Gartner Says the Race to Dominate the Future of TV Is Underway

Major Stakeholders Need to Work Together to Secure the Future of TV 2.0

STAMFORD, Conn. — The battle for the future of TV is underway in the United States with an overabundance of stakeholders pushing for greater influence as TV and computing converge, according to Gartner, Inc. Although the web of players competing to lead the way for TV 2.0 is starting to have some definition, content providers, device makers, cloud providers and communications firms will need to come together to secure the future of next-generation TV.

“At the moment, the future of TV is clouded by an excess of stakeholders, most of whom have a defensible position in television’s future,” said Allen Weiner, research vice president at Gartner. “New stakeholders, such as telco providers, Web search engines and portals, and new media titans, such as Apple and Microsoft, make for a crazy quilt of businesses and competitors looking for a significant stake in the future of TV, even if revenue models for next-generation broadcasting remain a mystery to most.”

Mr. Weiner said that regardless of market segment, a number of overarching factors will dictate which of these stakeholders emerge with what level of future power. These factors include:

* Agility — The ability to quickly react to technology, programming and consumer trends.
* Regulatory Influence — The ability to get the ear of people in governmental rulemaking and policymaking positions.
* Follow the Money — The ability to create close ties with advertisers, as well as to carefully experiment with new revenue models.
* Understand the Consumer — The ability to follow trends in consumer media usage and to separate the hype and transient trends from those prime for commercial exploitation.

Gartner said that successful stakeholders will need to partner with organizations in different market segments to fully enable the future of TV. “In order for content to ultimately be delivered to consumers outside of traditional paths of linear programming, such as cable and satellite, a number of market segments need to come together, namely content, bandwidth, devices and cloud-based services,” said Andrew Frank, research vice president at Gartner.

Mr. Frank said that overlaid on this orderly division of capabilities is a less-well-defined arrangement of long-standing and newly formed business ecosystems that are at once merging and competing for power. These include the incumbent television ecosystem encompassing broadcast networks, station groups, cable networks, and cable and satellite providers; the Internet Protocol television challengers, consisting of major telecommunications companies; various manufacturing interests including set-top box makers, such as Cisco and Motorola, and TV manufacturers, such as Sony and Samsung; platform providers, such as Sun, Adobe, Microsoft and Apple; and the pure-play Internet companies including Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Hulu, as well as online video publishing platform providers.

At the same time, consumers and advertisers are playing a key role in funding the entire enterprise, while the role of regulators, which has been extremely prominent in established broadcasting, remains relatively ill-defined in the over-the-top world.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report “The Race to Dominate the Future of TV.” The report is on Gartner’s Web site at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=975312&subref=simplesearch.

About Gartner
Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company. Gartner delivers the technology-related insight necessary for its clients to make the right decisions, every day. From CIOs and senior IT leaders in corporations and government agencies, to business leaders in high-tech and telecom enterprises and professional services firms, to technology investors, Gartner is the indispensable partner to 60,000 clients in 10,000 distinct organizations. Through the resources of Gartner Research, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events, Gartner works with every client to research, analyze and interpret the business of IT within the context of their individual role. Founded in 1979, Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.A., and has 4,000 associates, including 1,200 research analysts and consultants in 80 countries. For more information, visit www.gartner.com.