Free Rise

CES is most certainly a circle of Hades. But for all its logistical Hellscapes, it can only get one thinking about the future.

Smart TV is the real deal, but we are barely starting. Now, the systems are disparate and slow, the UIs are generally clunky messes, and the controls are clumsy. But this will be a real experience-changer.

3D TV is not the real deal. You have people coming over to watch football. Are you sure you have enough of the proprietary, battery-powered glasses for everyone? Glasses-free 3D is still experimental at best.

The biggest problem is that “immersiveness” eventually hits a wall. I tried out a 3D version of a combat game on PlayStation Move, and after three minutes the headache was undeniable. I couldn’t even imagine the most overstimulated 17-year-old playing an extended marathon of this.

Leaning back: The notion that people only want to veg out in front of the TV is pretty antiquated. First, we’re already been interacting with our TVs for years, whether it’s channel surfing, searching for shows in our DVRs, or playing Wii. We’re used to this type of behavior in 2011. Look around anywhere and you’ll see people interacting with devices all day long. If anything, the frustration isn’t that the TV requires you to interact, it’s that the interfaces and controls are so horribly inferior to those on your Droid or iPad.

And when you want to, you can still turn your brain off and watch a show about bitchy housewives or fancy cakes.

The Magnavox Promise is dead. I can’t tell whether TVs are supposed to be long-term purchases anymore. There was a time when a new TV was supposed to last for a generation, and TVs advertised themselves as such.

The TVs at CES, loaded with 3D and proprietary web OSes, are burdened with what could be described as bridge technologies. The people buying these TVs are also used to buying new phones every 24 months, and new PCs every 4-5 years. Will the TV upgrade cycle also compress like this? Imagine buying, say, a Sylvania Connected TV with Sylvania Apps. Think that will still be relevant in 10 years? Maybe the great tech growth industry is e-waste recycling.

I’ve recently been having a lot of conversations with people about how we consume media. The transition from three broadcast networks to an era of seeing anything you want on any screen is utterly profound, and incredibly interesting to anyone who has watched TV or gone to the movies in their lifetimes.

I’m going to be blogging more about this new world that we’re all hurtling towards, but we’ll start with part one, which is the creative lead that television took over movies in the mid-2000s.

Traditionally, movies told the great stories. In the 1970s, the silver screen flashed The Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, Star Wars, Chinatown, Annie Hall, Nashville (my favorite). Hollywood could make movies for niches, while the three-channel universe of TV tried to attain the broadest possible audience. As a result, none of the shows were really that great. The classic movies from that era are still brilliant. The classic TV shows are unwatchable for anything but nostalgia or camp. Unlike the movies of their era, few of these shows have found new audiences.

By the mid-2000s, the script flipped. With each cable network angling to air a must-see show in order to maintain their affiliate fees, the creativity on cable exploded. Meanwhile, the movies have become devoid of stories as compelling as those of Breaking Bad or The Wire.

As Mark Harris writes on EW.com (“What’s wrong with this summer’s movies?“):

Four or five years ago, it was a jaunty provocation to claim that ”TV is better than the movies” (a phrase that headed articles in TIME, Newsweek, and EW). Today, it’s just a fact. TV can be programmed for niche audiences; these days, studios only know how to spend too much money in order to lunge after too many eyeballs. TV actually tests its ideas before they air with pilots; studios just try to imagine what the poster will look like. Most significantly, TV can react quickly to a changing zeitgeist, whereas movies now take ridiculously long to respond to anything, if they even try…

As TV has surged, the risk-averse souls atop the movie studios have stopped pretending that their job is anything other than to find and greenlight renewable, easily marketed franchises for undemanding audiences on big weekends.

Is it any wonder Hollywood is charging hard into formats like 3D and IMAX? Unable to compete creatively with niche-seeking shows, movies have to compete on the screen and images.

But TV didn’t achieve its golden age via its legacy channels. The great shows are almost exclusively on cable networks. Legacy broadcast networks have gone the way of movies, weighed down with replica cop franchises and formula sitcoms. Tina Fey said upon accepting her first Emmy for 30 Rock that network television today is like vaudeville in the ’60s. The times, they have already changed.

Indeed, the broadcast networks have been forced to dial down their creative edge, as niche audiences have already migrated to cable shows. Or video games. Or the Internet. The top-rated show on TV today can only hope to get half the audience of the top show of 10 years. Put another way, 85% of Americans don’t watch the number one show. We’ve come a long way from I Love Lucy.

So what happens when YouTube, with its 2 billion daily video streams, comes to TV? That’s the next game-changer. And that’s the next blog post…