to TV and Web to TV problems, utilizing set-top boxes, connected TVs and mobile devices. TVersity also offers the leading DLNA media server to consumers.

Also published on LinkedIn