The post is going out while I am at SET in Brazil and it’s interesting to see the difference in TV habits around the world. Brazil is an amazing country. It has a rapidly growing economy and a new generation of affluent middle class who are keen to have the latest television sets in their homes:

The companies and the people that I have talked to so far show a broad spectrum of sophistication when it comes to file-based workflow. Some are at the bleeding edge of technology with implementation that are tape free, and others are struggling with migration plans to create an online infrastructure to show an archive that is still on tape.

This broad spectrum of users highlights clearly an effect described by Joe Zaller of Devoncroft. He called it the evolution continuum and this refers to the fact that television, in many ways, resists change. Taking creative content and showing to large audiences can still be done profitably today, particularly in countries with less sophisticated internet infrastructure. Competition for eyeball contact time becomes more and more intense and the market that television is trying to service comes into direct competition for attention with online activities.

If someone had told me that I would see adverts for browsers and online video services on the television and within 20 minutes I would be online with that browser being served adverts for the television station I was watching only a few minutes ago, then I would not have believed them. Yet here we are with everyone scrambling for viewers and attention. In many ways, the countries that have more time to adopt the new television models have it lucky. They can afford to watch what is happening to the more developed countries and see what models work and what models don’t.

Whichever model wins the day, there is one thing that is clear. The downward pressure on prices for TV equipment will continue. We’re not quite at the stage where a fully service based software infrastructure in the cloud makes sense for the majority of stakeholders, but the signs are there.