Tag: technology

What’s in the Museum of the Future?

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

20 Things You’ll See in 20 Years

Walk into a museum in 2045, and it won’t look like something from the past — it will look like today. It will reflect our homes, offices, and streets.

So many ‘modern’ technologies, ideas, and even social constructs are about to disappear — much quicker than we think. You might even find this a bit confronting, even unrealistic. But all of it is based on the technological possibilities of today… so buckle up.

Here are 20 exhibits you can expect in the Museum of the Future — and why they matter.

1. Physical Money

Remember coins and crumpled notes? They still exist… barely. The concept of cash will seem so antiquated — tokens and paper with pictures on them. Already, money is just numbers on screens and in databases. You’ll realise your kids have never even held money.

Supporting Factoid: Globally, physical money only represents 8% of the total supply of ‘cash’ people can make a claim on. In Australia, it is only 4% today.

2. Professional Drivers

Imagine a wall of steering wheels, gear sticks, and car keys. Videos of Uber drivers, truckies, and couriers — the last generation who steered their own destiny. Autonomous vehicles made this a job from history.

Supporting Factoid: Waymo (Google’s self-driving service) already has 1,500 cars operating in the USA, and they have a greater market share than Uber in every market they operate in.

3. Passwords

A light installation flashing millions of random characters — reminders of the era when we were the security system. Biometrics and passkeys made the “password” as dead as the rotary dial phone.

We are already halfway there…

4. Remote Controls

A giant pile of remotes in a Perspex box — all useless. Gesture, voice, and neural interfaces mean we control the world by thought.

5. Plastic Packaging

Mountains of crinkly wrappers and water bottles. Kids will gawk at the waste and ask, “You wrapped everything in this stuff?”

Supporting Factoid: Plant-based bioplastics are emerging quickly to replace plastic with all the efficacy, as well as being fully biodegradable.

6. Physical Screens

Thin LCD panels on the wall, smashed phones under glass. The exhibit will ask: “Why did we stare at rectangles for 12 hours a day when the world was all around us?”

Possible Replacement: Direct wiring into neural cortex!

7. Smartphones

A special section: the thing that made us gods for 10 years and slaves for another 20. The artefact that connected, distracted, and reprogrammed humanity.

Supporting Factoid: Smart glasses are emerging quickly as the most likely candidate to replace them. Meta’s latest iteration is quite impressive. But eventually contact lenses will win this race.

8. Tradespeople

Robot arms laying bricks and 3D-printed plumbing rigs. And humanoids doing any and every type of trade. You’ll watch footage of human tradies from the 2020s and feel nostalgic for the banter, not the cost.

Supporting Factoid: Humanoid robots can already be bought for around $16k. By the end of this decade, they’ll do everything people can — after being shown once, or downloading some ‘how to’ software.

9. Surgeons

Delicate metal scalpels suspended mid-air. The last human hands to open a chest cavity before precision robotic surgery took over.

Supporting Factoid: There were 14+ million robotic surgical procedures performed last year. And the first non-human-assisted trials are happening this year. Question: Would you rather a surgeon who has performed an operation 87 times, or a robot that’s done it over a million times in every context?

10. Actors & Directors

A wing filled with deepfake celebrities performing Shakespeare in every language. The final days of the Hollywood “star system,” when studios owned the faces and voices of the famous.

In the future, studios will mint new stars from AI that they own and control and don’t have to pay. Or even license our old favourites like Leo DiCaprio and Scarlett Johansson… while they stay home and watch Netflix.

11. The Internet

A blacked-out room with a dial-up modem screeching on loop. You’ll watch a screen to experience what “the feed” used to look like — and how it hacked our attention before decentralised, sovereign data grids took over, and bots took over.

Supporting Factoid: Just this year, the internet crossed over to more fake traffic than real human traffic. Humans are already exiting the internet.

12. Language Barriers

A globe that speaks every language at once. AI real-time translation made borders linguistic illusions.

Supporting Factoid: Many current smartphones and the latest Apple AirPods can already do this live.

13. Offices

Cubicles, water coolers, swipe cards. The last relics of “going to work.” In the future, work is a network — not a place.

The age of the digital craftsperson is already here.

14. Eyeglasses

A shelf of spectacles — quaint relics before gene therapy and nano-optics corrected sight at birth, or for us existential humans within the next decade…

15. Wheelchairs

A striking display of mobility aids that became obsolete once exoskeletons and neurotech restored motion to millions.

16. Forgetting

A poetic, slightly eerie space where visitors can choose to delete a memory — and then sit with the silence. In a world of perfect recall, the right to forget became sacred.

Question: Would you want to remember everything (childbirth?) or are some life experiences best forgotten?

17. Ageing

A time-lapse projection of faces getting younger again. Regenerative medicine turned ageing into an option, not a destiny.

Supporting Factoid: Live till 2035 and you’ll live forever… Read this if you haven’t already.

Would you want to liver forever?

18. Organic Humans

Yes, there will be a whole exhibit on “baseline humans.” No implants, no genetic tweaks, no cloud extensions. Just raw, analogue Homo sapiens.

We are merging with machines… rapidly.

19. Animal Farms

Screens of industrial animal agriculture — now gone — next to vats of lab-grown meat. These will be nature-identical down to the exact texture at the molecular level. A celebration of the end of animal suffering as a source of protein.

Confronting Thought: 50 years from now, killing an animal to eat it will be seen as worse than human slavery… Our grandchildren will be disgusted we ever killed and ate dead animals

20. Private Thoughts

A dark, intimate room where visitors sit in silence. It will be the most confronting exhibit: a reminder that once upon a time, your thoughts were yours alone.

Supporting Factoid: We are already reading people’s minds… I wrote about it here.

** Get me into do an AI keynote at your next event. I’ll use this as my testimonial!

The museum of the future won’t just display objects — it will display values. It will remind us what we lost, what we gained, and what we traded along the way. It won’t just be a walk through history. It’ll be a mirror — showing us who we chose to become.

Now consider the work you do or the company you work for… and ask yourself important this question:

Is it time to pivot to avoid the inevitable?

Keep Thinking,

Steve.

AI – Risk of Extinction

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Listen to Steve read this post (8 min audio) – let me know if you listened instead of reading this!

Imagine for a minute you were given an investment opportunity which could be life-changing, enough to make you better off than you are now, maybe even seriously rich. But the price of entry was that you had to put every single asset you owned into it and there was a small chance it would go to absolute zero — even a 5-10 per cent probability that this would occur.

Would you do it?

I wouldn’t consider it, even for a second. Yet, these are the risks we are being asked to take with our live Generative AI experiment, at least according to some AI experts.

p(Doom)

If you think P(Doom) sounds worrying, trust your instincts. P(Doom) is the term AI researchers are using to describe the probability that Artificial Super Intelligence will emerge and become an existential risk for humanity. (What a wonderful little moniker.)

Here is the crazy thing. Many learned AI researchers now have this probability sitting as high as 20-50 per cent. Kinda scary. Even a 5 per cent chance to wipe out our species is a worry… and there is almost no one who has a ratio smaller than this. Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI, who created ChatGPT, has publicly said the risk is real and he has a P(Doom) at around 5 per cent.

It’s at this point that we must remember that we are not talking about something bad happening here, like, say, a recession, or a war, a hurricane, or even a pandemic. All of these we’ve faced before and, with a lot of pain, have overcome, collectively. We are talking about the end of humanity – it doesn’t get any heavier than that.

  • Reply to this email and tell me what if AI worries you.

Says Who?

Some of those with a P(Doom) at worryingly high levels are not fear-mongering crackpots, but those deeply involved in giving birth to AI. Here are some of the worried AI researchers and their P(Doom) percentages.

  • Michael Tontchev, a former Microsoft software developer and current senior software lead at Meta has his at 20 per cent.
  • Paul Christiano, a former OpenAI researcher who also holds a Ph.D. in theoretical computer science from UC Berkeley has his at 50 per cent.
  • Eliezer Yudkowsky, a renowned AI researcher and decision theorist has his at 50 per cent.
  • Geoffrey Hinton, known as the godfather of AI and a recent Google employee has his at 50 per cent.

Cold War 2.0 & AI Bunkers

As a keynote speaker on the future and AI, the most common question i get asked is if we will face a ‘Terminator Moment’. And just like at the height of the Cold War, those with their fingers on the button seem to be the only ones with a bunker they can run to if things go wrong.

In 2016, Altman said in an interview he was prepping for survival in the event of catastrophe such as a rogue AI, claiming to have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defence Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur that he can fly to.

Altman’s doomsday vision of AI gone wrong is not uncommon in Silicon Valley. No tech billionaire worth his salt doesn’t have a post-apocalyptic contingency plan and remote bunker. Both Peter Thiel and Google co-founder Larry Page have snapped up land in New Zealand and built bunkers. They literally have private jets filled with fuel – which they don’t use – and pilots paid to wait for this ‘nuclear moment’.

This is some feedback I got from a client on my  my new Keynote on AI  – 

“Steve was amazing, awesome and all the superlatives. His insights on AI were absolutely incredible as was the feedback from our customers.”

It’s a revolution – Get me in – Don’t miss out!  

The AI Saviour?

Readers will know that I’m typically positive when it comes to the emancipating power of technology. And the last thing I want to be accused of is fear-mongering. There is a counter-argument to the worries about the AI threat:

We may not be able to survive without it. Really.

It seems to me that the probability of our species surviving other existential risks is greater than most experts’ AI P(Doom). The nuclear threat is still very real, and possibly greater than it ever was during the Cold War. While we theoretically control it, we can only count ourselves lucky that a crazed suicide bomber or rogue terrorist group hasn’t secured and deployed nuclear weapons.

Likewise, despite our progress with renewable energy, I can’t see progress by any large nation-state, which gives me the confidence to believe we can reduce our global emissions to the level needed before we reach a point of no return. We are still largely addicted to fossil fuels, GDP, economic growth, and consumption.

Maybe the thing we actually need is an all-omniscient, benevolent AI to save us from ourselves!

An AI which can uncover new forms of yet-to-be-discovered highly available energy, or ways to ensure we circumvent nuclear disaster via ‘Artificial Diplomacy’, an AI which can help us navigate species-level dangers which are already clear and present.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve.

AI – Merging with Machines

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Listen to Steve read this post (4 min)

The debate is heating up on Artificial Intelligence. Many experts believe that we’ve created AI which is close to becoming self aware. If that is true, we only have one choice.

We must merge with the machines.

If we don’t do this, we may lose our status as the alfa species on the planet. Machine Intelligence Researcher, Eliezer Yudkowsky believes we are in a very bad position and things could get radical quickly. While no one knows for sure, he has a deep, interesting and scary discussion about the issue here.

It’s Evolution Baby

Here is what I know for sure. Every species that exists today, evolved from something else. AI, is something we’ve literally given birth to. Not via traditional, biological methods, but we created it nonetheless. It is the child of a biological being – us. We have used our biological intelligence, and created it from natural substances on earth. Everything on earth is natural.

It may just be that we are subconsciously, as a species, configuring a way to evolve much more quickly outside of our bodies, before work out a way for the AI technology to enter our bodies. And eventually allow it to interact with our wet-ware. If we do this, and I think we will, it won’t be us versus the machine, we will become the machine. In time, we’ll work out a way to breed with it inside our progeny. It feels to me like part of the natural evolutionary process. I wrote about this inevitability 6 years ago.

Get me to deliver my new Keynote on AI  – I discuss our species merging with machines & what it means for your organisation. Make your next conference one to remember!

A New Species… and Podcast

If or when this occurs our species will split. We’ll have NEO Humans (tech-enhanced) and Luddite Humans (bio-beings). It’ll be a bit like some of the chimpanzees who decided to climb down from the tree, walk on two legs, and cross the Savana. Some will adapt, and some won’t. That moment is approaching quickly.

I discussed this issue in detail on my new Podcast ‘The Futuristic’. I have two co-hosts – one is a generative AI we’ve built, called Sailli (pronounced ‘Sally’). She interacts with us in the podcast. We even created her a fake face – she is below.

You can listen and subscribe here.

I’m also doing the Podcast with Cameron Reilly who is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met (not as smart as Sailli though). And we all disagree often. Our goal is simple, to go deep on tech. To go beyond the headlines, and uncover if we’re living the Jetson’s style future we were promised. It’s a great listen – get on it. We’ll be iterating the format as we go.

Be sure to email me back and tell me what you think about merging with the tech. I always love to hear your thoughts.

—

Keep Thinking,

Steve.

Disrupting Google

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Business disruption is not caused by technology alone. For it to occur we need 2 things to arrive simultaneously.

(1) A new technology

+

(2) A new business model

If we only have one, the incumbents can usually adapt. They can plug the new tech into the existing business model. Or, they can revert the old technology into a new business model.

For example:

The Music Industry had 3 new technologies before they got disrupted. They had the phonograph, the tape and the CD. Each time they sold the new tech in the old business model. It wasn’t until the mp3 arrived until the industry changed. When that happened, the business model shifted with the tech, which resulted in disruption: Napster (stealing music) and Apple iTunes (buying music one song at a time). Then when streaming arrived, a further disruption occurred as both the tech and business model shifted once more. No one buys music, they subscribe to it.

Likewise, when the Airline Industry had low cost airlines arrive. A new business model emerged, but because it was utilising existing technology: planes, airports and booking engines, legacy players could plug in low cost sub-brands. No real industry disruption transpired.

Most Successful Consumer Product Launch in History

Chat GPT is the fastest-growing consumer product in history. It had over a million users in its first week and more than 100 million in two months. Previous technology juggernauts haven’t come close: TikTok took nine months to get to 100 million users, Instagram took nearly three years and Google took nearly two years to reach this milestone. It isn’t just the rapid growth of users of the platform that’s interesting. It’s that it demands a review of internet Search as we know it, how we perform searches literally and the resulting business model which underlies it. It may even redirect us away from advertising and the prevailing surveillance capitalism model.

The technology and business model just changed for search. Sounds crazy to say it, but Google could be in trouble. If there was ever a company which looked dominant and unstoppable mere months ago, it was Alphabet. Their Google search engine commands a 90%-plus share in most of the markets it operates in. Then along came ChatGPT.

Will your company be the Disrupter or the Disrupted with AI ? Get me in to share my mind blowing new Keynote Speech – and win in the new AI era.

Bing v Google

At the moment it looks like Open AI, the developers behind ChatGPT, have everything to gain, but behind the scenes is tech overlord Microsoft. If all goes to plan they could be the unexpected winner in AI, and there are literally trillions of dollars in market capitalisation at stake. Microsoft’s 23 January $10 billion investment in Open AI may well be the tech deal of the century. As a part of it Microsoft will have exclusive access to Open AI’s product suite, and will gain a 49% share of Open AI. However, Open AI will need to give back Microsoft 75% of the profits until Microsoft recoups its initial investment. Microsoft have already plugged ChatGPT into their Bing Search engine, and it is pretty damn good. I’ve switched already. But is isn’t just the product which puts google at risk, it’s the costs and business model.

The cost per ‘prompt’ on ChatGPT is currently around $0.02c. This is vastly more than the $0.00001 per Google search, and probably couldn’t support a pay per click or display advertising model. The recent option to subscribing to ChatGPT for $20 per month is a clue as to where the business model of Generative AI is likely to go – subscription rather than advertising. This would both remove the ‘free rider’ problem, and temptation to compromise product quality to appease the advertising model supporting it. Subscription is also needed because AI is far too expensive per prompt to run a pay per click model. This is a major problem for Google – which people use for free.

The market is likely to bifurcate into two segments: Search (Traditional web links) and Creation (Generative AI).

Think about it – if we shift our search habits to ask questions and getting an actual answer, rather than a page of links and options – the pay per click model could die alongside it. Bing might just become the world’s first Premium Search engine – a pay to play for a different kind of search.

The Code Red which was called in through halls of the GooglePlex hasn’t resulted in anything that seems like a worthy response to ChatGPT. After a failed demo last week of the Google AI chatbot Bard, it lost more than $100 billion in market cap. But I also wonder if the market senses that Google has far more to lose even if (and most likely when) it develops a competitive AI product. 58% percent of Alphabet’s revenue comes from search, which is driven by pay per click advertising, which simply can’t survive with generative AI – there are literally no clicks when you get a direct answer. Currently Microsoft only generates 5% of its revenue from Bing pay per click advertising. In real terms, it has a potential ten-fold search revenue upside, with near zero downside all the while potentially adding a new weapon to its already strong enterprise offers of Windows, Office and Azure. AI inside your own laptop, generating answers from your own personal data. That would be super powerful, personally and at an enterprise level.

Just when we thought we thought a one tech firm could never be usurped, a new technology comes along which potentially changes everything.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve

How A.I. just changed the Internet

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Welcome to 2023 – This year I’ve promised myself to post here every Friday – starting today of course.

The impact of ChatGPT has been well documented in the media. If you haven’t played around with it yet – then I strongly suggest you give it a whirl.

There have been many articles about which industries and jobs ChatGPT might disrupt. Here’s a much simpler way to look at it from the Sammatron: If your job or industry uses ‘words’ – it will be impacted.

It’s that simple. It will impact everything. Like the internet that came before it, ChatGPT brings inordinate opportunities for those who choose to embrace the new reality.

The internet is currently:

A Giant Filing Cabinet

Everything we see on the internet is made by someone, somewhere. Words, pictures and video, all of it. Our experience on the internet is basically asking services to find and serve up what we’ve subscribed to or what we’ve searched for in this giant filing cabinet of human creation. Even when it is live, it’s still us peering in the window of what someone else is making or doing. This is why search and social are so powerful. That’s about to change.

We are about to go from Search Engines to Creation Engines.

(Read the above sentence again, it’s that important)

Let me explain. Starting now – we will shift from asking the internet to find what we want to asking it to create what we want. We’ll be expecting it to answer exact questions to queries, summarise things, write for us, create images, pictures, stories, animations, rap songs and even write software code for us by literally asking it to create an app that does XYZ. We are about to see another level of technology democratisation beyond what anyone can imagine.

ProTip: Get me to come into your company and deliver my mind blowing new Keynote Speech on How AI is about to change everything.

The art of the internet will rely on our ability to work with Artificial Intelligence. We’ll need to cajole the AIs to create what we are after. We’ll need to become great at prompting and teaching AIs how to build what we desire, because when used correctly, AI should be a mind expanding tool. An addendum to our biology, not a replacement. We’ll need to learn how to literally ‘train the AIs’ like we might a train a dog. It will be about the symbiosis of using tools. From a business perspective, our attention should be focused on industries that can cut costs through large language models and AI-generated imagery. The business of words and images will have production costs cut dramatically.

Get Daily Inspiration on my Tik Tok – 4 million views & counting! – Follow me here

Our imaginations on what to ‘make’ will become increasingly important. Here’s a prompt we might give very soon: “Create a seven minute animated movie, in manga style. Let it star a seven year old girl named Mary (base her animation on this picture) and her magic pony, who saves the world from a climate crisis. Give me versions in English, Spanish and Mandarin.”

As  I’ve previously written, the ability to determine what was made by a human or a machine will be increasingly difficult to differentiate. Likewise, an entirely new species of startups and business opportunities will emerge. It’s early, so it’s time to get started.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve.

Metaverse – Hype of Reality?

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Why Now?

When a top 10 company by valuation like Facebook, changes its name and focus to the MetaVerse – it is going to generate a lot of attention. A google search of the term now has 141 million results, a more than 100 fold increase on a year ago. The reason that Facebook became Meta, and started its focus on the concept, is that Facebook after being one of the fastest growing companies in history, is now in decline. In terms of both revenue and profit.

Since its launch in 2004, Facebook was the clear winner of social networking. It has 3.6 billion users across its platforms which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. But now, it is starting to wane as TikTok encroaches and people turn away from its apps. Meta wants to own what it thinks will be the future of social interaction. Meta’s revenue is almost entirely dependent on advertising (97%). Their success in advertising is in no small part due to the information they can gather on their users. Meta knows what you like, do, believe, we’re you’ve been, where you’re going next, who you friends are, what your life history is and of course, and what you spend on. And it’s not just through their sites, rather via the likes and login ecosystem they’ve built on the web which creates such a rich data flow.

BONUS: How observant are you? Have you noticed this?

There is no organisation in the history of the planet who nows more about individuals. They know more about you than your partner or government does. But this information gathering has become far more difficult as the owners of the hardware people access Meta apps on (namely Apple and Google) are starting to restrict Meta’s ability to track users. Likewise, governments the world over are quickly regulating against these privacy incursions, which are the fuel that powers the organisation.

This is a major problem for Meta, as don’t own any significant hardware. The Meta portal device has been discontinued and I don’t know anyone with a pair of their RayBan spy glasses. Because the Metaverse requires the use of goggles like the Meta Quest 2, it could solve this hardware problem and allow Meta to set its own privacy terms. To date they’ve made a massive investment including a $2 billion acquisition of the Oculus company and more than $70 billion in developing Metaverse hardware and applications. Zuckerberg really needs this to work.

BONUS: Start Smart in 2023?: Get the Sammatron in to speak to your team – Special offer for new year bookings to blog readers.

Hype or Reality?

So far, the share market hates it. The Meta Share price has declined more than 60% in the past year, losing investors more than $700 billion since its peak. That’s not a typo. In short, Mark Zuckerberg needs the Metaverse more than we do. But it is hard to see 3.6 billion people going from a ‘free service’ to having to invest $600 plus into a single purpose device (MetaQuest VR goggles) to log into Facebook Horizons.

In my view this is why the Metaverse is getting such attention. The only question is whether the people of the internet themselves will give it as much attention as Zuckerberg wants them to. If the meagre house hold penetration of VR goggles being at 0.03% of Facebook users is any indication – the answer is a clear no. Or at least, not for a long time.

Next Week: MetaVerse – Best use cases.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve.

TV Reality Check

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Who’s the biggest TV star in the world? Anyone older than 25 will probably nominate a TV star from the free-to-air (FTA) TV era. Anyone under the age of 25, that is, born after the modern internet burst onto the scene, will tell you it’s MrBeast – aka Jimmy Donaldson.

MrBeast recently passed a milestone 100 million subscribers on YouTube (now 104m) . In total, his posts have attracted more than 26 billion views and his videos are seen on average anywhere between 50 to 110 million times. To put that in context, the two most-watched shows in TV history (outside of global live events) are:

  • Mash – the final episode, 105 million viewers and;
  • Seinfeld – the final episode 76 million viewers

Clearly, it has been a long time since traditional linear TV set any viewership records.

Mr Beast Strategy

MrBeast is now more than an on-screen persona – it’s graduated to a sizeable business. According to Forbes magazine, Donaldson earned $US54 million in revenue last year and now runs a production company with over 50 employees. He has also given away more than $50 million to charity and claims to be YouTube’s biggest philanthropist. To celebrate his 100 millionth subscriber, Donaldson created a video with a hundred of his fans running a modern-day game show, competing to win an island. The production cost alone for this celebration was over $US500,000.

The story of Donaldson’s origin is as surprising as how big he’s become. Ten years ago, Donaldson set himself a clear goal to become famous by earning as many views on YouTube as possible. The ‘how’ of gaining views was less important. Naturally, Donaldson gravitated towards silly stunts and challenges to maximise reach. Some of his early videos included counting to 100,000 (a lengthy 40 hours) and tried spinning a fidget spinner for 24 hours straight. Although his videos have evolved in sophistication of production and concept, this ‘game show’ method has served him well. His key ingredients have become:

  • Challenges and stunts 
  • Giveaways with often very generous prizes
  • Celebrity appearances

Consistent with other popular game shows like The New Price is Right, audience participation is a priority. Donaldson creates incentives for viewers to be involved – to appear in videos and compete for exciting prizes, creating a brilliant viral loop growing both views and audience. Donaldson claims to have cracked the code for making viral posts and that once you’ve mastered the art, “you can make unlimited money”. There are many lessons our local media channels could learn from him about generating views, revenue and profit.

Bonus: Follow my TikTok here for biz & life rad advice (almost 1 million views just this month!)

TV Reality Check

The financial struggles of free to air TV channels are well-documented. Network 10 ended up in receivership and was eventually bought out by CBS. Neither Seven West Media nor Nine Entertainment have done much to solidify their long-term future and may struggle.

Basically, all media sells attention. In media circles, this is known as CPM which is ‘cost per thousand’ viewers. Enter, a reality check. FTA TV currently commands an average premium per set of eyeballs of 700 per cent. No, that’s not a typo.

Nestled in the TV that fits in the palm of your hand, social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook and YouTube charge around $A7 for every 1,000 views. In comparison, FTA TV charges $A50 per 1,000 views a mid-rating show, while ratings winners like The Block costs as much as $175 per 1,000 viewers for a 30 second commercial.

The irony is that while most people are peering into their tiny phone screens, that is when these ‘premium-priced’ commercials run on the big TV mounted on the wall. TV commercials are not nearly as targeted as digital advertising is, neither psycho-graphically nor geographically.

Additionally, FTA TV commercials don’t have click-through potential, and disappear into the ether after they run. In contrast, the online variant, while it can be skipped, can continue to live on in the same social channel as a standalone video, receiving organic views and feed a content play for the brands pushing them.

These FTA numbers for reaching people simply can’t and won’t be sustained. If I were to point out a reason why the market still tolerates such an imbalance in CPM on FTV versus digital channels, I’d narrow it down to the senior executives buying the ad spaces. People buying the advertising space for large brands mostly grew up before the internet and bear a legacy mindset that TV is in some way superior.

That said, it won’t be long before a new cohort of CEOs and CMOs arrive and start challenging why they are paying such an exorbitant premium to reach the same people. When that happens, we ought expect FTA TV’s revenue to decline by 80 per cent.

What Free to Air TV Should Do

Like all disrupted businesses, traditional TV is filled with growth opportunities if they’d only embrace them. The first of these should be realising that the world is no longer segmented in 30-minute slots.

The simplicity of online videos running for as long as a few seconds to a few hours is telling. It seems as though the TV stations would rather things be neat, instead of relevant.

They need to lower the barriers to entry on their digital catchup TV. Tuning into catchup TV is not nearly as easy as it should be. It requires registrations and most shows are removed after a few weeks. In what should be a competitive play against YouTube, the on-demand digital platform is treated as a departures lounge for the TV you missed.

In fact, all channels would do well to leave their entire corporate back catalogue of TV shows online forever, share the revenue with existing content owners and even allow it to be mashed up by new content creators. Then they could create new layered versions of what has already been made. This is already happening, but just TikTok and YouTube. It’s not even a secret…. they only need to copy what is happening!

Search for your favourite TV show from the 1980s and you’ll see it published on YouTube with Google collecting the revenue for advertising running before and beside it. Simply embracing long tail content, asynchronous viewing and allowing the audience to upload and re-interpret their content could change Free to Air’s business model dramatically. But it seems they love the business model they had yesterday more than the reality of today.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve.