No Need to Dream of Interactive TV — It’s Already Here
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The dream of interactive TV has been around for almost two decades. We’ve imagined a TV that allows us to transition seamlessly from watching a Yankees game to pulling up a music video on demand to ordering an advertiser’s product. But iTV as we conceived it remained elusive for the brightest of minds, even for the likes of Steve Jobs.
But today’s TV is increasingly a laptop, mobile or tablet experience, unless it arrives on a “proper” TV screen through a broadband-enabled device like an Xbox or Roku. It’s not coming through the cable operators that, at one time, were thought to hold the keys to iTV. In fact iTV is already here, all but ready to deliver everything we’ve been waiting for. We’ve just been waiting for it on the wrong screen.
Nielsen’s March Cross Platform Report recently dove into the deep end of this trend, describing the five million homes in the United States that it classifies as “Zero TV” because they eschew traditional cable or satellite viewing — often for streaming alternatives. Two-thirds of these “Zero TV” homes consume video content on other devices, and the distribution across age groups of “Zero TV” homes is not as concentrated as you might think. Almost two-thirds are age 44 and under, but a healthy chunk — more than one-third — fell into older demographics.
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