http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/1...e_tv_obsession/
Gates: PC will replace TV, TV will become a giant Google
Page: 1 2 Next > By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Wednesday 20th October 2004 00:06 GMT
Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates must see Google everywhere he looks these days. He must even see Google when he closes his eyes, and enters that lucid dreaming state from which all of Microsoft's great strategies eventually emerge. What he sees at that moment, we imagine, is a Tellytubby landscape that looks a lot like the Windows XP default wallpaper - perhaps with Chairman Bill himself as the sun. But bouncing across this happy vista are the red, green and blue colored balls that have rolled out of the Google playpen.

In Bill's world, the living room TV of the future will look a lot like Google. Only it will look like Google with all the good stuff Google provides taken out: it will be a huge screen of contextual classified ads. A sort of useless, interactive test card logo. Now if this isn't the sign of a man obsessed, we don't know what is.

Is he onto something?

If you ask people what's really wrong with TV, they'll reply that there's nothing on worth watching - that there are no compelling programs that reflect their world. Other comments such as "too many adverts", "too much sex and violence", "idiotic and patronizing programmes" are simply ways of characterizing this dearth of good viewing material. Viewers are astonishingly tolerant of advertising, so long as the programme grabs their attention. But one complaint you almost certainly won't hear is that TV isn't interactive enough. If the people making programs are representative of their audience, and the programs are consistently good enough, TV isn't in any kind of crisis. In fact, we see plenty of evidence to support the idea that the TV and radio broadcast model is in rude health, and is becoming more highly valued than ever, but we'll come to that in a moment.

For Gates, interactivity is an indispensable part of broadcasting in the future. Interactive technologies will render traditional broadcast models redundant, he predicts. Broadcasters and program makers must embrace this tidal wave of interactivity - Gates doesn't say when this will happen, but he's sure it will - and consequently embrace new business models. So far, so familiar: we've heard such rhetoric since 1994. Gates is almost certainly right when he suggests that great TV convenience device, the PVR, upsets the advertisers who fund an important part of the broadcast business. That's why they're fighting hard to limit its ad-skipping capabilities in the courts.

So, rather than face poverty, seeking out a living panhandling on the cruel streets, Bill offers the broadcast executives a helpful hand: the split screen Microsoft TV.

Gates explains that Microsoft has been experimenting with the 1970s-style split screen concept, where half of the TV is the regular broadcast program, and the other half is an interactive page. For viewers with zero attention spans - like Gates himself - the "interactive" page is always available. It will be broadcasting's salvation, he explains, because broadcasters will be able to make up the revenue they've lost from PVR-skipping by forcing viewers to look at Google-style ads.

Only in his lucid dreaming state, this makes perfect sense to Gates.

"We're saying to them that technology will change ... the advertising model and allow for personalized, targeted advertising," he tells the Hollywood Reporter. "To make the ads more interesting so you're less likely to skip them and (give) them more impact because they're delivered to the people the advertiser wants them to be delivered to."

Again, Gates isn't sure how the split screen will work - but he's fairly sure it must. "It's still kind of an unknown. I believe in it totally," he says (A statement which should excite the kind of people who invested in dot.coms, if no one else.) You can see how Bill's premise led him to his conclusion, but is his premise justified?

Let's take a step back, because some very interesting and surprising things are taking place right now.

Back after the break - and no clicking
Reliable, subscription-style broadcasters, and businesses that depended on mass audience advertising have survived the recession in good health, while media that could be described as more "interactive", or more reliant on impulse buying decisions - such as newspapers and internet web sites - bore the brunt of ad budget cuts.

People quite stubbornly seem to like broadcasting, too. When people are offered more choice (for example, the many thousands of songs on an iPod) or more interactivity (digital TV), the more they seem to value not having to either click or choose. People love non-interactive broadcasting, so long as the programmes are good and the programmer makers reasonably representative.

Radio is enjoying a renaissance in the United Kingdom, with commercial ad spending rocketing, and the emergence of genuinely good, grassroots FM stations. The government has issued 200 low-power FM licenses for community stations, and people are embracing the opportunity with great enthusiasm. (Compare this to the lackluster adoption of community media websites, such as Skokie,Ill.). Your reporter was astonished to see so many bus passengers listening to FM radio on their mobile phones this year on the morning commute, recently.

Meanwhile, and this is even more astonishing, digital TV has become an object of widespread derision in the UK. For the first time in its history, the word "digital" has negative brand connotations. Such is the pushback against glitchy digital TV streams, full of drop outs and hiccups, and hard-to-use controls, that people are beginning to clamor for the analog signal to remain on. "Digital" now means "crap", which should give lazy marketeers some pause for thought. TV is becoming associated with the kinds of problems people associated with PCs. It's true a few programme formats lend themselves naturally to some form of interactivity: particularly live TV which invites vox pop polls or comments. But these gimmicks actually get in the way of programming with a conventional narrative pull: such as a movie, a drama or a footie match.

But Gates' belief in interactivity is almost religious. An intelligent man with a zero boredom threshold, it's no wonder he finds traditional broadcasting tedious and dull. As Gates tells the Hollywood Reporter, he hates linear assumptions.

Gates' presumption that only stupid people can enjoy non-interactive TV is widely shared amongst technology evangelists, but it isn't widely shared amongst the population at large, who simply clamor for better programs. The enthusiasm of the audeince during Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance, where he berated the format for its idiotic theatre, shows that people want better programming, not to click more.

But in addition to thinking mass audiences are axiomatically stupid - if you got a dollar for every time a technology enthusiast berated someone "not getting it!", there wouldn't be a pensions crisis - Bill also makes a another mistake. He thinks broadcasters are stupid, too.

However, really effective broadcasters are more likely to be found blazing the trail, rather than looking to Redmond for answers. Rupert Murdoch gambled on satellites and encryption technology in the mid-1980s, at a time when Microsoft couldn't give away its GUI. And as regular readers know, BBC's research facility at Kingswood Warren continues to pioneer broadcast technologies. Dumb broadcasters who swallow the technologists' interactivity mantra do tend to do some very dumb things: ask Time Warner. Murdoch famously treated the internet with great circumspection, and he was proved right.

Gates also forgets that the major advertisers and their agencies don't want to be dependent on text-classified ads. Companies like Audi and Nike depend on big, splashy campaigns that enforce the idea of a global brand. This is obscene in its own way, but it's what they value. If we can help Bill understand it this way: if Windows was advertised as simply another text ad alongside Red Hat and a home made OS, you wouldn't be too happy.

It's doubtful whether Microsoft, or any other technology company, is in a unique position to give broadcasters something they need that they can't get by some other means cheaper. Hence the mania for "interactivity". It hasn't escaped our notice that most of the negative reaction to digital TV cites features that broadcasters have added to make the TV look like the internet. Both the broadcast lobby and the internet lobby are surely going to be disappointed if they insist on stamping on each other's domains. Good TV isn't interactive, and on effective computer networks, users aren't passive. The two can happily co-exist. TV broadcasters seem to have learned this lesson, and for their part, need to fix the programming. Meanwhile, the internet lobby would do better to fix deep and systemic problems with its own networks, lobbying to keep the platform open and useful for sharing media, if its core value isn't to disappear.

And surely a more rewarding path for Bill himself, or similarly fidgety, zero-attention span clickers, would be to take up gardening, or the flamenco guitar. 𦲷