Why would one of the world's biggest TV manufacturers team up with a tiny US-based startup to make a new line of TV sets?
What does a huge Chinese television maker, like TCL Corporation, see in Frequency - a small (as of January 2013, Frequency had only around 20 employees) LA-based startup? (Hint: It wasn't because Lisa Brennan-Jobs, the daughter of Apple founder Steve Jobs, worked there.)
Why is TCL betting millions to hardwire Frequency's video curation app into their new line of Android-based TVs?
Here's why: Frequency has developed a powerful app for curating online videos. That app currently indexes around five million videos a day and constantly creates customized channels for each viewer - based on that user's unique viewing history and what their online friends have watched and are recommending.
According to a January 9th, 2013 post to GigaOM, TCL is betting a big chunk of its future on the idea that this kind of personal TV channel will be how the world will be managing the ever growing tide of online motion picture content.
To prove the concept, TCL's new smart TV set will aggregate clips and links from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and organize them into personalized feeds. If things go as planned for TCL and Frequency, this might be the beginning of the end for centralized networks and the beginning of a new age of niche content - algorthms with access to big data that cull content (in this case, mostly short films like the kind uploaded to YouTube and Twitter's Vine) that are really of interest to you.
So what do you think?
Is this new TV with a built-in app - that uses big data to cherry-pick content that will be of interest to individual users - gathering the best and most timely content from all over the web - the future of TV?
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