The Future On Remote Control

Michael Hedges December 5, 2011 Follow on Twitter

Forecasters and trend-spotters are rich with insight toward the end of each calendar year. Leaping into 2012 and beyond requires faith that an asteroid won’t slam into Brussels, Berlin or Buffalo. While economics continues to rule all media-related forecasts, technology is, again this year, the currency of the realm.

Berlin-based consultancy Goldmedia, in its annual Trend Monitor (November 30), offered a glimpse into the converged crystal ball. What’s happening with media, telecommunications, entertainment and the Web is all one big swirl, like turning a snow globe upside down and back. Joy for some is confusion for others.

The smartphone has become, says Goldmedia, “the remote control of life. It is the link between the physical world, cyber space and the social world.” A third of Germans are now smartphone equipped. And once LTE (4G) arrives, they believe, smartphone penetration will soar.

Two years ago (August 2009) tech researcher Gartner said smartphones would take up 70% of the European mobile phone market by 2012. “There will really be little alternative but to buy a smartphone,” Gartner research director Carolina Milanesi at the time. “Smartphones are a must have.” The smartphone is the dominant mobile device in Europe (51%) and North America (63%) in 2011, reported US-based mobile strategy firm VisionMobile (November 28), with other regions catching up.

Video on mobile devices will reach the critical mass market in 2012, said Goldmedia. Television viewers still watch their favorite shows in the evening from the living room couch but now they can take the “last few minutes of their favorite program to bed to run on the iPad.” It’s a trend driven by increasing smartphone sales and the instant availability of video clips online.

Time and place shifting, physics notwithstanding, will put further ad revenue pressure on television broadcasters. “Growth rates for online video advertising is currently in three digits,” said the Goldmedia report. “TV shows hold great potential, if only because they are significantly longer than the short clips of news sites.”

Social media and television will continue to converge, said the Goldmedia consultants. Indeed, television broadcasters will be “programming” to the social media audience. They mention RTL’s “sophisticated” social media strategy with the program Berlin-Tag und Nacht (Berlin – Day and Night), which draws on its Facebook fans for continuity.

But the oft-anticipated business model for the social media “playground” will be found, they say, in corporate marketing. “Intelligence” from social networks Facebook, Twitter and Google+ will be analyzed for “integration into other business processes such as customer relationship management, customer service and sales.”  

Advertising luminaries attending the multi-city Reuters Global Media Summit (November 28) sounded a pessimistic tone, particularly when looking to 2013 with no big events to rival the London Olympics, the European football championships and US presidential elections. And it was the ubiquitous WPP chairman Martin Sorrel who waxed macro-economic quite conservatively.

“Whilst the situation in Europe is very serious, I believe it's a sideshow in a sense to what America has to do in dealing with its deficit,” he offered. “The complexity fills everybody with such appalling fear.”

As the Reuters media confab wound down the big league media executives were asked, by Reuters (December 2), about their social media habits. “I have enough to do answering your emails,” said Sir Martin. “I'm 66 years old. I'm almost in the glue factory.”

“I hate the idea that I would have to share things which are not for sharing or which are superficial,” offered Publicis CEO Maurice Levy. “I understand how to wash dishes. I don't do it regularly.”

The first television remote control device was invented by Zenith in 1950. It was wired to the TV set. Within a decade the wires were gone and everybody had one… or several. The effect on television was dramatic as viewers no longer had to leave the couch to “surf” TV and attention spans plummeted. Now there are apps for changing television channels and people never need to leave their smartphone.

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