Television Everywhere How Hollywood Can Take Back the Internet and Turn Digital Dimes Into Dollars

This book was partly born of frustration - personal frustration with how complicated the simple act of trying to watch TV can be, and the professional frustration of being around almost twenty years of television-, advertising-, and technology-industry floundering with how to better reach TV audiences. The internet, we argue, is finally ready to change all that. Not in the way most people think and experts talk about incessantly - Jetsons-like visions of TV everywhere anytime. While it can do that, the internet can also do something much more powerful for viewers, programmers, and advertisers alike: allow viewers to discover and organize what they really want to watch. Solving that problem is worth billions. Not only because it will extend the lifecycle of so-called linear TV, but it can extend and improve television's economic returns while simultaneously seizing the strategic high ground for the transition to the day when television and the internet become one. That's what this book is about- why it's a problem worth solving, how to go about solving it, and how today's television industry will benefit from stepping in where cable companies, phone companies, and their technology suppliers are failing miserably. Aimed primarily at Hollywood, this book is for studio, network, and channel executives, producers, show runners, ad agency strategists ("digital" or otherwise), media buyers, and executives at ratings/measurement companies. We describe how Hollywood can both extend the life of so-called linear television and control the transition to internet-delivered TV, while building upon existing "starter" digital assets such as Hulu, or channel- and program-specific web properties and applications. Finally, this book is also a wake-up call to internet content and technology companies to take a fresh look at an old problem, using a comparatively new, low-cost set of approaches produced by the "Web 2.0" and cloud computing waves which emerged over the last several years.