MONT-TREMBLANT – Free, ad-supported streaming television (FAST) is “going to be the dominant system all around the world,” Alan Wolk (above), co-founder and lead analyst at TVREV told attendees of the Canadian Communication Systems Alliance Connect 2022 conference yesterday.
At the moment, we are living in a hybrid environment, which will be around for a while, Wolk said, explaining in Canada, 51% of people are subscribing to both linear and streaming services.
“The thing about hybrid that’s interesting is that it’s not necessarily one or the other all of the time,” he said. There will be some people who watch mostly streaming while others will watch mostly linear, but there are also people who will watch football on linear television all season and when the season is over, they will turn to streaming.
Cord-cutting, furthermore, is only happening in “dribs and drabs”, said Wolk.
In other words, the environment is complex.
Wolk told the crowd that not only do people seem to like cable, “linear in general is enjoying a comeback.”
This is not to suggest things are not changing – they are. Wolk, who coined the term FAST, spoke about the evolving world of streaming, outlining the challenges streamers are facing, and future trends.
Among the challenges facing streamers, is that no one has really figured out advertising.
One of the reasons has to do with data. It’s not a lack of data per se, it is that there is no standardized form of data that is the same across the board.
Another issue Wolk talked about was transparency – when you buy on linear television, you know where your ad runs, what show it is on and what the context is, but on a lot of streaming services, this is not the case. However, advertisers do not want their funny commercials running after a funeral scene, he said.
In terms of future trends, Wolk said the biggest one is the global expansion of big U.S. subscription video on demand companies. He explained it has been going well for them so far in countries such as Canada, Korea and Japan and European countries, “but the rest of the world is not a slam dunk” – people in places such as India do not necessarily have the money some of the streaming companies are asking for, so the streamers either need to shift to a free model or reduce their prices drastically.
“They’re also going to have to think about mobile and how their product works on mobile, because in a lot of these countries that’s how most people connect to the Internet and watch stuff,” Wolk said.
What they need to do, and what everyone in the industry needs to at least be thinking about doing, is innovating – which is exactly what innovation strategist Shawn Kanungo spoke about at CCSA Connect 2022 today.
“My job is to remind leaders that there is going to be something, some company or someone coming out of nowhere that will challenge their status quo and it’s a reminder to these leaders to innovate every single day and a reminder that disruption is actually an opportunity,” he said.
One of his key messages was to embrace luck, which Kanungo said does not happen in optimized environments. “In a world abundant with data we should be spending more time more effort and more resources on luck … Our obsession with optimization leaves little room for luck,” he explained.
Kanungo argued there is a real problem with optimization and big data in terms of innovation.
“What I’ve noticed with organizations is that in a world abundant with data, that sometimes we grip onto the past,” he said. Big data and artificial intelligence optimize the past – “innovation is about creating a future, it’s about unlocking insights that we haven’t seen before.”
We cannot cling to the past because it makes it difficult to pivot when things change, he said.
