A bit of video industry analysis appeared at the Wall Street Journal blog this past month. The post referenced research from Bernstein Research and the opinion of its analyst Todd Juenger who commented on his vision of what the television landscape will look like in 10 years.
Prediction of the future is not an exact science, but current trends point to streaming services such as Netflix dominating the future of TV. Juenger notes that, although streaming networks are actually channel bundles similar to what cable currently offers, they have the distinct advantage of allowing for a range of on-demand programming. It is that which sets them apart from traditional television and will allow them to rise to prominence amid the death of cable as we know it.
The proof is already here. Futuresource Consulting reports that the digital video market in the U.K. grew to £600 million (about USD $931 million). Telsyte shows that streaming video on demand (SVOD) services have grown from 315,000 to two million subscriptions since the end of 2014. And Bitkom Research notes that more than three-quarters of all Internet users in Germany consume streaming video.
The spread of SVOD is global, and it will certainly feed into Juenger's prediction about what media delivery will resemble by the middle of the next decade. We are on our way to a plethora of on-demand video networks that provide everything from shows to movies to live broadcasts -- network- and user-created -- and have dismantled the dominance of structured TV and restrictive bundles. On our televisions, desktops, laptops, and mobile devices, we won't miss a second of our favorite programs.
Feature and inline images courtesy of flash.pro and Kirill Kniazev. Header image courtesy of Steve Johnson.
