LOS ANGELES -- Television as a communal experience will largely disappear in the next few years. It will be displaced by appointment television enabled by new video storage devices and broadband, Web-based entertainment.
That vision from Snap.com COO Edmund Sanctis is particularly striking because the portal is controlled by NBC, a broadcast network whose bread-and-butter is families gathered in the living room for communal television.
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"The TV I knew as a kid is going away fast, and it's going away forever," he said in his keynote address at the Herring on Hollywood conference. "The trend away from family viewing is only going to get steeper."
Snap.com is slated to be folded later this year into NBCi, the proposed umbrella organization for NBC's Internet assets. Sanctis will focus on Snap's broadband efforts, reflecting his belief that millions more Americans soon will adopt high-speed entertainment access.
Sanctis' comments reflect a radical new direction emerging at major broadcast networks. The Big Four (ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox) have sold advertising in recent years by arguing that they're the one communal experience left to most Americans in a world fractionalized by cable, VCRs, and the Internet.
While Sanctis allowed that some major events will pull families together on their couches, for the most part, "that communal experience is going away forever."
But NBC won't be. Leveraging its brand name and a broadcast network's promotional power, NBC has helped Snap grow from the 55th-largest Web site to the 14th-largest in 10 months, making it the fastest-growing portal, Sanctis said.
Snap "had really good management, but they couldn't get any traction." Skeptics who didn't believe a broadcaster could make the site grow, "were wrong," he said. "The old media company could pull it off after all." With Snap.com folded into NBCi, the broadcaster will "climb to the top" of companies with a Web presence, Sanctis said.
NBC can't be sure what sort of entertainment it will ultimately provide, Sanctis noted. New technologies are evolving too fast and "most of the ideas won't work."
And there remain roadblocks. Only about a million Americans currently have access to broadband in the home and another 15 million at work -- hardly a mass phenomenon on par with television. Video, even on a broadband connection, remains choppy and unsatisfying, making it impractical to cybercast, say, a full-length movie.
"We have to work at making the Internet more instant and reliable," Sanctis said. "Don't focus on the box. Focus on the delivery path." Still, the explosive adoption of MP3 standards on the Internet illustrates how fast things are changing.
"MP3 downloads are now the hottest thing in high school libraries," Sanctis said. "The ability to turn a piece of music into digital file and enable the user (to manipulate it) is revolutionary."
Examining search-term patterns at Snap.com, executives discovered recently that "MP3" now competes with "sex" as the most popular, Sanctis said. The standard's adoption will drive the adoption of broadband and, soon, the ability of consumers to download a broad range of video programming on demand.
"MP3 let the cat out of the bag," Sanctis added. "We have to learn to live with that cat, folks, because I don't think it's going back in the bag."
