The amazing aspect of technology-driven markets is how swiftly change happens.

In 1995 Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen, two researchers at Harvard Business School, felt the need to invent a new term for defining the most radical of those markets’ innovations: disruptive technology.

Of course change isn’t loved by everyone. As Wikipedia states: “Disruptive technologies are particularly threatening to the leaders of an existing market, because they are competition coming from an unexpected direction”. The risk for incumbent companies is that of the proverbial boiling frog: they often can’t guess the right moment to switch to the new technology, until it’s too late.

Now, which is the market heading to the next disruptive change?

My bet is on TV, where some old-fashioned broadcasters seem very unlikely to keep their leadership over the next decade. Yes, of course they’re moving some content to the cloud and granting some sort of on-demand access to their customers. But real competition can reveal tough to deal with… especially whether it comes from copyright owners, suddenly able to speak directly to their viewers.

Perhaps something new is developing underneath. This is the main feeling I brought away, back from the ipTV World Forum in London.

Of course the big players had large stands and released powerful features. But a back-to-the-basics mood spread out from many presentations. Moreover, maybe party to the current recession, much more interest than expected has developed around the Open ipTV association, whose aim is developing end-to-end specifications for ipTV, based upon existing technologies and open standards, for either managed or unmanaged networks.

Let’s say it: most of the current ipTV deployments really fit the definition of Cable TV in Telco’s clothes. They support everything with huge investments, but still don’t know which business they really want to be in. Thus the adoption of standard technologies might be a winning strategy: not only for cost reduction, but even in order to deliver new services and get the market response in a very short time. Basically, a perpetual beta approach.

Would this drive us to eventually enjoy the Internet potential within a television box, like the oncoming ipTV technology has promised years ago?

Of course I don’t have this answer. I just believe that indirect competition is highlighting the urgency of a route change. I’m especially referring to those services which rely on the open Internet, delivering quality content through an outstanding experience: the multi-platform BBC iPlayer is the european best-practice by now, while devices like Roku and TiVo make the US video-rental offers handier every day.

Cinema: what a great passion!

Once stricly linked to the physical theatre, today movies are distributed through dozens of media and devices, allowing many different use cases. Everything started in the 80s with a successful company named Blockbuster: couch, pop-corns and VHS cassettes have been the ingredients of a great concept.

Then DVDs, promptly decrypted by the norvegian student Jon Johansen, have represented the first sparkle of a massive revolution: digital support, unlimited copies with no quality loss…

Today broadcasters and ISPs deliver digital content onto our televisions in real time, new formats like mpeg4 and DivX have disclosed commercial opportunities and also set up a fertile ground for piracy, video content can be easily watched through the Internet Protocol with many different devices… while high definition and home-theatre systems turn our living rooms into an amazing environment.

At least the Hollywood Studios, perhaps adviced by the discographic disastrous experience, have exploited rather than fought this revolution. So Steve Jobs’ latest announcement is what we’ve been waiting for: besides songs, iTunes is going to sell thousands of movies. What’s next?

A few months ago I’ve been guest of the Telco TV Summit.

The aim of my speech, titled like this post and based on my experience with Bulldog Broadband in the UK, was showing how user-centered design can effectively lead an ipTV interface development, in order to bring some of the Internet potential into the television box.

The starting point is necessarily the Internet. A medium? A technology? Every definition would be reductive. Instead, let’s give a look at the scratch Tim Berners-Lee conceived the hypertext with. It’s displayed at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and appears so ingenious in its (relative) simplicity.

Doesn’t it look somehow like Doc Brown’s flux capacitor chart, the one he draws in 1955 after clashing against the toilet? Unforgettable! :-D  But let’s remain focused…

The Internet has changed our lives because it allows users to personalize, interact, build relationships. Everybody is the main character in the world-wide-web, because can build up his personal way of collecting, managing and enjoying unlimited content and amazing tools.

On the other hand, television is the typical passive medium. In front of the small screen we’re all spectators, ads viewers, recipients of a programme schedule that somebody else has defined for all of us.

The great advantage of traditional TV? Being prompt, immediate, outrageously easy-to-use. The real challenge for ipTV? Delivering the unlimited Internet potential onto the TV screen, without losing that easiness. Interactivity would be eventually available for everyone!

Consider the basic customer, threatened by these computers that send information through the entire world. Then give him a remote control. He’ll suddenly feel confident, and will gradually get ready to discover new amazing possibilities, as long as you provide them through a great user-experience.

Very soon he’ll play a movie whenever he wants, check the weather forecasts, share photographs and thoughts… And he’ll build his own TV schedule, as easily as I manage my iGoogle personal page.