The future of TV

John Battelle is up with a post about the future of TV. He points to a post about search and TV converging in a Tivo like box. I think he is right and the only thing I would amend is to say that the need to program TV shows for a certain time block is getting less important and probably irrelevant.

Back when I was living 'Life without TV' in 2007 when our TV broke, I wrote about what I thought the future holds:

I imagine digitally delivered content breaking down into four different buckets:

• LIVE: Sports, News, Events, Etc. could command the highest price because they have timely content people want right now. The would probably be priced higher and have commercials (best of both worlds) because of the time factor of the show (it's hard to fast forward live TV).
• Premium / No Commercials: Pre-recorded shows that can be bought pay per view at a higher price point to compensate for no commercials. High production quality is important here.
  
• Premium / With Commercials: The same pre-recorded shows but priced more cheaply because they are commercially supported. No fast forwarding allowed.
• Free/Amateur: The long tail of video content will be user generated content, smaller production companies making a splash, etc. This will most likely be free, but the best will rise to the top and join the ranks of premium.

Interestingly enough, I thought it would be interesting to go 3 months without TV. Our daughter has gone 2-years without it. Today is her first day watching -- she is home with the flu and there is nothing like TV to slow down a 2-year old! (she is watching scenario #2 above: Premium / No Commercials - which is a DVD)

Teetering back... Google cancels Google Print

News today that Google Print is no more. I find this very, very interesting.

One, it confirms my belief that the Google Print system offered no inherent media ROI benefit to its advertisers.

Two, it disproves my belief that Google Print was a superior workflow software for buying and selling print advertising. (I actually still believe this though and think perhaps the economy, newspaper advertising's woes, and potential revenue share %'s were what caused Google to rethink this product)

Most importantly, this teeters Google back a little bit from the tipping point I thought they had reached. Perhaps Google is not quite ready yet to be the buying and selling hub of all media. Perhaps just electronic media?

2/12/09 Update: And today they canceled Google Radio ads.

2/19/09 Update: Word on Alley Insider that Google may cancel (or let expire?) its MySpace deal. I expect the deal was not profitable but it is interesting that this is a piece of online advertising that their algorithms could not make profitable. Of course with rates coming down so much in advertising, any deal with guaranteed payouts would have to be renegotiated. But, what do I know? Its like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with only 1/2 the pieces and wearing a blindfold.

Why Search Spend is Down 8% in Q408

Efficient Frontier, a company I know very well from my Fathom days, issued a report that said spending on search advertising was down in Q408. Alley Insider had a take about the implications but did not surmise why search spending unexpectedly declined in Q4. I thought I would give it my best shot.

The answer is actually simple: Conversion Rates are down.

In my experience, minute changes in the conversion rate can cause significant downward pressure on keyword prices (and spending). At Fathom, we saw it over and over again with clients such as mortgage brokers -- when housing interest rates would marginally rise, mortgage applications would slightly decrease, and keyword cost per clicks would plummet.

In a recession, it is natural that conversion rates would decrease for any type of retail (including ecommerce) and the holiday retail figures confirmed that sales were down.

Keyword spend had to decrease as marketers realized that conversion rates were not delivering the desired ROI. With ecom marketing, ROI is the driver of spend and no ecommerce marketers wants to pay for visitors - they only want to pay for customers.

And because search is so ROI-centric and so easily measured, it is actually exposed to this type of decisioning more so than a lot of other media. Probably why Google was smart to go into this recession warily.

Best Mobile App Ever

Finally, someone made something truly useful for my mobile phone... and of course, it was Google. I'm probably late to the game on this, but Google Maps for Mobile now offers the user the ability to choose from driving directions, walking directions or transit directions. THAT is truly useful.

Link to Google Maps for Mobile.

Now, if they could just create an app for Google Reader instead of sending me to my mobile web browser...

2/11/09 UPDATE: Google just calculated that it would take me 10 days and 16 hours to walk from my house in California to my buddy's house in Arizona... awesome. Of course, Google did warn me... "This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths."