I Want To Change TV: Mitch Berman, CEO of ZillionTV (Part 3)

SM: At the same time, our iMac screen has almost the same resolution as this TV screen. They are incredibly high-resolution.

MB: What is really important for this discussion is to take ourselves out of Silicon Valley to the rank and file television viewer in this country. HDTV, or high definition, is growing in consumer adoption, daily. TV resolution on an HD TV set is a terrific consumer viewing experience.

SM: I would not position computer screens versus television screens by size, rather by where they are. A computer screen sits on my desk with a keyboard and a chair where I am in work mode. I am not sitting on a lounge chair with the screen in a way that I can view with a number of family and friends.

MB: Precisely. TV is and has always been a communal experience. Always has been and always will be.

SM: Does that mean your focus is squarely on the television screen?

MB: Yes. For now. Let’s go back to the ecosystem I described as the three key pieces. Do advertisers prefer the PC screen or the television screen? Do content providers prefer the PC screen or the television screen? If I am Oliver Stone, do I want people to watch my movie on a PC screen or on a television screen?

SM: That is true if you are talking about movies. There is a lot of content which is perfectly acceptable to be viewed over a PC screen.

MB: Again, I want to take a step back out of Silicon Valley and picture Indiana, Iowa and Oregon. When I come home from work, do I want to race right back to my PC? According to Nielsen, the average US TV household watches 8.3 hours of TV per day. People watch video on a television four times more than they watch video on a PC screen. For the past 27 years, my job has been to gauge the mainstream television audience in this country as well as in others and give people an experience they could not get anywhere else. In those days, it was to get viewers to reach into their pocket and pay me a fee to do it.

Over these years, the question for me changed. Within this ecosystem I’ve described, advertisers are getting hammered, trying to engage with consumers one-on-one, and gathering more information about them. Their challenge is how to sell their brands to consumers in a proactive way that makes sense and reduce all the waste of buying ads on the Super Bowl, for example, where you pay $2 million for 30 seconds. Do you know as an advertiser who saw your ad? Not exactly an efficient use of your precious advertising budget.

SM: I would never pay for that.

MB: Google has done a good job of monetzing advertising with better efficiency, but that is on the PC and is a one-to-one experience. The question is, can you transfer all the great stuff that Google and TiVo have done and expand it to the television set in new and creative, ways? That is what ZillionTV is doing. It is the same thing in terms of transactions and commerce. The question is: can you take all of the good stuff that companies like eBay and Amazon have done on a PC and bring it to the television set in a new and powerful way?

SM: So you are framing your universe by assuming that the television screen is the screen of choice and the remote control is the input device. There is no computer screen or keyboard in the equation?

MB: Yes, as it applies to watching video entertainment on-demand.

This segment is part 3 in the series : I Want To Change TV: Mitch Berman, CEO of ZillionTV
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