Imagine the world in five or ten years time – will television and the Internet be the same thing? I asked HBO’s SVP of digital platforms, Alison Moore, when I interviewed her at Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored event in San Francisco last week.
While nobody – not even a SVP of digital platforms – can actually see into the future, Moore appeared fairly confident that television and the Internet are, indeed, merging and that they would, eventually, become the same thing. But this doesn’t mean, she hinted, that HBO’s expensive programming would suddenly become free or that the mutually profitable relationship between the MSO’s (cable operators) and content producers will come to an end.
So what, exactly, do we see when we look five or ten years into the innovative future of television/internet? I suspect that we’ll see paid services like HBO GO (their version of TV Everywhere), which we’ll be able to access from all our networked devices and whose pricing will be closer to a la carte than today’s all-you-can-eat cable model. The interesting question, however, is what we’ll describe it as: will it be called the internet or will it be called television?