Mobile Fix: New TV

This week Simon Andrews, founder of Addictive!, examines the evolution of TV and video – looking at the new thinking and experimentation being driven by the proliferation of new devices and consumer behaviours.

A while back we talked about how we could imagine Google – one day – being a bidder against Sky et al for the TV rights for the Premier League. And how that would herald a big switch in newTV.

Rumour has it that the Sun has attracted 340k subscribers to its mobile Goals service (although others question how many of those are paying the full price) and we know sports can drive digital eyeballs and subscriptions. So it’s not too surprising to hear that Google is talking to the National Hockey League in the US.

Whilst not quite at the scale of the NBA or NFL, Hockey is a big sport and this could be a big deal with the package in question not affecting the traditional TV rights.

As could the Hollywood studios going direct to consumers, with their own OTT service to rival Netflix and Sky. Again, rumours and conjecture but the numbers sort of add up. And if you know that your content is enabling new entrants to come in and potentially set themselves up as future gatekeepers, what would you do?

Whatever business you are in, new thinking is required when new devices drive new consumer behaviours and new business models. And there is so much money in TV, we have to expect experimentation. The NYT has a good piece talking with the talent behind some of the big TV shows about social and new ways of doing things;

“They’re still making money, and that’s the bottom line. As long as the ad sales model is producing revenue, they will persist in doing things in a traditional fashion. When that starts to fall apart, or if they really see that other people are cleaning their clock, then they’re going to have to adapt.”

– Carlton Cuse (Lost)

“The only reason we do 13 episodes and in one-hour chunks is because we have international buyers that are actually airing the show week to week, and we have to fit in one-hour spaces. But I think that there’s a really exciting door opening where shows won’t have to be seasons. They could be in parts. Episodes won’t have to be an hour long. One episode could be 22 minutes, another episode could be 94 minutes. That could in total comprise 4 to 6 to 14 to 52 hours. There’s an idea I’m toying with of a show in which there would be no episodes. It would simply be six to eight hours straight, and the audience could choose when they pause or if they do.”

– Beau Willimon (House of Cards)

People happily watch TV shows on their tablets and phone – iPlayer had 41 million programme requests from tablets in March and 40 million from mobile devices versus 128 million on computers. But when they can ‘switch’ this viewing to their proper TV things really change. £30 Google Chromecasts are going to accelerate this switch when they become widely available – as this article asks, are they the future of television?

And the other flank of newTV continues to thrive – Techcrunch has a good video on Maker – one of the top YouTube studios. One interesting new twist in this space is the availability of tools to make video.

Vine have 40 million users and a new app from TasteMade show how things are changing – this free app helps you make 1 minute videos – with captions etc – and whilst the idea is you load these to the TasteMade ‘channel’ you can save them to post anywhere.

Want more proof that digital is going to video? The new head of Yahoo in Europe is one of the smartest people from oldTV – Dawn Airey.

Mobile advertising

One of the key things I talked about at Facebook last week was mobile advertising and what the similarities and differences with desktop are.

As the Facebook figures demonstrate, mobile advertising continues to suck in money and emarketer predicts that mobile will be over half of all US digital spend by 2017 – our smart friend at Google @DamianBurns suggests it will only take two years and we tend to agree.

New data from comScore shows that – in the US – pretty much all the growth in time spent on the internet since 2010 has come from mobile. And in May this year the time spent on the internet via mobile devices and tablets exceeded that via PCs.

So if money does follow audience it only has one place to go.

But conversion continues to be an issue and this could slow things down for the response marketers. A key reason for this poor conversion is that most brands’ mobile ads and mobile sites are poor. For those businesses looking for a brand effect, the creative work in mobile advertising isn’t good enough either – too many people are using shrunken desktop banners.

A key advantage for Facebook (and Twitter) is they have a format which is perfect for mobile and isn’t intrusive. The challenge for everyone else is to see what they can come up with to supplement – if not replace – the banner.

This is smart thinking about how the new aesthetic of iOS7 could affect advertising – making the banner ad so conspicuous it gets rejected. We are still looking for answers as to what comes next – but in the meantime we keep seeing floating pop ups and all that nonsense we eventually got rid of on desktop.

As well as formats, the other big issue in advertising is tracking – just as mobile starts to get close to being as good as desktop along come the ad blockers. The new version of the Firefox browser will default to having ad tracking cookies turned off and amongst its users there are already 15 million people using AdBlocker – the top add-on.

This article is a good summary of the issues and suggests the answer to this problem is VRM – the idea that the user Manages their Relationship with Vendors or advertisers.

We have liked this idea for a long time and it’s surprising it has yet to take off.

If I could outsource my data management to someone who would mediate the advertising and ensure I only saw ads for things that are relevant or interesting I would be delighted. And if I could get a cut of the adspend – with a chunk going to the third party that manages my data and makes the process work – then it’s a win win.

Maybe this is the area all the Luma chart adtech people should pivot to – the consolidation we mentioned last week is gaining ground.

Lots of interesting work to be done in this space – and big prizes for those people who get it right.