Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Reflections on the Future of TV

I’ve long been interested in the impact of digital technologies on the media industry.  While all industries are subject to the forces of creative destruction, media is one of the most affected.  Everything seems to be changing at once, from the way content is produced and delivered, to the sources of revenue and profits.  It seems as if, - to borrow Marc Andreessen’s words - digital technologies are eating the media world.

Studying such dramatic changes helps me better appreciate the transitions our economy is going through.  Moreover, unlike other industries which I would mostly follow from afar, media is one that I can actually discuss based on personal experiences.  From print newspapers and websites, to live TV and recorded programs, I’m an everyday consumer of media, spending, like many of us, a considerable part of my day on its various offerings.  I’m also a (very minor) content producer, given the weekly blogs I’ve been posting since 2005 and my 2-year guest columnist affiliation with the WSJ’s CIO Journal .  In addition, I’ve been a member of the advisory board of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab (AIL) since it was founded in 2010 to study the impact of technology and cultural changes on the media industries. 

Within media, I’ve been particularly interested in the evolution of television.  The future of TV is being widely discussed in articles and workshops.  Once upon a time, the term television  generally referred to TV sets, the TV programs we watched on those sets, and the TV networks that broadcast those programs to our sets.  But, over the past few decades, and especially in the past 5 - 10 years, it’s much less clear what we now mean by the TV industry, let alone what it will encompass by 2025.  The TV industry is being massively restructured as its companies keep searching for viable business models.

The “Recombinant” Nature of Digital Innovations

Killer-app is the name we give to those IT applications that turn out to be unexpectedly useful and help propel the success of a new product or service in the marketplace.  Most everyone will agree, for example, that spreadsheet and word processing were the first killer-apps of the PC era, helping transform PCs into must-have business and personal productivity tools.

Customer self-service is my preferred candidate for the killer-app of the early days of the Web.  These kinds of apps were relatively easy to implement, yet so useful that they helped convince companies that the Web was something real that they had to pay attention to.  The universal reach and connectivity of the Internet were enabling access to information of all sorts for anyone with a browser and an Internet connection. 

Any business, by integrating its existing databases and applications with a web front end, could now reach its customers, employees, suppliers and partners at any time of the day or night, no matter where they were.  Companies were thus able to engage in their core transactional activities in a much more productive and efficient way.  And they could start very simply, initially just web-enabling their legacy applications and databases. 

Customer self-service is an excellent example of recombinant innovations, which UC Davis professor Andrew Hargadon defines as innovations that “rather than chasing whole new ideas, [are] focused on recombining old ideas in new ways.”  The basic premise behind these kinds of innovations is the search for breakthrough ideas that might lead to the creation of new products, markets and industries based on novel combinations of existing technologies 

What’s the Key Economic Challenge of the Future?

The US economy is confronting a number of serious challenges as it transitions from the industrial to the digital age.  Two in particular have commanded our attention in the recent past: job creation, especially the kind of mid-wage, mid-skills jobs that’ve been particularly hard hit by technology and globalization; and the rising financial inequality between the rich and superrich, - the 1% and .1%, - and everybody else.  Most everyone agrees that these are both important challenges, but of the two, which should be at the top of our policy priorities?  The best discussion I’ve seen of this question comes from two excellent recent articles by Harvard economics professor Larry Summers,  - former Treasury Secretary, Director of the National Economic Council, and President of Harvard.

The first article, The Inequality Puzzle, is his review of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French economist Thomas Piketty.  The English translation, published earlier this year, became a bestseller.  Few scholarly books have received this kind of attention.

I’ve read a number of reviews but not the book itself, as I was frankly intimidated by its length and depth, - 700 pages of exhaustive facts-based, footnote-laden economic research.  Generally, the reviewers’ opinions were influenced by their ideological leanings, with progressives liking it while conservatives were critical.

Lean Principles in the Digital Economy

Lean principles is the name given to a group of production techniques developed by Japanese manufacturing companies around the 1970s-1980s to maximize customer value while reducing wasteful resource.  Lean production methods have also been described as aiming “to combine the flexibility and quality of craftsmanship with the low costs of mass production.”  Such methods include quality control of the processes involved in production; just-in-time production to reduce the costs associated with excess inventory; and continuous improvement involving everyone in the organization in the quest for new, easy to implement ideas. 

More recently, lean principles have been playing a key role in a variety of industries beyond manufacturing which must now adapt to the fast changing technologies and markets of the Internet age.  Lean software development, for example, can be viewed as the agile reaction to the highly structured, heavyweight waterfall-based software methods of the past.  In Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit published in 2003, Mary and Tom Poppendiek translated the principles of lean production into 7 key lean software development principles: eliminate waste, amplify learning, decide as late as possible, deliver as fast as possible, empower the team, build integrity in, and see the whole. 

As companies transition from the industrial to the digital economy, lean philosophies are influencing just about every aspect of their operations, strategy, organization and culture.  Lean’s core idea, - maximize customer value while minimizing waste, - feels particularly applicable to our times, as organizations must better understand what customers truly value; organize their work activities to efficiently develop and deliver the appropriate products and services; and continuously improve customer value and efficiency based on real marketplace feedback.  Such a pull approach to business is quite different from the push approaches of the past.