Category: Product

Video Content in a Mobile World: Diet-Sized and Distributed

100 Calorie Snacks

While the tech industry was buzzing over Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, the social network’s original blockbuster deal, Instagram, was quietly making some interesting news of its own. Action-sport channel Network A, a property of next-generation media start-up Bedrocket, announced the launch of a first-of-its-kind video series called ‘#goodstuff’. The lifestyle series, which focuses on event and product reviews in its first installment, will be exclusively distributed on Instagram over the course of ten, 15-second episodes.

Instagram Video, which only launched this past June, has had a couple of other ‘firsts’ on the branded, short-form content front in recent months. In December Mass Appeal launched the first animated video series on the app followed by the launch of Instafax, a news-clip series from BBC, in January. While watching videos over the internet has become commonplace thanks to YouTube, Netflix and others, these three video series are the first to be created specifically for a mobile-first social networking audience. The combination of Instagram’s photo/video sharing experience with user engagement and growth figures that exceed those of Facebook, as well as those of rival mobile social networking apps, makes the company and it’s 150 million-plus user platform a logical place to experiment with new forms of atomized content creation and distribution.

The typical process for distributing video content online usually includes developing a branded destination website and accompanying YouTube channel to garner views. That won’t work in mobile, where apps are preferred by users and competing for attention is further challenged by siloed experiences and navigation constraints relative to the web. Instead of introducing yet another app for consumers to hopefully download, content creators have the opportunity to leverage the popularity of the most engaged social apps to efficiently reach their intended audiences.

In a day an age where smartphones have enabled content consumption to proliferated (just look at music video site Vevo’s recently revealed 2013 viewership stats), some mobile applications have imposed functional constraints (Twitter’s 140-characters, Instagram’s 15-second videos, SnapChat’s disappearing content, etc.) to create unique, and successful, user experiences. Without these limitations on the web, content creators have never had to consider developing stories to fit this new mode. While Netflix has shown us that a full season of House of Cards (about 13 hours) might be the upper-limit for online video storytelling, consuming this type of content is still best suited for TVs and laptops. Mobile devices, with their smaller screens, slower data connections and app-centric usage already lend themselves to content ‘snacking’- so why not experiment with optimizing production for these mobile confines.

The onslaught of webisodic content during the aughts, which launched such companies as Blip.tv and EQAL, eventually proved to be overly optimistic. But the issue might have been one of timing more so than anything else. The social-mobile generation is more likely to trade quality for content brevity and platform convenience in a world of streaming digital distractions.  Recasting webisodes to fit the realities of mobile could enable such experiments as lonelygirl15 to succeed longer-term. If the right content experience can be created for audiences, the quality will follow. If ESPN’s SVP of Product Ryan Spoon comments are any indication, users are willing and ready. The question is- can you successfully condense something like Modern Family into 3-minute seasons?

Time will tell if the ‘mobisode’ makes its way into your stream.

The 3 Most Interesting Start-ups in #DCTech in 2013

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With it being that time of year again when ‘best of’ lists and predictions for the New Year get published I thought I’d take a hybrid approach in looking at the current state of the Washington, DC start-up community of which I’ve been a part of for the past dozen years. It was a web generation ago that the DC area, namely Northern Virginia, was considered an important technology hub thanks to the likes of AOL, which drove consumer adoption of the web, and UUNET, which built the underlying delivery infrastructure. Unfortunately there’s not much left to show from these early internet successes (just look at AOL’s former campus headquarters in Dulles, VA which mostly consists of Raytheon, a defense contractor, signage these days). If the DC region hopes to reestablish itself as an important tech ecosystem it needs a company, or two, to become anchors in the community that will not only draw technical talent to the region but also enable employees to leverage these companies to start new ventures of their own. So I put together a list of a few start-ups that could become one of these pillars.

Two caveats in putting this list together though (1) I excluded any company I’m directly or indirectly involved with (as an employee, investor, mentor, etc.) so as to remove any personal biases and avoid disclosing any non-public information. This meant that portfolio companies of NextGen Angels (where I am a member), for instance, were not considered (and anyway, how could I choose the best amongst all of my companies!) and (2) Advertising-supported businesses, like Vox Media, were also eliminated from consideration. The rationale for focusing this list on start-ups that build and sell technology rather than are just tech-enabled is the diversity of engineering talent needed to run these types of organizations, which are critical in sustaining a tech ecosystem, as well as their ability to build defensible businesses longer-term that are not as susceptible to changing consumer momentum and tastes.

So with these disclaimers out of the way, here are the 3 companies that laid the groundwork in 2013 to potentially become outsized success stories and reestablish the DC region as a major technology hub longer term:

FoundationDB In 2010 then Google CEO (and now Chairman) Eric Schmidt was famously quoted as saying that the amount of information created in 2 days at the time equaled all the information created between the dawn of civilization and 2003- and the pace of creation was only increasing. Even if Schmidt was wrong by a factor of 10 that’s still a lot of information that needs to be captured, stored and made available for retrieval. Add to this the complexity of handling disparate data types with varying rules around what information actually constitutes data and you have the reason for FoundationDB’s existence.

The company is developing a new type of core database that supports the modern day needs of web applications by storing and scaling data regardless of the data model being used (geospatial, graph, JSON, traditional, etc.). By combining the scale and distributed architecture of NoSQL databases (which the likes of MongoDB, which has raised over $220 million to date, have popularized) with the power of ACID transactions, FoundationDB is creating an industrial strength database technology similar to the one used by Google to run AdWords. Having started out building its core features to support NoSQL, the company acquired Akiban, another database start-up that used the same abstraction FoundationDB’s substrate uses but for SQL, earlier this year giving the combined entity a unique hybrid solution. The company’s 4-year effort in building a fault-tolerant system was rewarded last month with a $17 million Series A investment, bringing FoundationDB’s total funding to $23 million.

MapBox Apple’s launch of the App Store in 2008 ushered in the era of computing and with it the importance of location in adding context to mobile application experiences. One of the simplest ways to provide location-based information is via maps- and that’s where MapBox’s technology comes into play.

The company provides cloud-based tools for developers to add interactive maps to their web and mobile applications by leveraging OpenStreetMap data (an open-source project which MapBox also contributes to). Even though the company competes with the likes of Google Maps and ESRI it counts Evernote, Foursquare GitHub, Hipmunk and Uber among its 2,500 paying customers. Due to this early success, MapBox was able to raise a $10 million Series A in October to expand its offering.  That’s because location data is just the starting point of potential for the company as it looks to partner with other data providers to incorporate other types of content to its map offering which would allow it to apply other, relevant, contextual signals that developers could use to enhance the capabilities and user experience of their apps.

SmartThings The “internet of things” promises to move the internet beyond just computing devices to include everyday devices such as door locks and thermostats. By 2018 it’s estimated that there will be 9 billion such devices connected to the internet- roughly equal to the number of smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, wearable computers and PCs combined. So it’s no surprise that DC-based SmartThings is tackling this huge market opportunity. The company, which raised a $12.5 million Series A last month bringing its total funding to $15.5 million since its founding, started out as a Kickstarter project in 2012. Since then SmartThings has launched its own online store to promote its ‘Smart Hub’ which allows consumers to connect various packages of sensors and devices to the internet to solve specific problems.

While the company faces competition from the likes of Nest (founded by ex-Apple employees that are building a vertically integrated solution) and Revolv (which launched its own hub that connects to existing connected devices but lets people create their own notifications) its biggest threat might come from their market timing of consumer understanding and adoption of these types of solutions.

So is this list perfect? No. Could I be dead wrong? Absolutely. But the fact that these companies touch on early-stage and fast-growing technology market opportunities gives me hope for their success. All they have to do now is execute.

I Spent a Few Hours in the Future and I Liked It

Tuesday I was in New York City for the day on business. After finishing up my last meeting it was time for me to make my way to the airport to head home. The process of getting from 34th and Madison to my seat on Delta flight #6054 at LaGuardia took me through a series of events over the course of a few hours that gave me a hopeful glimpse into how we will perform everyday transactions in the near future thanks to mobile consumer technologies.

I started things off by launching Uber’s smartphone app to request a town car. With the evening taxi cab shift-change in full effect (good luck tracking down a cab that will take you out of Manhattan at that time of day) and an expiring promotion from Uber that would make the entire trip cheaper than a taxi ride anyway (thanks Ed!) I requested one of their contracted drivers pick me up through the app. With Francisca, my driver-to-be, estimated to arrive in 13 minutes (an unusually long wait for Uber by the way) I went across the street to grab an ice coffee from Starbucks for the ride. After ordering my drink I paid for it by showing the barista my phone which displayed a barcode from the downloaded Starbucks app for her to scan. The barcode contained my Starbucks card information and credit balance for her to deduct the appropriate amount from. After picking up my drink I went outside to meet Francisca who had called to confirm my location and her momentary arrival. Once we arrived at LaGuardia I thanked her and went inside Terminal D- no payment transaction required. That’s because the fare was calculated by Uber based on the time, distance and tolls incurred during the trip (which was tracked via GPS) and charged to my credit card on file with Uber, who emailed me a receipt of the transaction with all the details by the time I made my way inside Terminal D.

To get to my boarding pass I skipped the ticker counter and kiosks and headed straight to the security line where I opened up an email from Delta and launched the link to my QR code-based boarding pass. Aside from my driver’s license for identity purposes, that’s all I needed to get to my flight’s gate. Since I made it with time to spare I decided to grab some dinner at a restaurant called Bisoux. At my table, and every other seat in the restaurant for that matter, was a tethered iPad and electrical outlet. So while my phone was recharging I pulled up the restaurant’s app on the iPad to order my meal. I paid for my food, including tip, by swiping my credit card through the credit card reader attached to the outlet and had the receipt emailed to my work address. While I waited for my food to arrive (about 15 minutes), I used the iPad to catch-up on some email (and Twitter once my food had arrived). After I was done eating I got up and left without having to track someone down for a bill and payment. Heading over to the seating area at my gate I was greeted by more iPads and outlets (in fact the entire Terminal D at LaGuardia is outfitted with iPads, credit card readers and electrical outlets thanks to OTG Management, an airline food service company) to catch up on my news feeds until it was time to board my flight. One more showing of my QR code boarding pass to the gate attendant and I was off for DC.

In total, during my 2 ½ hour experience that took me from Manhattan to LaGuardia:

  • I conducted 4 transactions (buying coffee, transportation to the airport, buying dinner and boarding a flight)
  • Used 5 physical items to complete these transactions (smartphone, driver’s license, iPad, credit card and credit card reader)
  • Paid for everything using 2 mechanisms (smartphone and credit card)
  • Used 2 wireless networks (Verizon’s mobile network and LaGuardia’s WiFi network)
  • And in only 2 of these instances could I not control the timing of the entire experience (ordering at Starbucks and waiting in the security line at the airport)

With a few realistic software updates and better planning though, these four transactions could have been completed using just one device, a driver’s license and one wireless network by (1) incorporating the payment mechanism directly into the restaurant’s ordering app from OTG Management and making the app available for my smartphone, (2) enabling drinks orders through the Starbuck’s app and (3) enrolling in TSA Pre√ to avoid the traditionally slow security line experience.

Some other insights about the future I came away with from this experience:

Battery Life: This continues to be a huge issue with smartphones, which are increasingly being instrumented to perform computer-like tasks as a result of apps, GPS utilization, mobile browsing and multi-tasking (I drained half of my phone’s battery in a matter of 3 hours due to my little experiment). Without quicker improvements in battery life technology or in the development of wireless charging capabilities, which uBeam is attempting to tackle, the adoption of many of these types of consumer applications, especially those that leverage location, will be hindered. Until batteries can meet the daily demand of consumers the proliferation of charging stations at airports are an adequate solution but needs to be more broadly deployed across additional public and retail spaces (coffee shops, malls, etc.) to be truly valuable.

WiFi Networks: Connecting to publicly identifiable WiFi hotspots is unnecessarily challenging for laptops, let alone smartphones as quickly degrading connections and networks that require “additional information to log on” are a drain on productivity. Add to this the disparate WiFi policies across venues, such as WiFi being free at Washington’s Dulles airport but not at New York’s LaGuardia, consumers’ ability to enter and complete transactions is severely curtailed when a wireless carrier network isn’t available (like in a building or subway for example). Ideally the wireless carriers would take it upon themselves to aggregate various WiFi networks and offer up access as part of a mobile plan. Until there are better, more consistent solutions, companies like Connectify, which aggregates multiple broadband connections into a single high-bandwidth link, and Open Garden, which provides crowd-sourced mobile connectivity, are attempting to meet consumer demands for greater availability and throughput by leveraging the current publicly WiFi infrastructure.

Payments: Two types of mobile payment experiences are emerging in the real world depending on whether you are purchasing a product or service. When buying physical goods, like a cup of coffee, QR and barcodes are being used to facilitate digital payments at the register or provide proof of purchase. In these scenarios services like LevelUp from SCVNGR and Square, which recently announced a deal with Starbucks, are providing the underlying payment processing and generating the associated user codes. For transactions that involve purchasing a service, like a car ride, the entire payment experience can occur within the mobile app itself with companies like Braintree, which is used by Uber, and Stripe providing the transaction processing and merchant notification. At the end of the day what all these companies are vying for is a piece of the worldwide mobile payment transaction market which is expected to reach $1.3 trillion in 2017 according to Juniper Research.

Mobile Wallet: While every transaction I performed was through a specific app, the future of mobile payments is `all about the mobile wallet. Companies at every point in the mobile commerce value chain are joining forces to get their cut of the fast-growing mobile payment market by attempting to aggregate consumer activity and demand. Isis, the wireless carrier-backed initiative, is slated to debut next month on the heels of this month’s announcement from a group of brand name retailers and merchants regarding the launch of Merchant Customer Exchange, which is building its own consumer mobile payment application. Sitting between the carriers delivering the underlying mobile service and the retailers at the point of sale are mobile operating system providers Google, which provided an update on Google Wallet earlier this week, and Apple, which demoed Passbook this summer for the much rumored new iPhone, who are launching their own competitive mobile wallet initiatives. The key to the success of any of these services will be their ability to go beyond just providing a frictionless payment mechanism. The applications that seamlessly incorporate payment options, purchasing preferences, loyalty programs and promotional offers directly into the mobile app and transaction process will be the most successful wallet solutions.

Identification: While the mobile wallet has the ability to create a contact-less payment society, the one physical item it won’t eliminate any time soon is the government issued ID. A truly digital form of personal identification (be it a driver’s license or passport) would be too easy to forge or replicate by criminals and implementing fingerprint or retina scanning as an alternative form of identification is wrought with infrastructure and privacy concerns. So until biometrics can become a viable and cost-effective solution, the physical wallet is here to stay- unless you decide to use a mobile phone cases that doubles as a wallet.

It’s interesting to see how software development and hardware advancements are continually being leveraged to simplify and speed up the experience of completing transactions by challenging legacy models and removing manual steps in the process. Combined with business innovations, consumers are finally able to control when and how these activities are being executed which further enhances the overall experience. While not perfect, from what I was able to do over those few hours, I like where our future days are headed thanks to mobile.

Not All Users Are Created Equal (For Ad-Supported Consumer Businesses)

Facebook’s first earnings announcement as a publicly-traded company last week was not well-received by investors, as the company’s stock hit new all-time lows after only being able to meet analysts’ already lowered financial expectations.

Most of the discrepancies between Facebook’s growth trajectory and stock performance can be summed up in these two slides from the company’s earnings release:

While directionally these charts look good, going up and to the right, a closer look reveals a growing problem in the relationship between Monthly Active Users (MAUs) and Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). The MAUs chart shows quarter-over-quarter user growth in each of Facebook’s four geographic regions over the past two years. The largest of these regions, Rest of the World, is growing the fastest though (at 9% over last quarter) while US & Canada, which is the smallest region in terms of MAUs, is growing the slowest (at 2%) which is an issue since Facebook is able to monetize US & Canada users over seven times better than Rest of World users on average according to the ARPU chart. Optimizing per user monetization is further exacerbated when you consider that growth is increasingly coming from mobile-only users where advertising is still in its infancy.

Facebook’s ability to attract and monetize a large U.S. audience is what has enabled the company to go public. Whether Facebook becomes a successful publicly-traded company will rest largely on how quickly it’s able to reduce the ad monetization gap between U.S. users and every other region of the world. Until then, the financial markets will continue to recalibrate Facebook’s valuation (downward) to reflect the realities of the company’s current revenue capabilities.

This situation isn’t unique to just Facebook though. For example Twitter, the second largest social network out there, recently passed the 500 million account mark according to analyst group Semiocast, which also saw the proportion of U.S. user accounts decline relative to the rest of the world since the beginning of the year and identified Jakarta, Indonesia as the most active tweeting city- statistics that have a similar looking trend to what Facebook has experienced, growing but mostly in less mature advertising markets. As any free consumer tech services starts to grow quickly, they too will eventually face this same situation.

If you’re fortunate enough to be involved with such a consumer product that is gaining millions of users, focus on growth in countries where advertising is a mature industry so mobile will also be monetized more quickly (places like the U.S., Japan, Germany, and U.K.) and also accessible (so not China). If growth takes off in less-mature ad markets, but sizeably populated countries such as India or Indonesia, find a local advertising partner with strong ties to large conglomerates and marketers in the region before committing resources.

So when Josh Elman, venture capitalist at Greylock Partners, blogs about getting meaning from growth numbers provided by startups, we should probably add users by region to the discussion for ad-supported consumer start-ups in order to better understand the real opportunity and value being created for investors.

Is Path (2.0) Mobile’s Path?

One feature of the recently announced Nike+ FuelBand, Nike’s new activity measuring wristband, is its social integrations that enable users to share their activity data on Facebook, Foursquare and Path. With over 800 million and 15 million people using Facebook and Foursquare respectively these tie-ins make sense for Nike. For Path though, which re-launched its app a mere 2 months ago, this represents a big coup considering it just passed the 2 million user mark. It also highlights the early stages of a user experience in mobile that mimics the content creation and consumption cycle on the wired web.

Path 2.0 incorporates a set of activities- Photos, People, Places, Music, Thoughts and Sleep/Awake status- that users can post to their timeline and share with their network. By initially focusing on these social services, Path’s mobile functionality either super-sets (in the case of Places and Thoughts) or competes with (for Photos and Music) some of the most popular mobile apps available:

  • Photos: The basis for the original Path app, Photos, which incorporates image-filters as well, competes with many other photo-sharing apps including the wildly successful Instagram.
  • Places: Popularized by location-based social networks, Path also offers check-in services inside its app and allows the location data to be posted to a user’s Foursquare account.
  • Music: Giving users the ability to insert song clips into their Path timeline competes directly with the relatively new but popular SoundTracking app.
  • Thoughts: Like any social network, commenting is a core functionality which Path supports and allows to be shared to both a user’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.

By leveraging design, for which the company has received rave reviews, Path has created a differentiated mobile user experience that consolidates these services into a single app. While competition between content creators and aggregators for audience attention is a relatively new phenomenon in mobile, it has played out over several cycles on the wired web already. Yahoo became a very popular web 1.0 destination by providing an online directory through which the initial content creators on the web could be found. Over time Yahoo evolved from being just an aggregator to a creator of content as well- launching successful finance and sports content verticals in the process. As the web matured, traditional media (magazines, newspapers and television networks) began bringing its offline content online, shifting consumer attention back towards these properties. Then came Google who re-aggregated the content experience for audiences by providing a better way to discover exactly what people were looking for through its search engine. Google has also tried leveraging its audience by acquiring (i.e. YouTube) or launching (i.e. Gmail) content and services that keep these consumers engaged with Google’s properties. When web 2.0 came along the balance of attention started to shift to socially oriented sites like MySpace and Photobucket where the users became the content creators. As last week’s S-1 filing reminds us, Facebook won the battle for social networking supremacy as they created a platform that not only aggregates individual content creation but enables professional content to be curated in the same experience as well. In the process Facebook took the aggregation idea one step further than in previous cycles by allowing other companies (such as Zynga) to build applications directly on the platform, thus ensuring users continued to engage with Facebook.

The ushering in of the mobile app economy by Apple has led to the development of hundreds of thousands of task-specific apps- from games and content apps to personal utilities and social networking services. Relatively few of these though have been built to aggregate individual app experiences. Path is attempting to do this, and take it a step further at the same time, by creating its own set of services (Photos, Music, Sleep/Awake status) alongside super-setting such well-established apps as Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and now Nike+ through the use of APIs. A consistent, mobile-only experience throughout Path’s app allows users to still participate in these underlying networks but aggregates the engagement within its own app, which if successful, would allow Path to eventually drop their connection to these underlying social networks.

How valuable consumers find the aggregated experience versus using activity-specific apps will determine Path’s success ultimately. And while design may very well continue to win over users from competing web and mobile services, Path will need to grow beyond the Valley’s A-List of users and connect with the average American already using Facebook if it’s going to win the first wave of mobile app aggregation. If not, which companies stand to benefit in this cycle?

Time for Television Ratings to Get Social

The start of the current fall television season has highlighted the importance of social media in driving awareness and tune-in for new and established TV series as audience consumption habits continue to fragment across device and social platforms. With multiple apps being promoted by shows, networks and even TV service providers for checking-in to these broadcasts as well as fan pages and hashtags used to centralize the conversation around each episode, there is a growing need for audience measurement beyond the traditional Nielsen ratings.

The Nielsen Company is the de facto provider of the ratings system used to determine how the 60 billion in television advertising dollars are allocated amongst broadcast and cable network line-ups. The company relies on the behavior of 50,000 Americans across its sample of 25,000 households to extrapolate ratings for the nearly 115 million households with television sets in the U.S.  The resulting ‘share’ of audience Nielsen attributes to each TV episode on a nightly basis ultimately effects which series get renewed or cancelled (for a great primer on how Nielsen’s TV ratings system works, check out this ESPN-style animated video on the topic from local Washington, DC creative agency JESS3).

Though with the number of households with television sets dropping for the first time in 20 years, on-demand video platforms taking viewing time away from traditional television and multi-tasking across multiple screens a growing reality, traditional means of measurement are failing to capture this evolving consumer behavior. While Nielsen is working on ways to aggregate this distributed viewing audience through its ‘extended screen’ initiative, the company isn’t measuring the actual activity on the social web occurring around the episodes being watched. This represents an opportunity for services that provide a platform for social engagement as well as companies that aggregate TV show-related conversations from across the internet to address this information gap. While both Facebook and Twitter have their own media-related initiatives that allow fans to interact with one another as well as with the shows and their stars, neither network focuses on quantifying this engagement on an industry-wide basis.

Services like BuddyTV, GetGlue, Miso and Tunerfish, on the other hand, have been built in a manner that can address this need. Having ridden the check-in wave popularized by location-based service Foursquare, these event-based social networks (EBSNs) capture when consumers are tuning in to watch television and aggregating the activity being generated around each show within their respective apps and websites. GetGlue, the largest of these services, already has more users checking-in to the most popular shows on its platform than the size of Nielsen’s entire sample audience, making it statistically valuable to the ratings conversation.

Even though the demographic make-up of EBSN users is not representative of the overall U.S. population (which Nielsen does try to mirror in selecting its households), check-in services make up for this by highlighting the actual activity of the most desirable audience to advertisers (18 to 49 year-olds) and not just projections. For advertisers this represents a unique opportunity to target these consumers in a highly engaged environment by extending their TV advertising for particular shows to the equivalent social web channels and mobile devices. To bring the desired scale to this type of opportunity though, these social environments need to be aggregated somehow.

That’s where companies like Bluefin Labs, General Sentiment, Social Guide and Trendrr come into play by not only aggregating publicly available social commentary but filtering and normalizing this data from disparate sources (EBSNs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to identify the underlying sentiment of a broader range of web users. This provides a more complete view of the engagement associated with shows across the social web in real-time as well as beyond the initial airing time slot of each episode. The resulting findings might be just the data set necessary to become the de facto social television rating to rival Nielsen.

Even with Nielsen’s recent ratings calculation glitch, it’s unlikely that the company will be replaced as the ratings system for the television advertisers industry in the near future. But as audiences for traditional TV continue to disperse across more mediums and content experiences, the need to compliment the ratings discussion, and ultimately how advertising dollars are allocated, with additional data will only continue to increase. This creates an opportunity for actual engagement-related metrics to gain equal footing with passive stream and tune-in projections over time.

So how do we get there?

While results from a recent NM Incite (a Nielsen/McKinsey company) study confirms the correlation between social activity and TV ratings, the opportunity for social television start-ups is in identifying and explaining the variations in popularity between Nielsen’s most highly rated shows and those series being discussed online and how to benefit from it.

The combination of tune-in and conversation activity make EBSNs the most compelling data set for social television ratings. The challenge is that the company that popularized the check-in, Foursquare, only recently passed 10 million users worldwide itself, a far cry from Facebook’s 150 million users in the U.S. alone. For EBSNs to reach Facebook-like adoption, they need distribution and a more automated process for socializing around TV shows (beyond the manual download of apps and checking-in to services). While BuddyTV and Miso have partnered with AT&T’s television service offering U-verse, GetGlue and Miso have integrations underway with satellite television provider DirecTV that enables subscribers to check-in to shows through DirecTV’s remote control. Other companies, such as Dijit, are by-passing traditional TV service providers entirely and competing for consumers with their own universal remote that layers in check-in functionality.

What social analytic companies lacks in proprietary data, they make-up for in business model by already working with advertisers and media companies to help them understand the volume and sentiment of chatter occurring online about their brands and shows across the social web. Gaining access to data on an exclusive basis from EBSNs and other social communities would be a key differentiator in winning the battle for advertising and media clients- the same companies that subscribe to Nielsen’s television ratings data. With so many companies vying for client dollars and mind share, the social analytics provider that can get the right media outlets partnerships to adopt and distribute their version of social television ratings can become the industry standard through sheer perception and market momentum.

Based on these factors, Trendrr, which launched a TV industry-specific real-time dashboard before the start of the fall television season could be that company. Considering Trendrr’s breadth of data sources (Facebook, GetGlue, Miso and Twitter) and how well they’ve embedded themselves into the online media landscape (partnering with the likes of AdAge, Lost Remote and Mashable to distribute their data and findings), the company is best positioned to become the social television ratings provider of the future.

What are the most likely outcomes?

Absent Trendrr or another one of these start-ups gaining the necessary client or user clout to grow into the de facto social TV ratings provider, the most likely outcome for the companies with the most traction in this market is an acquisition.

If either Facebook or Twitter decided to focus on providing analytics as a value-add to their advertiser and media clients, they would make ideal acquirers of these types of companies. For Facebook, adding a media-oriented check-in service to their massive user base would fit nicely with Facebook’s recent overturns towards the television industry and turn the acquired ESBN into the immediate and undisputed winner in the social television data game. Twitter on the other hand would benefit from acquiring one of the leading social analytics companies, as it would fill a large analytics hole in their offering. Even though the company recently stated its intentions to stay out of the enterprise market, the opportunity might prove to be too lucrative to stay out.

Beyond Twitter, The Nielsen Company is a natural acquirer of a social analytics company since it compliments Nielsen’s existing ratings and research business. With the company having held an initial public offering at the beginning of this year, Nielsen also has the necessary capital to do this.

Beyond these entities, media companies and television platform could benefit from owning one of the EBSNs by leveraging these services to gain insight into user activity and drive additional tune-in for themselves or partners. Yahoo was the first to act on this, acquiring 12-week old IntoNow earlier this year and releasing an iPad app last week that integrates into Yahoo’s Connected TV framework. For GetGlue and Miso, who have raised capital from Time Warner and Google’s venture arm respectively, they already have likely acquirers in the fold. That being said, with the variety of relationships GetGlue (most recently with FX) and Miso (most recently with Showtime) have established with different broadcast and cable networks it’s not out of the question that one of these media partners tries to acquire either company to be their underlying social TV platform. The engagement data would be very valuable to any company negotiating with advertisers during the ‘upfront’ season as a way to justify advertising rates (beyond Nielsen’s rating data) for the next television season or provide brands with a new way to advertise to their intended audiences (for an additional cost or as a make-good).

Stay tuned. This market will only get more interesting.

Apple’s Game of “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose”

Remember as kids when you were given the know-how to always win at coin-flips? By uttering those 6 simple words “heads I win, tails you lose” you were able to set-up the rules of the game in a manner that seemed fair, in that it provided an outcome for both participants, but always resulted in you being the winner of the coin-flip and your opponent the loser (until of course they realized what was going on).

This is essentially the game Apple is playing in the tablet market right now. The company, which launched the industry with the unveiling of the iPad last April, has yet to see a truly competitive offering after selling 15 million iPad units in 2010. The only notable rival last year was Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. This Android-based tablet, which launched in November at a slightly lower price point than the iPad but at the expense of comparable features (smaller touchscreen display and less internal memory though it does include front and rear-facing cameras), has not met sales expectations.

The Motorola Xoom, which gets released today, is expected to be the first viable alternative to the iPad after winning Best of Show at CES in January. This device comes equipped with Android’s tablet-specific Honeycomb operating system and hardware specs to match current versions of the iPad, with the addition of memory expansion capabilities and front and rear-facing cameras, but accomplishes this at the expense of price (higher compared to iPads) and app offering (a handful versus the iPad’s 60,000).

In both of these instances, a trade-off between product and price had to be made by the manufacturer. To compete on price, Samsung had to sacrifice on product (i.e. screen size and memory). To compete on product, Motorola had to give on price (i.e. be more expensive). Throw in research that shows the iPad has 90% awareness among consumers, and you can see why tablet manufacturers must beat Apple on both product and price to beat the iPad.

Heads Apple wins, tails tablet manufacturers lose.

While Apple competitors might be able to match, or even exceed the design and hardware capabilities of the iPad at some point in the future, doing so at a lower price point would be challenging. Apple understands their strategic price advantage and is continuously looking to expand on it.

Case in point- based on iSuppli’s research, the single most expensive component in the iPad’s manufacturing process is the touchscreen display. So it’s no surprise that Apple revealed on its most recent earnings call that it has made long-term financial commitments of $3.9 billion dollars with three suppliers believed to be display providers. If correct, this means Apple would control 60% of the global touch panel capacity according to Taiwanese industry website DigitTimes. Controlling this amount of supply would have two major effects on the tablet market as (1) it would lock in favorable pricing and predictable supply for Apple going forward in manufacturing future versions of the iPad and (2) create supply constraints and pricing pressure on tablet manufacturers.

Once again, heads Apple wins, tails tablet manufacturers lose.

The concept of vertical integration is nothing new to Apple which acquired Intrinsity last year, a semiconductor chip design firm responsible for developing the iPad’s original A4 processor, in an effort to bring the skills and development costs in-house. This became another component cost advantage over the Motorola Xoom which leverages NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 for its processor.

With Apple’s event next week expected to showcase the next iteration of the iPad, which should once again place the product’s feature set ahead of its competitors, the question to Android, Tablet OS and WebOS tablet makers is: want to flip again?

Photo credit: Algie Moncrief/Flickr

Mobile Video: The Final Frontier for Ad Networks?

Earlier this month TechCrunch broke the news that mobile video ad platform Transpera had been acquired by online video ad network Tremor Media. The deal came almost exactly three months after Tremor’s last transaction, the purchase of video ad network ScanScout. The Tremor-ScanScout merger was part of a string of announcements in the online video ad space last fall which began with top 10 online display advertising network Specific Media acquiring video ad platform BBE and ending with another leading ad network, Undertone, buying Jambo Media, a video solutions company.

With advertising a major theme at last week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona could this latest Tremor news set off the next round of capabilities expansion and provider consolidation amongst ad networks?

With online video projected to grow 55% annually through 2014, making it the fastest growing online ad format worldwide, it’s easy to see why there’s interest from both traditional display and pure play video ad networks in acquiring online video market share. Looking at recent industry trends and projections, mobile video might be poised to follow this same type of growth trajectory, creating a similar opportunity for ad networks looking to provide cross-platform digital ad solutions to agencies and advertisers.

  • Devices: Worldwide smartphone shipments passed PCs in total volume for the first time in the 4th quarter of last year while tablet shipments, led by Apple’s iPad, are expected to reach nearly 56 million this year and 172 million by 2014.
  • Network Traffic: In Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Forecast, updated this month, the company predicted that, by 2015, two-thirds of all global mobile data traffic would be video.
  • Advertising: Mobile ad spending is projected to exceed $18 billion worldwide by 2015, representing over 15% of digital advertising’s spend. While in the U.S. video is expected to continue growing faster than any other mobile segment through 2014.

Together, these data points confirm that the PC-based era of the web has been officially replaced by the mobile web, which consumers are already taking advantage of through the proliferation of mobile device types. According to The Nielsen Company, Americans, led by teens and young adults, watch an average of 3 ½ hours of video a month on their mobile devices. To understand just how quickly video consumption habits are evolving look at YouTube’s announcement last month that it has reached 200 million video views per day on mobile devices- an increase of 300% over the beginning of 2010.

Media companies and marketers are looking at ways to quantify this audience in aggregate in an effort to bring advertising economics to parity across all “three screens” (television, web and mobile). This represents a big opportunity for ad networks willing to put forth the technical and execution effort to target mobile audiences fragmented by app-type (mobile web versus native apps), device (smartphones versus tablets), operating system (Android, BlackBerry, iOS, etc.) and ad unit interactivity (passive versus touch-screen).

Because ad guidelines and standards for the mobile web are still maturing in comparison to display and online video, ad networks interested in entering the mobile video space would benefit from acquiring video delivery expertise and an embedded distribution network. Any M&A activity would involve one of these three types of acquisition strategies:

  1. Buy capabilities and market share: This tact was used by Specific Media to enter the online video market by acquiring a top 10 video ad provider and instantly gaining reach. If leading online video advertising networks BrightRoll and YuMe, which launched their respective mobile advertising solutions last fall, don’t see adoption of their offerings, they might be forced to take this route in order to match Tremor Media’s cross-platform scale in video. From the display advertising perspective, only Microsoft and Yahoo as well as the largest ad networks will be able to afford this type of acquisition due to lofty valuations in mobile and video.
  2. Buy capabilities, leverage market share in current business: Undertone took this route by leveraging its own scale on the display advertising side with its video technology purchase to become a top 10 online video ad provider of its own within a couple of months of the acquisition. This is the most capital efficient way for any ad networks to enter the mobile video business, though acting quickly will be the key to successfully executing this strategy due to the limited number of acquisition options and venture capital being invested in the segment.
  3. Extend capabilities and market share: As for Tremor Media, already a leader in the online video advertising space, its deal allowed the company to add product expertise (video overlay ads) while growing its reach and video ad volume. Millennial Media, the largest independent mobile ad network which raised $27.5 million earlier this year, and has raised $65 million overall, is the best positioned mobile ad network to take advantage of this strategy due to its profitability, exit options and capital on hand.

While Google bought its way into a dominate position in the U.S. mobile advertising market (including interactive video ad capabilities) with its purchase of AdMob last year, the growth of YouTube’s mobile website has allowed Google to become a cross-platform provider of mobile video monetization solutions. Apple on the other hand used its acquisition of AdMob competitor Quattro Wireless to build the iAd Network solely for its own mobile operating system (iOS). With two of the largest ad networks having been acquired by the two leading mobile operating platforms what merger opportunities still exist in mobile video advertising?

  • JumpTap: The company added video to its suite of mobile ad formats last year in an effort to broaden its appeal to clients. JumpTap, which delivers ads across all major smartphone platforms (Android, BlackBerry and iOS) as well as the iPad, is considered the largest independent mobile ad network in the U.S. after Millennial Media. As such, the company will most likely have to wait and see what happens with Millennial (which will either go public or get acquired) before drawing interest from the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo and potentially Research in Motion (maker of BlackBerry) who have all been rumored acquirers of a mobile ad network and the only companies large enough to digest JumpTap’s $69 million in capital raised.
  • Mogreet: The company provides mobile video advertising solutions through SMS and MMS mobile messaging services, allowing Mogreet to address the feature phone audience as well. Considering the limitation of their offering, especially when you consider the growth of the smartphone and tablet markets, and the $7 million invested in the company thus far, an acquisition of this company would be a stretch for a U.S.-based ad network but maybe not for a network in a large developing market such as Brazil, India, Indonesia or Russia where feature phones dominate the market.
  • Rhythm NewMedia: From a pure play mobile video ad network perspective, Rhythm NewMedia has built the most envious, cross-platform network out there of the remaining independent players. The company, which recently raised $10 million, only works with premium brand advertisers and publishers across Android and iOS mobile platforms covering both smartphones and iPads. Having raised $37 million in total funding makes Rhythm a pricey acquisition for anyone not named Microsoft or Yahoo at this point though.
  • Vdopia: While the company is an online video ad network with extensive operations and market share in India, it also operates iVdopia, a mobile video ad network. Its mobile offering covers both Android and iOS platforms (including iPads) as well as mobile websites. Claiming it has reached profitability, and with only $4 million raised, Vdopia would be a prudent acquisition for an online global ad network.

Beyond these mobile video ad companies there are several other start-ups that focus on providing rich media advertising solutions for smartphones, tablets and the mobile web that could provide the framework for a video offering for ad networks interested in getting into mobile video. Greystripe which focuses on rich media banner ads primarily for the iPhone, while supporting Android  and Java feature phones as well, has raised the most venture capital of the group ($18 million), followed by Medialets ($10 million) and Crisp Media (at least $5 million). Greystripe’s strength is in its ability to transcode Flash ads into HTML5 in order to support Apple’s Flash-restriction on iOS devices. Both Crisp Media and Medialets, neither of which are an ad network but instead earn revenue from serving rich media ads to mobile devices, do provide video ad solutions for both smartphones and tablets. The biggest challenge facing these companies will be potentially pricing themselves out of the M&A market if they continue to raise capital. Based on this, Crisp Media might be an ideal technology pick-up for an ad network with a strong client-base and distribution network.

With the display inventory component of mobile advertising already being automated through demand side platforms like DataXu and real-time bidding exchanges like Mobclix, mobile video might be the last digital ad segment where ad networks can extract additional margin out of the industry through ad effectiveness and audience scale. Perfecting the online and app video experience will be important beyond just mobile as internet television, the next great digital ad opportunity, will leverage these advertising frameworks for its own platform monetization. As agencies begin to provide digital services at global scale to their advertising clients, ad networks that can deliver audiences across devices and digital formats, at scale, will garner the lion’s share of ad campaign dollars coming from these agencies going forward. To accomplish this ad network’s need to boldly go where most networks haven’t gone before.

Photo credit: fdecomite/Flickr

Rise of the Event-Based Social Networks

With interest in location-based social networks (LBSNs) hitting an all-time high with Foursquare’s recent funding announcement valuing the company at $115 million, a new type of social networking has emerged that borrows some of the mechanics and incentives from location-based services: event-based social networks (EBSNs). While LBSN users notify their personal networks where they are physically located by “checking-in” to the service, earning virtual badges in the process, EBSN users earn their virtual rewards by identifying themselves to other attendees and participants by also using check-in mechanics, but without having to actually be physically present at the event.

We see from studies and personal experiences that recommendations from social networks do influence our television viewing habits. Combined with the abundant, on-demand nature of information available on the internet today, it’s easy to understand how the changing content consumption habits, from the ‘day after’ to the ‘day of”, have affected the media industry. While much of the demise of print news media can be attributed to these changing habits (and nowhere better explained than on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart), it has actually had the opposite effect on live television event broadcasts.  Here is audience data from some of the most widely-known sports and entertainment events from this year that were broadcast live:

  • Golden Globes (January): This year’s television audience was 17 million, 14% higher than in 2009;
  • Grammy Awards January): Almost 27 million viewers tuned in, a 35% increase over last year’s broadcast and the highest TV ratings for the event since 2004;
  • Super Bowl XLIV (February): Became the most watched television program in U.S. history, beating the finale of the TV show ‘M-A-S-H’ with a total audience of over 150 million and an average of over 106 million viewers;
  • Academy Awards (March): Had over 41 million viewers, up 14% over the 2009 Oscars;
  • NBA Finals Game 7 (June): The deciding game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics pulled in a viewership of over 28 million, the largest basketball audience in 12 years (when Michael Jordan won his last of six NBA championships);
  • World Cup Final (July): The finals between Spain and Netherlands became the most-watched soccer game in U.S. history with over 24 million viewers, topping the previous record of 19 million viewers from United States’ match against Ghana in the elimination round only weeks earlier.

While some might argue that the economy (i.e. people staying home more often for entertainment purposes) or content quality (i.e. offensive-minded Super Bowl match-up, the popularity of Lady Gaga and Avatar for the Grammys and Golden Globes/Oscars respectively, deciding game of a classic NBA Finals match-up and final of the most-followed sporting event in the world, the World Cup) are better explanations for this renewed interest in live television programming, the fact is that most of these events are leveraging social media hubs like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube more and more as part of their tune-in marketing campaigns to engage with fans and would-be viewers.

And it’s working. The network effect caused by the interest of the most engaged fans is bringing indifferent audiences on the sideline that are connected to these fans into the viewing experience. The real-time nature of information flow on the web and the ability to extended social connections through Facebook and Twitter has made it increasingly difficult for people to avoid watching or hearing about live television event broadcasts or even attempting to try to watch them in a non-linear, time-shifted manner without having the outcome spoiled by social media channels. Combined with the social pressures around participation, additional audiences are being influenced to engage with these events via social networks.

Some recent engagement figures from Facebook and Twitter seem to confirm this. Facebook has shared that about 30% of all status updates on the site during the U.S. versus England match included a World Cup-related term. More impressively Twitter saw the number of Tweets-per-second (TPS) it handles cross 3,000 as a result of the Lakers beating the Celtics in the NBA Finals. This record was broken a week later on the heels of two World Cup matches that generated almost 3,300 TPS.  To put this into context Twitter’s normal activity is 750 TPS, which is big reason why the service has experienced over 6 hours of downtime since the beginning of the World Cup.

With live television event broadcasting benefiting greatly from social networking, can EBSNs become the next big opportunity in social media?

Even though the most well-known companies in this segment of social networking have positioned themselves in a slightly different manner from one another, at the most basic level Fanvibe, formerly known as FanPulse (sporting events), GetGlue by AdaptiveBlue (home entertainment such as movies, books and music), Hot Potato (general events), Miso by Bazaar Labs (TV shows and movies) and Tunerfish from Comcast (online video and TV shows), among others, all address some type of live event participation through their services. As ReadWriteWeb points out in its recent coverage of some of these apps, their current lack of users adversely affects the social value of their respective networks. With Facebook and Twitter already driving the lion’s share of social media status updates, and check-in functionality becoming a commodity, these EBSNs will need more than virtual badges and threaded conversation capabilities around events to drive adoption.

The “more than” is partnering with the leagues and organizations behind these events as well as the television networks with the broadcast rights. Being promoted by the events or built into the digital experiences of the broadcasts is the ideal way to drive mind share and user growth.  For this reason Tunerfish is best positioned of the group to succeed since it comes out of Comcast, which has the largest television subscriber base, and is in the process of acquiring one of the biggest TV network broadcasters, in the U.S. Being part of Comcast helped Tunerfish land its first promotional partnership with HBO when the service went live last month. Owning NBC could bring a lot more of these types of opportunities to Tunerfish. With an iPad app also in the works from Comcast, adding Tunerfish’s functionality to the application could automate the check-in process for millions of TV viewers across every television show and network available in the U.S.,creating an enviable interest graph.

There is hope for some of the other services as well. AdaptiveBlue, which has been around the longest, probably has the most robust underlying platform. The company leverages semantic technologies to generate social recommendations for its users based on their check-ins and ratings. By covering a broader range of interests than just TV shows and movies and strong platform usage resulting from its recently launched GetGlue iPhone app, AdaptiveBlue can create a much deeper interest graph than some of its competitors. Hot Potato could find early success amongst sports leagues as its founding team comes from MLBAM, the digital media arm of Major League Baseball. That being said, MLB, which is the most tech-savvy of all the major sports leagues, did announce it has integrated its own check-in functionality into its iPhone app just last week. Miso’s best opportunity for success is tied to the investment it took from Google Ventures last month. With the announcement of GoogleTV earlier this year, Miso should have the inside track in doing for GoogleTV what Tunerfish could do for Comcast- to be integrated directly into the television guide and discovery experience for set-top boxes.

What’s at stake in becoming the real-time conversation service and recommendation engine for television?

Over $400 billion in television advertising and on-demand video revenues worldwide according to a recent report published by media researcher Futurescape. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts and tweets, live TV event programming such as sports championships and entertainment award shows will only increase in value to broadcasters as produced, series-based programming becomes even more accessible on-demand in a non-linear viewing experience. Live television represents the best opportunity for advertisers to find and connect with an engaged audience in the present. Combined with real-time status updates, event producers and advertisers can receive immediate feedback from users on their TV viewing experience. This social feedback loop will be critical in delivering better television programming and advertising in the future.

With nearly half of Facebook users simultaneously watching television while on the site and Twitter showing its impact during the recently concluded NBA Finals and World Cup, it’s their game to lose at the moment as each brings a respective interest and sentiment data set that can add tangible value to traditional TV audience metrics. For EBSNs to succeed they will need to leverage Facebook and Twitter’s platforms as distribution channels, much like Foursquare did initially, in order to drive utility for its users and interest for their own services. By becoming the interface between users and their Facebook and Twitter accounts, ESBNs have an opportunity to get users to build sub-networks within their respective platforms that are unique and more valuable to those on Facebook and Twitter- once again, something Foursquare is starting to do with its own LBSN. The ultimate benefit in evolving a platform in this manner is that an event-based social network can become the audience and data provider to event creators and distributors as well as advertisers while delivering better programming recommendations and socially targeting advertising to its users in the process.

Whatever the eventual outcome, it will unfold live.

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Nevermind the iPad, What’s Next for Apple?

Now that the long-rumored Apple tablet has finally been unveiled as the iPad, we can turn our attention towards figuring out what Apple’s next big product launch might be. Based on the evolution of the company’s devices, software and recent business discussions the answer actually seems pretty clear: Apple should build a true web-enabled home entertainment television experience- the iTV. Here’s why:

Apple TV has been a failure. For a company that loves to reference stats regarding the success of its products, Apple has been very reticent about the sales performance of Apple TV, repeatedly referring to the product as “still a hobby.” The device, which competes with over-the-top (video delivering over a broadband network and not through a cable box) offerings from the likes of Boxee and Roku, has not met with nearly the same success as other Apple products since its launch 2 ½ years ago- primarily because it functions as a peripheral device and not as an end-to-end Apple experience.

Apple’s corporate success has been built upon its desire to create elegant and simple user experiences around its products. The development of the iPad, iPhone/iTouch, iPod and Mac is entirely controlled by Apple from the moment a user turns them on to when the device is powered down. This allows the company to design products that tightly integrate the aesthetic design and functionality of the hardware with the software and services, making it intuitive and easy for consumers to use. All that users have to do is connect the device to a network (broadband or mobile- if even that) to get going. Apple TV on the other hand functions as a peripheral device within a broader television viewing experience that Apple does not have complete control over. This leaves consumers to deal with separate controls for Apple TV, the television set and potentially their cable set-top box, creating a very un-Apple-like experience from the integration of the hardware’s aesthetics, to the rendering of content on the display, to delivering additional value through applications.

iTunes has a robust video content offering. What started out as a music catalog for the iPod has grown to include podcasts, audio books and, most importantly, video content from television networks and movie studios. While the iTunes store has successfully been selling access to televisions shows and movies on a per unit basis over the years, there are persistent rumors that Apple is in discussions with these same video content providers to offer a subscription-based service through iTunes, mimicking cable’s content offering, but at a lower price point. Since the iTunes software is integrated with Apple’s operating system already, connecting it to an iTV device becomes trivial.

The AppStore already competes with TV and gaming consoles. One of the big trends at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year was web-enabled televisions that offer not only video streaming services over the internet but access to widgets through the likes of Yahoo’s Connected TV. With 140,000 apps on its platform, Apple has a massive head-start on potential competitive offerings from television manufacturers. With the iPad now expanding the opportunity for game developers while also providing a scaling solution for  apps currently in the App Store, Apple has become an even greater threat to traditional gaming consoles from Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. By also leveraging apps or hardware, iPhones and iTouches can be turned into remote controls, enabling these apps to work in a more traditional television viewing experience as well as allowing for multi-user games to be played on a single screen, a capability that has been an exclusive feature of gaming consoles to date.

The iPad is a personal entertainment experience. While the iPad offers a great medium through which to consume a variety of content (apps, books, photos, magazines, movies, websites, etc.), because the display is only 9.7 inches it doesn’t make for a great experience when more than one person wants to participate. For an entire family to enjoy watching television or playing games together there needs to be a larger screen.

The iMac’s monitor is already big enough. Even though Steve Jobs referred to Apple as the largest mobile device company during the iPad’s launch event, the company still sells a fair amount of Macs. The current 27 inch display is large enough to already compete with smaller LCD and plasma television displays on the market today. The iMac also offers a great example of how Apple would approach designing-away the clutter associated with today’s television and gaming console cords and cables, creating a much more  aesthetic and desirable device for display at home.

With a complete line of mobile devices now available to consumers as well as content and app catalogs that render across Apple’s entire portfolio of hardware products, Apple will need to find new growth opportunities beyond its current line of ‘iProducts’ in the future. With internet-enabled televisions expected to be a $29 billion worldwide business by the end of next year, and with an average of almost 3 television sets in the over 110 million households in the U.S. alone, Apple can make a multi-billion dollar business out of home entertainment-enabled televisions- especially when you take into account the recurring revenue opportunity provided by video subscription services.

Considering Steve Jobs’ almost maniacal, hands-on approach to launching products, it’s doubtful that we would see a version of the iTV before January 2012. Until then Apple fans can enjoy the launch of the iPad and the evolution of Apple’s content offering in (hopeful) anticipation of a better home entertainment experience.

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