Anthony Noto, Twitter's COO, is confident that streaming devices like Chromecast, Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV and more will cease to exist in five years. During a panel last week at CES 2018 hosted by Turner Sports, Noto made the bold prediction while on the topic of evolving the content ecosystem. If he is indeed correct, how will consumers stream content to their high-res big screens? According to Noto, everything will stream from your smartphone.
“Over the next five years, we’ll see a melding of distribution devices,” said Noto. “Today, you walk into your house and your cell phone attaches to your WiFi instantly. Over the next five years when you walk into your house, your cell phone will automatically connect to the television. There will be no device. There will be no Apple TV, no Chromecast, no Amazon Fire or Microsoft Xbox.”
What would this do to the growing number of smart TVs that come with Roku, Android TV and more baked in? That (major) issue wasn't addressed. Also, both Chromecast and Apple TV already allow users to cast virtually anything on their respective smartphones to their TVs, making Noto's prediction a little more questionable. Why kill one option to push another when both already work well together?
Noto (above, second from right) believes that certain content will be valued more if all of it comes from a smartphone, but again, we can already pretty much do that. “All the rights on my phone that I thought were worth ‘X’ are now worth much more than ‘X’ — that’s a better viewing experience and a more valuable advertising platform,” he claimed. “People that have aggregated audiences on the phone start to compete with distributors — cable operators and satellite operators — for distribution to linear TV type of content.”
Noto's prediction seems a bit like wishful thinking as such a change would benefit Twitter itself. The company already has deals with content creators like the NFL and Bloomberg, and user-generated tweets provide a live commentary to live streams, which helps Twitter differentiate itself from other services. And let's not pretend that Apple, Google and Amazon all get along. Google recently pulled YouTube from Amazon's platform, for example. Is it realistic to think that all TVs in five years will be universally compatible with all competing platforms?
Back in October, Twitter said that the company expects to turn a profit by the end of 2017. We'll know if that's a reality when they post quarterly earnings on February 8th. Their shares have been increasing since August 2017.
Source: GeekWire
