TheFutureofTV Book NEW Copy

7/28/2019 TheFutureofTV Book NEW Copy

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hen people talk about the disruptionthat the internet has brought to variousindustries its always cast in a negative

light. And, with the glut of post-Christmas high-street casualties were hearing about, you cansee why for entertainment and leisure retailers.

But, for some, internet and mobile is creating,if not exactly disruption, an altogether morepositive form of evolution. TV is the shiningexample of this. The next couple of years areonly going to continue this trend.

Linear broadcast TV is rock-solid were watchingmore than we did in 1993 - and we can now addlive streaming of TV which proved so popularduring 2012s Olympics and Paralympics whenpeople were at work.

TV on-demand is also entering a new phase withmore on-demand services easily available on thebest screen in the home. Whether from existingpay or free set-top boxes (Sky, Virgin, Freeview,Freesat), or new suppliers like Youview, or Smart

TVs, more and more TV sets will get connected,offering more choice and convenience. Andweve been as surprised as anyone to find thateasy catch-up TV far from cannibalising linear

TV actually drives more people back to theschedule.

So, more TV watched and more screens to watchit on.

Then theres multi-screening. After this lasttablet-tastic Christmas more people areequipped to respond instantly to, or interactwith, programmes and ads. This is making TVadvertising more effective than its ever been.While its easy to exaggerate the level of multi-screening, its making people feel closer to TVand enhancing their enjoyment. This is crucial ifwe want people to continue to watch 4 hours of

TV every day.

At the heart of all this is great TV content.

Theres little point having expanding forms ofdistribution if people dont care about what theywatch. The joy of social media is that its revealingthe passionate involvement people have withtelly whether it is Game of Thrones, Fresh Meator Mr Selfridge. This visible love is reignitingmedia planners interest in TV as they deviseoriginal ways of linking TV with social media.

TVs resilience is inevitably attracting some newentrants to the industry, but the companies whomake or invest directly in content will continueto hold the aces.

The only thing I wish for in the next 18 months isan economic revival. A little more investment in

TV advertising, now cheaper than its ever been,could get turnover and profits moving in theright direction, as many advertisers are finding.

W

TESS ALPSEXECUTIVE CHAIR, THINKBOX

...FOR SOME, INTERNET ANDMOBILE IS CREATING, IF NOT

EXACTLY DISRUPTION, AN

ALTOGETHER MORE POSITIVE

FORM OF EVOLUTION. TV

IS THE SHINING EXAMPLE OF

THIS. THE NEXT COUPLE OF

YEARS ARE ONLY GOING TO

CONTINUE THIS TREND.


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WHATS REALLY EXCITING

IS TECHNOLOGY IS GIVING

VIEWERS NOT ONLY NEW

WAYS OF WATCHING TV,

VIA MOBILES, TABLETS

AND GAMES CONSOLES,

BUT ALSO MORE

OPPORTUNITIES TO

ENGAGE WITH WHAT THEY

ARE WATCHING

was a year that reminded us of thepower of great television to bring

audiences together in their millions to share inan experience.

Looking ahead its hard to see that powerdiminishing significantly in the short term. For toolong we all spent a lot of our time pronouncingthe death of traditional media as new mediacame along, only to realise 10 years later thatsome of those platforms are more popularthan ever. Whats really exciting is technology isgiving viewers not only new ways of watching

TV, via mobiles, tablets and games consoles, butalso more opportunities to engage with whatthey are watching be that programming oradvertising.

This is what I think will really enrich the TVexperience going forward and make it a far moreinteresting and exciting industry than ten yearsago. No longer are TV ads confined to the brandbuilding function you can get immediateinteraction with your audience direct from your30 second spot right now and the ways ofdoing this and enriching that communicationwith your customers are only going to get moreinnovative and simple to implement.

At ITV we understand that the menvironment is changing. Viewers now haccess to hundreds of channels and are formrelationships with digital brands that did exist a few years ago. However, as our recrebrand demonstrates, we also believe thatare at the heart of popular culture and that Ta medium will remain there for the foreseeaand distant future.

2012

FRU HAZLITTMANAGING DIRECTOR, ITV


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f content is king then the key battles foraudiences can be broken down into threeconcurrent clashes:

Commissioned content vs co-creation Contextualisation vs commodisation Control vs Convergence

Commissioned content vs co-creation

Traditionally, TV content has been prescribedto the audience via a well established pipeline:development, commissioning, production andbroadcast. That remains the case, but increasinglyfor younger audiences they want to feel like theyhave some involvement; that content is not onlyengaging but actively engages with them. Themost powerful way for that be achieved is by the

audience helping to shape it. That could be crowdsourced ideas or calls to actions to contributean aspect of a show. Alternatively it could beself-developed, commissioned, produced andbroadcast content on alternative platforms likeYou Tube, Yahoo, Vimeo etcwhere perpetualaudience engagement and involvement isencouraged. Increasingly the best of theseformats and talents are being approached bytraditional TV channels like SB.TV. Crucially given

that these new platforms allow an inherentlymore direct relationship with a consumer andhave more specific analytics with regard to theirdemographics, they are also attracting interestfrom non-traditional broadcast players; fromtelcos, to advertisers, to charities, to web portalsare increasing their investment in content that isa truly collaborative creation.

Control vs Convergence

Content owners and broadcasters have enjoyeda monopoly over what audiences watch, whenand how. However new technologies havecreated two distinct challenges:

1. the prospect of access to content on multipleplatforms and devices in multiple territoriessimultaneously

2. an expectation that different platformswill also provide audiences with differentexperiences.

The challenge for the industry is not inrecognising the benefit new technologicalprovide audiences, but working out how toencourage people to pay for the privilege.

Contextualisation vs commodisation

I

If content is king then the

key battles for audiences

can be broken down

into three concurrent

clashes: Commissionedcontent vs co-creation,

Contextualisation vs

commodisation, Control vs

Convergence

Derren LawfordGlobal Head of Programming + Scheduling,BBC iPlayer

With so many ways to watch TV on demand thereal challenge is how the audience make senseof what it is they can watch, what it is they wantto watch and the extent to which they wantto pay for the privilege. Services like Netflix,Lovefilm, Hulu etc are increasingly positioningthemselves as curators of the content theyreacquiring for subscribers rather than just amonolithic vault of content with endlessopportunities. For Global iPlayer, curation isthe cornerstone of our editorial strategy. Why?Because peoples leisure time is precious, so thisnew generation of services need to make it eveneasier than traditional TV to choose how andwhat to watch. How? Well it could be a backwardsEPG, algorithmic recommendation, You Tubeannotations, real time social media screenoverlays or thematic on demand collections.

The players that provide audience with the mostcompelling context for what and how it is theyare watching in the digital age will in my viewprovide the most value to consumers. We livein a world of bewildering choice and access tocontent, from DTO, to SVOD, to consoles, set toptop boxes and Smart TVs. As such, the value ofhaving a reputation for making content easy tonavigate and access cannot be underestimatedas it may well convince consumers to be thecustomer of one service as opposed to another.


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emember watching a drama series weeklyfor the whole Autumn? Well when Netflixlaunched Walking Dead, 230,000 people

watched ALL 13 episodes in one sitting. Thatssome change.

In fact, for a decade, everyone has been staringinto their increasingly large TV sets (4k Ultra HDbeing the new wave, say Lenovo) looking for aglib direction TV would take.

Narrowcasting into multiplicitous niches?Interactivity in set-top boxes? Pay TV aroundprogramme brands as channel killers ? The truthis almost everyone is right - and wrong. Multiple,contradictory trends happen at once in TV. Thatswhy it is just SO much fun.

Lets just pick two big trends.

ONE: Big drama. From Breaking Bad to Downton,to Game of Thrones, Homeland or The Killing- every channel everywhere needs a definingdramatic brand. Thats not just the terrestrialseither in fact drama investment and creativityis being driven intensively by the pay channelsas well as free to air ones, from Sky Atlantic inthe UK to Showtime in the US, and by the kind

of international co-production market that the800k-2m per hour costs require.

The result in consumption terms is th at dramasdefines everyone from ITV to Netflix (2/3 of whoseviewing is serialized TV drama, the market forwhich it describes as exploding.) In production,its creating what the Harvard Business Schoolfamously called a war for talent. Onscreen,the services of name TV actors are tough tosecure even for the biggest projects. Offscreen,production schedules are driven by theavailability of proven writers. And in production,proven producers are a rare earth to be valuedabove all, to the extent that 2013 sees morestartups than ever built around commissioningand producing talent, and backed by studiosand large indies (including ours).

It adds up to an industry in foment, creativeapogee, transition and existential challenge all at the same time. And the central dynamic?Quality, quality, quality: think Sherlock, Spooks.

TWO: Internet video. Its been with us seeminglyforever, but is also now an extraordinarilypowerful new player in entertainment. YouTubehas 798m viewers, Daily Motion 114m and Vimeohas 85m. Add BBC iplayer, 4OD, ITV player,and the shiny new platforms like Netflix (27mdomestic and 6m international subscribers),Hulu, Amazon Prime. Taken individually andtogether, these are creating an entire ecology of

TV that is brand new, constructed on completelydifferent business models, and both a challengeand an enormous service to conventionalproduction.

Take US-based Maker Studios the largesttalent-driven video content network in theworld. Maker has some 2.2bn views on YouTube

per month, averaging around 3-5 minutes, and150m subscribers, 40% of them on mobile. Itowns and operates channels and serves an ad per7 minutes of video with a CPM of $2. Its findingtalent, stars, material, audiences - and its lookingfor distribution beyond YouTube too. My ownemployer Shine has a similar company calledChannel Flip with very strong UK penetration,and the sheer open-mouthed moment when Irealized how big some of their audiences were

Fail to interact with this

emerging audience as YouTube

adds a subscription layer

(coming soon, possibly at

an initial 100% revenue

allocation to the producer to

get it going) and you could

be left way behind.R

Alex ConnockDirector of New Business, Shine UK

for, say, a teenager in Swindon who recordsvideos from his bedroom, was reminiscent ofthe early 1990s and the way Channel 4 at thetime was able to bring on new talent using its

TV schedule. Fail to interact with this emergingaudience as YouTube adds a subscription layer(coming soon, possibly at an initial 100% revenueallocation to the producer to get it going) andyou could be left way behind.


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s I write this, I am sitting in front of my 48 HDTV watching Dancing on Ice on ITV1. Well, Isay watching, of course, Im not really (Im

writing this!) and I doubt a significant percentageof the audience BARB says are watching reallyare either. A bottleneck of analogue bandwidthin to the home and a historical context of only1 or perhaps 2 TV sets in the house produced aremarkably concentrated audience where the

job of the programmer was really to appealto the widest audience possible thus shareof audience became the main measure ofsuccess. There is an inherent assumption in the

TV industry that people would watch, it was justa question of whether they would watch yourparticular channel. Programming against thecompetitor channels is a common strategy.

All of this changes in the IP-connected worldwhere households have multiple screens (I have11 screens in my house where I can watchwatching YouTube, BBC, ITV, Netflix, Channel4,SKY etc). This together with high Broadbandpenetration and all-you-can-eat data packagesis generating the explosion of reach and timespent viewing online that now compares withmany broadcast networks in key demographicgroups. These viewers are becoming a marketing

wasteland to many commercial broadcasters. Ofcourse, younger audiences are at the forefrontof this and the near disappearance of childrensprogramming from linear viewing including theBBCs flagship channels worries many corporatesaround the world.

Understandably, the incumbent industry hasdone their best to hold back the tide and,compared to all other media, they have donea very good job. Why do you think ITV areaggressively pursuing acquisitions of Indies?

They all have a big incentive - TV, or linearbroadcast via terrestrial network, has been amassively profitable industry in the last 40yrs andhad many of us thinking that it is the truest formof entertainment. In a world of screens though,there is no longer an homogenous thing called

TV alone and it strikes me that even ThinkBox(the TV industrys own association) appear tohave acknowledged this crucial point as we moveto a world of Content delivered across multiplescreens. Along similar lines, I believe ATVoDhave struggled to regulate the IP-connectedvideo world in the UK because they benchmarkall online services to a TV like experience.

In this world of multiple screens, we believe inpolarisation into On-Demand viewing vs. Liveevents with audiences continuing to fragment.On-Demand will relentlessly move on to IP-connected platforms as the concept of time-shifting gets turbo-charged. Viewers will reallywatch the programmes because they choseto. Live remains the bastion of linear broadcastwhile the cost of delivering live across IP remainshigh and so ITV et al will remain dominant for the

A

Ashley MacKenzieFounder + CEO, Base 79

next 5 years. That said, Red Bulls Stratos jump onYouTube was watched by 8,500,000 people inHD simultaneously across the world... ITV1 wouldbe proud of that number in prime-time now. Oh,and it cost Red Bull absolutely nothing in MediaCosts.

Advertisers are paying for my non-watching ofDancing on Ice, which they will increasingly stopdoing and this will unwind the industry and drivethe inevitable success of IP-connected video.Fragmentation onto IP-connected platforms isnot to be feared by the advertising communitybut should be embraced. It will inevitablyproduce much higher engagement, greatertransparency and better results thanks to real-time data and improved targeting.

Bill Gates famously quipped We alwaysoverestimate the change that will occur in thenext two years and underestimate the changethat will occur in the next ten the real questionis where are we in the cycle?

In this world of multiple

screens, we believe in

polarisation into On-Demand

viewing vs. Live events with

audiences continuing to

fragment.


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he year ahead looks exciting for thoseexcited about technology and those of uswho love great TV. Theres been increasing

volume of discussion about the second screen ie the use of phones, laptops or tablets alongsidethe consumption of TV. In the last year alonewe saw a more than doubling in the volume ofdiscussions about TV shows on Twitter.

But the exciting part is that we are just gettingstarted here. One of the challenges has been forbroadcasters to work out how to use this newtechnology to add value for their viewers. Therehas been rapid experimentation. BBC Question

Time found that just by dropping a hashtagon screens thousands of conversations started

talking place alongside the discussion on screen.Such was the impact they decided to involve anextra guest a member of the panel tweetingfrom their home.

Skys Monday Night Football found that thequality of the tweeted discussion alongsidetheir analysis was such that they built it into theformat of the show. Broadcasters are starting torealise that this is a win-win. Formats are beingimproved, and engagement is being enhancedby bringing the audience closer the show. Weveseen evidence of audiences using social media asa Twitter EPG, if they are bored with Eastendersthey can see which shows are trending rightnow on other channels.

So where does this take advertisers? Well it

helps keep audiences engaged in TV like neverbefore. Live TV remains the biggest show intown because if audiences dont watch theshow live they will miss th e subversive audiencecommentary that the second screen provides.

the challenges has been for

broadcasters to work out

how to use this new tech-

nology to add value for their

viewers.

T

Bruce DaisleyDirector, Twitter


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