I agree with your sentiment of course — the innovator’s dilemma will play out again and again…

Brendan,

Entirely agree with you, and my language is too specific. People like sports clubs and arts organisations will also have access to large amounts of video content.

The only problem for a viewer will be knowing which app the content is in, and so hopefully more platforms will have unified search like Microsoft are on the Xbox Dashboard, so people don’t need to understand where the rights reside at a given time.

Just think of every sports franchise (I could easily imagine a Man City youview app where I could see every goal ever scored, plus loads of stats and analysis, for a reasonable fee, plus F1, PGA Golf, etc etc). Then you have most arts providers (I heard the Royal Opera House are very interested in doing their own apps, plus the Met Opera etc), many bands, orchestras, comedians, etc etc.

I think it could lead to a huge increase in the amount of video being created and distributed, letting people own their own video content the same way people write blogs, make podcasts etc now.

Sure it raises the barrier to entry a bit and favours people who actually have interesting content, but that’s not such a bad thing.

Plus there will be the inevitable new batch of apps that use the new medium in ways that we haven’t even thought of yet… that’s when it will start to get really exciting.

There is a real challenge here in balancing the simplicity of frictionless sharing, and the delight of discovering your friends doing the same thing, with the user surprise platforms discovering things about you.

(disclosure, we built the platform behind the X Factor stuff – we think a lot about this)

Perhaps, but when I was watching XFactor last night I didn’t think of loading the app (even though I have a supported TV and the channel-control is nice), I just went straight to twitter. It’s a lovely app written by a friend of yours, but I do still have to make the modal change to choose to use it.

Aye, feels very much a version 2.0 thing to do when they can do it right. I think you’d maybe want to do it as a back-end integration that their servers speak to your servers, and then maybe shell out to apps later – rather than trying to do anything on the phone itself.