TV Giving Way To 2nd Screen For Live Fare

Smartphones and tablets are soon going to become primary devices — challenging televisions — for consuming live news and information, according to one industry watchers.

“Streaming and viewing, sharing up and down, is about to become part of our national consciousness,” Huffington Post CTO John Pavley said Thursday at the Content and Communications World convention in New York.

While consumers today use smartphones and tablets to access more recorded information than live content, that should change within six to 12 months, Pavley said.  “It’s going to hit big time.”

Content providers and distributors should embrace the change, not only by making live content accessible but also embracing the “fifth column” — primarily the people who comment and chat online — by giving them an arena in which to interact.

Pavley said the so-called “first screen” — TV — is going to become an increasingly irrelevant means of consuming live content, primarily because it doesn’t allow people to interact the way they can on other platforms.

Another key reason consumers like mobile devices versus traditional media is that they allow them to assume control of the experience rather than deferring to a third person, like a newscaster, he said. “What that gives you is a live, mobile streaming world that is a first person experience,” Pavley said. Consumers are “taking what comes in as the real world and altering it for themselves.”

Pavley said three recent “seismic” events — last summer’s London Olympics, the presidential election and Hurricane Sandy — fueled the growing trend.

The events demonstrated the appeal of watching an event like, for instance, a presidential debate while simultaneously being able to chatting about it on the same screen.

Hurricane Sandy had the most dramatic impact on the movement, he said. Hurricane victims, many without power or displaced, turned to phones and tablets to communicate and check on others’ safety or whereabouts, all while getting news and information that was infinitely important in the storm’s aftermath, he said.  “That was the tipping point.”

External factors, like the widespread availability of inexpensive mobile devices, will also fuel their popularity.

Consumers’ transition to mobile already is showing, he said. Sixty percent of Facebook’s 1 billion users access the social network on mobile. Smartphones will account for 54% of all phones worldwide this year, up from 34% last year, he said. Tablets are experiencing similar growth, expected to account for 36% of all personal computer sales by 2015.