Walking the floors of last year’s CES extravaganza, EY’s Janet Balis saw many separate consumer-facing ecosystems with smart technology in common. “And you see a lot of friction between the electronics in your kitchen suddenly communicating with your front door or communicating with the screens and devices and mobile experiences that we each have,” says the Global Advisory Leader for Media & Entertainment.
The bottom line is that consumers need system interoperability, not “essentially closed loops” but one particular operation system across devices, Balis explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
And then there’s the television business. “I think television follows the same parallel here. In this case, it’s the advertiser that needs interoperability,” says Balis. “And they really need interoperability at scale. So the worst thing we can do is fragment all of these different sources of supply.”
Bringing things together and infusing it with data would produce standards so that people “can make intelligent decisions about what media they can or cannot find value in.”
Whether it’s open platforms or walled gardens, at the end of the day what facilitates fluidity in marketplaces is what wins, according to Balis. “I think we have to be able to connect supply and demand in a way that’s objective, that’s infused with data and ultimately that allows you to compare one piece of inventory with another. Fundamentally I think walled gardens make it harder to do that. It implies some layer of comparison that we’re going to have to make across walled gardens.”
EY fundamentally believes in building a better working world, with TV being no exception even if it means competitors working together. “Data and technology fundamentally connect everything. I think the big question is, if everyone’s innovating in a vacuum, we may not get to answers as an industry as quickly as if we come together.”
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
