Fitting for a trade show long associated with the latest and greatest television sets, this year’s CES featured a panel titled “The Future of Immersive TV.” The panelists, led by moderator Rick Kowalski, senior director of business intelligence for the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), underscored the biggest current challenge for home entertainment is the fragmentation of platforms on which consumers view content. Multimodal content delivery is impacting production workflows and advertising services. From trends in consumer behavior to emerging technologies, the panel speculated about interactive TV, shoppable TV, and the need for consistent experiences.

The panel recommended that immersive TV should be an encompassing home entertainment system that brings high-quality personalized experiences for consumers to engage with content in a manner that aligns with their everyday lives.

From an advertising purview, Innovid SVP Dan Mouradian emphasized that this means serving highly interactive and personalized ads to viewers in a nondisruptive manner. For example, customized ads are possible with metadata based on the streaming device’s IP address that implies the viewer’s physical location. He also cites Disney’s Magic Words AI tool that lets advertisers cater contextualized messaging based on the mood of the visuals on screen.

However, not everyone is watching TV the same way. According to Sasha McCune, VP of media, entertainment & culture at market research consulting firm CMB, their studies on living room entertainment systems reveal that every consumer is like a “unique snowflake” in how they interact with their content, akin to “an intricate web of systems and workarounds” involving different streaming platforms and devices.

For 6P Color’s CTO Matthew Brantley, this fragmentation of devices calls for the need to maintain consistent color rendering across displays to preserve the same viewing experience. Brantley lauded the latest laser TV technology for its ability to deliver wider color gamut, hence achieving more accurate and vivid displays.

Coherency of how an IP appears is important for brand management as well. Mouradian also shared that they often encode an advertising asset over 90 times to satisfy all the devices’ needs.

As AI-aided functionalities proliferate, McCune foresees consumers conversing with their TVs to find content to watch interactively, instead of directing the TV to play a specific title transactionally. Noticing the overnight success of TikTok Shop that immerses clickable e-commerce into content, she and Mouradian expect TV sets may soon adopt this model, too.

Related:
CES: 6P Color Pivots to Provide New Color Management Tools, ETCentric, 1/14/25