Science fiction often leads to science reality. C’mon, don’t tell me you haven’t seen the similarity between Capt. James T. Kirk’s communicator and a clamshell cell phone. The blur between fiction and reality is what makes entertainment TV so entertaining. Ideas show up as reality when, truthfully, they are figments in the fertile imaginations of script writers who seem to be able to look around the next corner.
I’m no scriptwriter but when I start looking around the corner I see Intuitive TV (ITV) as the next evolution of interactive TV. ITV, in my vision, will give customers what they really want rather than what they think they want.
This idea of matching a viewer’s wants got a test spin, of sorts, on TV this past season when characters in an episode of “Bones” signed up for a dating service that linked their profiles and then used the GPS on their cell phones to alert them when someone they might like was in the vicinity. Because this was a crime show, the dating service was run by an evil genius who, in the end, turned out to be a stalker but the idea had legs: find out what really interests singles then connect them.
This kind of thing would need some buy-in from the participants, but that’s not as big a privacy hassle as it’s been in the past. Today’s early adopters eagerly concede some privacy to get features.
Imagine taking this fictional concept to television, and not just as part of a weekly show. TV for too long has played catch-up and copycat with the Web and cell phones. It’s embarrassing. Here’s a medium with millions of eyes glued every minute looking to mimic concepts used by computer nerds and vapid teens.
The TV medium needs to push past today’s reality and into the world of science fiction. Interactive television offers a foundation to take advertising from the top of the marketing funnel where everybody watches the ad to the bottom where only the most elite viewers with the greatest interest remain. Intuitive TV takes it even further.
Like all good science fiction, it won’t happen today but somewhere down the line a consenting TV viewer will provide not just a list of likes and dislikes but will, by responding to carefully phrased psychographic questions, offer a glimpse of his/her inner desires before even turning on the set. This will be like a GPS system to guide programmers to deliver the right content to the right person without detours for channel guides and channel changes. For advertisers it will be nirvana; an opportunity to target a specific spot to a user who’s predisposed to pay attention.
Okay, this means building more network intelligence than is currently feasible, even with set-tops that approximate computers. But, as more viewers skip more ads on their DVRs it will only be a matter of time until someone makes it possible for a programmer or advertiser to intuitively target what a consumer wants – even if the consumer doesn’t know s/he wants it.
Science fiction is only the prelude to science reality. And Intuitive TV and the ability to target programming and advertising is the first chapter.
