Big Think

Allison: Three to five years from now, there will not be a distinction between the internet and television. It will just be entertainment and media that’s [IB]. It will be all on demand. It will be all in one screen and you’ll have a hard drive and that hard drive will be a combination of your old TiVo stuff, iTunes, [Hullo], it’s all available. You might pay for something. You might pay for subscription the way I do with 30 Rock. I am going to cancel my cable subscription. There’s no point for me to have it, but you’ll also have a lot of additional features. There’ll be no reason to have set programming like 30 minutes, 44 minutes, well, it’s actually it’s like 22 minutes, 44 minutes that’s how they do it, no reason. Some shows will remain like that because it’s simply habit. However, you will find that you’ll have episodic shows like The Guild, which has gotten a lot of attention on YouTube, very well written webisodes. Tiny, huge, huge fan based. What’s going to happen is that there will be a huge shift in production cost. So, instead of shifting the business model, which actually there will be small shift in the business model too, but the production costs have got to go way, way down. A lot of television executives don’t think that can happen. It’s not true. I have done it. I have worked with magazines that have no money but they need video content. It is possible and viewers are so much more willing to watch low production value stuff than anyone realizes. So, when the… you know, it’s just… you might keep the margins the same but the production costs have to go way, way down. The other thing that’s going to happen is instead of strict advertisements or product replacement, you’re going to have old school sponsorships the way that radio did back in the ‘30s, you know, this program is sponsored by Colgate, you’re going to see a ton of that, that’s what Next New Networks is really bringing right now to web and it’s going to be targeted sponsorships, not random stuff. It’s like the advertisers are going to be thinking about what make sense. They’re going to be spending less money but they’re going to be targeting people in a more careful way instead of spending $30 million on American Idol, they’ll be spending $3 million but they’re going to be getting the exact same number of customers, which means that the television networks which are just going to become entertainment networks have got to be smarter about it. And the great news is then we won’t have to suffer through terrible programming that is damn down for everyone.

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