The Oscars, Roku and the BBC - Revealing the future of TV

It's been another fast-paced week in the digital video and second screen industries.  While the OTT video world is still reeling from the previous week's announced Disney Movies Anywhere service (a serious threat to UltraViolet) and Marvel's announcement of an exclusive output deal with Netflix (continuing to threaten HBO), second screen took a shot in the arm from the Oscars, and Roku mounted an attack on Chromecast.  At a glance:

• "Watch ABC" did Second Screen for the Oscars "right"
• Ellen broke Twitter
• Roku announced their "streaming stick" device
• Dish struck a deal with Disney to delay commercial skips
• FreeWheel was acquired by Comcast
• The BBC announced the death of analog for it's Channel 3 service
• An Aereo lost its court battle in Salt Lake City and Denver

Second Screen and the 2013 CES

We kicked off the 2013 International CES show last week on Monday with a 5-hour, program-packed 2nd Screen Summit--working hard to get the "right" people on stage and in the audience.

But was CES the "2nd Screen CES" we predicted it would be in mid-December?

Who is going to disrupt the Pay TV industry?

I've spent the last few weeks having renewed discussions with a variety of people whose opinion I respect in this space, including those in the Twitter-sphere, the blogosphere, and in plain old real life, and with the NCTA Cable Show happening in Boston next week, I think it is the right time to open this debate up again.

The debate is simple: Who is going to disrupt the current Pay TV industry?

A few months ago at the OTT Con in Santa Clara, I had this discussion in spades with many of the participants in the would-be "cable killer" world (most of whom themselves are "cord cutters" or at least "cord thinners").  My take aways after those discussions were that it was incredibly premature to even think about "Over the Top" or "broadband" video killing the established Pay TV operators like Comcast, DirecTV and Verizon because only the metrics had indicated that all of the current players combined had only made a minor dent in TV Viewing (3 hours of online viewing vs. 34 of traditional viewing per week, 2% of the $200B TV advertising spent on "on-line" video) and that so far the only business being disrupted in a serious manner was DVD sell-thru, which was suffering as much from physical Netflix and the shift from purchase to rental as it was from digital Netflix.  My brief conclusion then was simple: Large pay TV operators were bringing in an average monthly bill per household of close to $100 (ARPU) and the would be disruptors were still in the sub-$15 range and those Pay TV operators were "Striking Back" with their own TV Everywhere solutions, so any would-be survivors in the next 3-5 years would have to deliver an incredibly compelling user experience (UX) centered around Discovery (likely on the second screen).