Mobile: The New Television

Mobile: The New Television

Posted by Sam Churchill on September 26th, 2012

The global advertising market is big. Half a trillion dollars big in 2012, says Matt Cohler in TechCrunch. Television is the primary focus of all those ad dollars, world-wide.

TV ad spending is more than twice as big as Internet ad spending and represents close to half of all ad spending in the world across all media.

Why is that?

First of all, people spend a lot of time watching TV. In America, the only thing people spend more time doing is sleeping and working. This time is important to marketers not only for sheer quantity of inventory, but also for the society-wide reach and broad social context it provides.
Second, watching TV is a focused, immersive experience. There’s really only one thing happening on the screen at a time and the only distraction available is changing the program to a different version of the same thing.
TV beats the web on time spent and on focus of attention. But you know what TV doesn’t beat?

Mobile.
People are going to spend more time staring at mobile screens than television screens. Your smartphone is with you pretty much all the time. Smartphones are also inherently social devices. Advertisers know all about you and your preferences.
Every ad can be targeted to you. What you buy. Where you are.

What’s not to like?
It’s the cost of a data plan, silly. It needs to be free.
The licensed 2.6 GHz band, I believe, could become the new WiFi. With 120 MHz of available spectrum, seamless roaming, and cheap microcells, bandwidth could be moving towards free. Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft will make it happen.
Fiber to the streetlamp is the first step on the road to “wireless cable”. That’s what Google Fiber is really all about. Trenching is too expensive. Hasn’t anyone ever heard of cellular Multicast or 600 Mbps LTE-A? Wireless cable. That’s Entertainment.
Screw group owners. To hell with corporate media. They don’t “own” our frequencies. The FCC shouldn’t pay off broadcasters with “incentive auctions”.
They should eviscerate them.

Broadcast television? Dead! Print and magazines? Dead! Cable? Dead!