The sun is shining on Amsterdam today and the green seems greener. Every time that I am in The Netherlands and it’s nice and sunny I would like to move here… off course if you do, you then realize that it is so green and nice because most of the time it’s cloudy and rainy!

Anyway, it’s too nice to be stocked in a dark conference room, but this is where I was for the keynote session “Connected TV: Re-making the TV industry: the battle for the home screen”. The main keynote was by Mr. Hiroshi Yoshioka, executive deputy president from Sony in Japan. In his keynote he talked about the multi-screens (his presentation went up to 5) that the media landscape is composed of today. After the other panelist all talked about the importance of the multi-screen experience and how they needed to offer synchronized multi-screen experience.

This theme is not new to me as we were talking about that (and doing implementations) at Current TV over five years ago. I myself have been watching TV with a laptop on my knees since 2000. However, I am almost never interested in having a “synchronized” experience. On the contrary, watching with a laptop allows me to wander at any source of information or any destination to where my mind leads me when I watch a program. That may be a word that I hear that reminds me something or I want to compare what they say on the show with other source… in other terms, I enjoy the freedom to go to any direction not to go where the show distributors would like me to go (including product placements).

Also, the last thing I want as a viewer is to get more targeted than I am already am, my interest as a viewer are not the same as the ones from the distributors.

So, from my experience, effort from distributors to feed me a multi-screen synchronize experience are just wishful thinking that serve their interest but does not correspond to the needs of the viewers.

What do you think?