TORONTO – Once viewers are convinced to try the various TV Everywhere platforms being made available by carriers and broadcasters, keeping them engaged with great content and a seamless user experience reduces subscriber churn and leads towards making a profit from the significant investments that broadcasters have made in TVE apps and services.
A panel moderated by Cartt.ca’s Greg O’Brien at the CTAM Canada Broadcaster Forum held Wednesday at Toronto's Sony Centre saw experts from Vidéotron, Corus Entertainment and the CBC offered insight into their organizations’ current TVE services, while TVE platform experts from U.S. technology providers Accedo and ThePlatform shed light on the challenges of successfully bringing TVE to market.
Success in the TVE space can be gauged in several ways.
Vidéotron has already achieved a certain level of success with its Club Illico subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) service and Illico web service, said Marie Ginette Lepage, vice-president of marketing for content and broadcasting at Vidéotron. “It’s not big numbers, but for us it’s definitely a start,” Lepage said.
Club Illico currently has close to 60,000 subscribers who, said Lepage, view content on the service five or six times a week on average. In addition, 30% of Illico web customers visit the site 20 times a week to view content. She added that looking at consumer adoption rates and the frequency with which customers return to view content are ways of gauging the success of Vidéotron’s TV Everywhere offerings.
Lepage offered the following advice for getting customers to keep coming back: know their preferences and understand how they consume content. For example, having a huge stock of English-only titles available on its TVE services doesn’t address the majority of Vidéotron’s French-speaking audience, nor does having a lot of movie titles serve for mobile users who want to view short-form content, usually in the four to seven minute range of length, Lepage said. “You have to know your customers to be able to provide them with the right content” on the right device, she said.
The value Vidéotron brings to its TVE customers is it provides “a single application where you can find all of your multiplatform content,” Lepage said. Vidéotron has seven different platforms that need to be reworked every time its TVE services and apps need updating, which costs a lot to operate, Lepage said. She added that Vidéotron is considering the use of more advertising to help monetize its TVE services.
“Most of our broadcasters here in Canada, as well as the U.S., are running full ad loads on their sitcoms and dramas with zero drop-off… and that includes even disabling fast forward in commercials.” – Marty Roberts, ThePlatform
The good news for broadcasters who run advertising on their TVE services is that viewers seem willing to sit through the ads, according to Marty Roberts, co-CEO of thePlatform, a subsidiary of Comcast which provides a video management system that helps broadcasters bring multiplatform TVE services to market. “Most of our (TVE) broadcasters here in Canada, as well as the U.S., are running full ad loads on their sitcoms and dramas with zero drop-off (in viewers)… and that includes even disabling fast forward in commercials,” he said.
“There was a lot of conversation early in the market about, ‘Can we run the same ad load as what you have on TV?’ And I think what we’ve proven is, if the content is good enough, that the audience is absolutely willing to sit through that ad experience,” Roberts said. “Now what [are they] doing during that ad time? Maybe they’re checking Facebook or whatever, but the point is that ad is actually being displayed and presented in the browser.”
However, he noted ad-blocking technology in those browsers is currently having a significant impact on broadcasters’ advertising clients.
“Some of our customers that have younger demographics have seen 30 to 40% of their ad avails get blocked on the browser-based playback,” Roberts said. “That’s pretty material when you have 40 to 50% of their traffic coming from browsers. You’re talking about 20% of their ad avails are just gone, because of ad blockers.”
“As an industry, it’s a fairly big challenge,” Roberts said. “And frankly, it’s an arms race that we’re going to get into with the ad-blocking technology that is around today.”
Mark Adams, vice-president and general manager, North America, for TVE and OTT application developer Accedo, said he believes the TVE market is moving more toward a direct-to-consumer monetization model for broadcasters, as seen with SVoD services.
Richard Kanee, head of digital for English services at the CBC, pointed to the Tou.tv service offered by Radio-Canada as an example of an effort to monetize using both ads and subscriptions, by a broadcaster going direct to consumer. “Radio-Canada has done a really interesting job with Tou.tv. It’s launched I think a fairly unique blended model that includes an ad-based VoD offer and then a conversion to a pay offer, which is both direct to the consumer as well as a subscriber tied to Rogers and Telus subscriptions,” Kanee said.
Similar to Vidéotron’s Lepage, Kanee said return on investment in TVE services can be measured in terms of the reduction in subscriber churn and the level of viewer engagement with TVE content. The CBC is using its TVE services to “get the content in front of our audiences and to build excitement and interest,” to ultimately drive viewer demand for live events and CBC shows, Kanee said.
“Certainly, it’s the first time that we as a broadcaster have had to deal with things like subscriber retention, acquisition, subscriber bundles.” – Richard Kanee, CBC
“It’s very early days in terms of understanding the (return on investment), really,” he said. “Certainly, it’s the first time that we as a broadcaster have had to deal with things like (subscriber) retention, acquisition, subscriber bundles, all these things that the BDUs, you know, it’s their bread and butter. So it’s a very interesting new skill set that we have to develop.”
Shawn Praskey, vice-president of content distribution for Corus Entertainment, said ROI may be measurable in terms of the number of TVE app downloads or how much time people use the apps. In addition to off-setting subscriber churn, TVE products could also help to acquire new audiences.
Praskey spoke about his company’s new Treehouse app (expected to be available in the spring), which will be the first of three TVE apps offered by Corus (apps for YTV and Teletoon being the other two). Corus is trying to build “an experience” with its Treehouse app and not just a place to consume content.
“What we’re building is an environment that kids can walk into or go into, and it will have the on-demand content, but it will also have live streaming. It will have downloads, built-in features, parental features. It will have what we call ‘surprise and delight’, so there are surprises to keep kids coming back to the app. Constantly content will be updated to the app,” he explained.
He said having a TVE app associated with the Treehouse channel may give Corus an advantage over other kids’ channels available.
“How many kids’ products do you really need in your household? Are you going to subscribe to the one that has a TV Everywhere product and robust on-demand offering in HD, or are you going to subscribe to the one that doesn’t have those offerings or that better experience?” Praskey asked.
Adams advised TVE app developers to create different experiences depending on the platform the apps are running on. “Significant time and effort are going into [these apps], so why not take the effort to create something that is completely different from what you get on a set-top box or other platforms,” he said.
In addition, TVE content providers should differentiate between big-screen content and smaller screen, since consumption patterns are so different. Some content will always belong on a big screen, whether it’s being viewed through a set-top box or Xbox, he added. In the Southeast Asia market, for example, “it’s mobile first and it’s not even a consideration to be watching anything on a big screen. It’s all mobile,” said Adams.
Kanee mused about the evolution of TV Everywhere and what the implications are for storytelling in future. “Where do the interface and the content go over the long term, and how does the interface inform the form of the content itself?” he asked. “Today we’re just putting 45-minute TV shows online.”
“(As TVE evolves), how does the story-telling change is a really interesting topic. Not for this year, maybe in five years. ”
