The Digital Culture & Lifestyle Festival, Tweakfest, was held on Friday and Saturday, April 23 & 24 in Zürich, Switzerland. The venue for this “Platform for the digital avant-garde” was the renovated “Alte Börse” formerly the Zürich Stock Exchange. Tweakfest offered participants and attendees the opportunity to discuss and experience current themes and developments in the areas of digital culture and digital lifestyle.

Tweakfest was naturally the ideal opportunity for watchmi and our partners from Philips’ APRICO Solutions to play a leading role, and we were represented by Axel Springer Digital TV Guide Managing Director Ned Wiley, together with APRICO Chief Technical Officer, Adolf Proidl, at the Saturday panel discussion on the “Future of Television”. Also participating on the panel were Reto Bertschi of the Swiss Cable Operator Finecom; Marie-Françoise Ruesch, CEO of the Internet TV provider Gartenhof Media (Wilmaa), and Dario Casari, Head of CE Business for Samsung-Switzerland. Moderation was by the Swiss media journalist and commentator, Kurt Haupt.

A wide range of topics was discussed during the hour-long session, including the impact of 3-D television and possible limitations to consumer choice resulting from the HD+/CI+ technology. The panel surveyed the recent history of television and impact of technological developments from black & white to colour transmission, from standard to high definition broadcast, and most recently the advent of Internet video content, concluding that overall, much progress has been made from the perspective of the viewer experience. The shifting landscape of content provisioning business models was also analyzed by the panellists, who agreed that the market was presently in a state of flux, with no clear indication yet of a unified new business template across the television sector.
Asked to summarize where the future of television was going, Ned Wiley noted first the 3 underlying dynamics that drove the founding of Axel Springer Digital TV Guide three years ago, “Audience Fragmentation; Connecting TV to the Internet, and Democratization of Video,” to which he added a fourth trend, “My TV, Always and Everywhere”. It is this latest trend which is the driving force behind the introduction of watchmi, powered by the personalized recommendation technology of APRICO.

The panel was in broad agreement that in the future, Television would become much more personal, ubiquitous and independent of time-slot “appointments”. Helping viewers make sense of this brave new world is something to which the entire panel was firmly committed.