A TV is Just a Large Screen on a Wall

The future of TV is apps. -Tim Cook

What Apple just showed us is that you have wrist space, laptop space, desk space, and then you have wall space. -Horace Dediu (video @ 1:10)

I believe that with the launch of the new Apple TV we are in a moment where the word TV is being redefined in the same way that the word phone was redefined with the launch of the smartphone.

A phone was a device for making phone calls, but today it is a pocket computer. Today a TV is a device for watching TV shows, movies, and playing console games. In the future, a TV is a large screen on the wall where you display an app whenever you want to share the experience with other people.

There are two ways to interpret Tim Cook’s statement that the “future of TV is apps”. The first is that our current usage patterns of a TV will be packaged into apps. In other words, our main usage of TV’s will be to watch video content by launching apps on our TV. The second is that our current usage patterns with apps will be displayed on a TV. In other words, everything we do with apps (of which watching video is a subset) will be available on a large screen on the wall which we happen to call a TV.

I think the second interpretation is the correct vision of the future. This implies that the future of TV (sitting on a couch watching shows), and the future of TV (the large screen on your wall) are diverging. And in the future “TV” will only mean the large screen on your wall. The other meaning of TV will go away. So no more “TV shows”, “TV networks”, etc…

Interestingly when someone says something about the future of TV they can be both right and wrong.