Facebook Application Development

What do you get when a team of Emmy winning children’s TV producers are introduced to the iPad? You get a company that has a whole new vision for the future of television. That company, PlaySquare, is working on something they’re calling “touchable TV.” It’s the idea that the child shouldn’t just be watching television, they should be interacting with it. And it’s not a second screen experience, where the iPad app serves to complement the show a child is viewing. It’s a television network on the iPad, where the show itself becomes personalized to the child, growing with them the more they play, and even “leveling up” as they learn new things.

After a few delays and setbacks, Google today officially launched its 1 gigabit residential fiber network in Kansas City. The network will deliver symmetric 1 gigabit connections to households across the city. That’s about 100 times faster than most current residential broadband connections in the U.S. There will be no monthly caps or overage charges. Google Fiber will also come with 1 terabyte of cloud storage and HD TV service. Users in Kansas City will have to pay a $300 fee to get the service installed in their houses. The monthly price for TV service and the 1 gigabit Internet connection will be $120/month. Users who just want the Internet service will have to pay $70/month.

Users who just want a basic 5 Mbps Internet connection will be able to get this for free for at least the next 7 years, as long as they pay the $300 construction fee. Google will also offer free gigabit connectivity to schools.

According to the latest data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than half of the adult cellphone owners in the U.S. now use their phones while watching TV. The main reason they do so isn’t to talk about a program they are watching on Twitter, though. Instead, the majority of cell owners (38%) used their phones to keep themselves occupied during commercials or breaks. Quite a few of these “connected viewers” also use their phones to fact check something they heard on TV (22%) and marketers will be happy to hear that 35% of smartphone owners use their phones to vist sites that were mentioned on TV.

What’s wrong with this picture? It’s 2012, cheap broadband is ubiquitous in the developed world, and TV still isn’t dead. In fact it’s thriving. Sure, for the first time ever, Nielsen says more people watch videos on the Internet than on a TV–albeit barely–but if you look at how much time is spent on the two, there’s no comparison: TV utterly dominates. Which explains why, again according to Nielsen, more money is spent on TV advertising than all other ad platforms combined.

A few doomsayers say the TV industry “may be starting to collapse” and that excessive production costs are its weak spot. Yeah, if only. Television as constituted today makes no sense at all; it’s a kludged-up legacy system that’s enormously painful and expensive to maintain. But TV’s entrenched economic interests and cultural inertia are so pathological that even HBO GO wouldn’t make sense as a standalone app–as HBO confirms–and the rumors of a brand-new Apple TV ecosystem were, alas, dead wrong. Sure, YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu are mighty powers in their own right, but if even nigh-omnipotent Apple has given up, what hope do they have?

Funny you should ask. I just happen to have an answer.

Almost 115 million households in the U.S. currently own at least on TV set and 36 million own four or more. That’s a huge market and as Apple, Google and Microsoft try wrestle more of this business away from the traditional content and hardware players, the old-school cable and satellite providers now suddenly have to content with this new group of challengers that, until now, barely registered on their radars. According to Forrester analyst James McQuivey, it’s Microsoft that’s winning this platform war so far.