Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland and I'm here today with Benedict

David Evans, Benedict. Hello. And Andreessen Horowitz partner, Zalbel Amoria.

Hi, how are you doing? Good. So we're going to talk today about the future of television.

And I know you guys are going to disagree from the get-go on what television actually is or if that's the right way to describe this. So, Benedict, I see

my brows raised. Well, I always like to disagree with everything on principle. I think there's a,

I mean, I wrote a blog post a week or two ago called sort of Notes on TV. And part of the reason I gave

it that title was because you've got two or three or four

different blocks here that are all kind of almost independent of each other. So in the USA

there's a question around the control of content and the willingness of cable operators

and channel operators and content owners to allow a different

consumption model. And there's a lot of industry dynamics that make them very reluctant to do that

because, as I said, everybody hates the way US TV works except the US TV industry. And there's a lot of

very strong incentives and very strong power relationships. It mean, you can't just turn up with a new

device and somehow get a completely different experience.

And then there's a second question around the availability of devices and what kind of device it would be and what the experience would be,

presuming for the sake of argument anything you wanted to watch was available on that device.

Well, what would that be? Would it be touch? Would it be on the TV? Would it be a tablet? What would that actually mean? And then there's a third question, which is, well,

what are people actually want to do, presuming that you have that nirvana of every device,

of the right content on the right device? Would people switch all of their viewing over to a pure

on-demand experience, or would that make up, you know, 10, 20% of your viewing and you'd still watch schedule TV.

And there's a final one, which is, you know, when we say TV, what do we even mean when we say that?

Which, you know, they kind of flow through.

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