The $70b disruption
It was my great pleasure to present at The Media Kitchen’s 11th Annual Venture Capital Conference this week in New York all about how tech continues to reinvent TV. Barry Lowenthal and Simon Andrews curated excellent points of view across the space ranging from Dave Morgan at Simulmedia and Terry Kawaja at Luma Partners to Chris Fralic at First Round Capital among many others.
What were the consistent themes? TV isn’t dying, it is evolving. Sam Landman at Comcast Ventures underscored that content is king but distribution in this brave new world is kinger and that the tables have very much moved into a distribution power play! Others highlighted the big and fast trends in customer identity, the use of data to inform content creation. I talked about the brave new world of hyper-personalization and how Revel’s startups are helping traditional content companies compete against the large offensive tech behemoths in the space by helping them with data management, consumer identity, personalization, and attribution. Melissa Rosenthal at Cheddar talked about the device agnostic direct to consumer world in which Cheddar is blazing new frontiers.
What’s clear is that this is happening now in real time. Winners and losers are being fast defined. And traditional companies like Disney, Comcast and Verizon are up against the tech-first behemoths of FB, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. Terry highlighted that it isn’t a fair fight when you look at the market caps of the offensive versus defensive players! But certainly, some very interesting moves and I would say there are plenty of opportunities for the defensive enterprises to compete. But they need to be smart and fast. We’ll see who buys who, moves into another’s core turf and develops what products to compete in this massive marketplace. Game on!
