TORONTO – Is the surging popularity of on-line video viewing a real threat to the old television broadcasting business model or is it actually fuelling a new ‘golden age’ of television?
That was the subject of a lively discussion staged at the first of three Digital Convergence Executive seminars presented by Canadian Women in Communications and management consulting firm Digital Theory. Cartt.ca is the media partner for the series.
Brent Bernie, the president of Media Metrix Canada, a division of measurement company comScore, called television “still the most powerful medium in the world”, but stressed that the influence of social networking has impacted “more than just how things happen in our world, but also how media is consumed, shared and moved around”.
“Maybe this is a new era for TV because there’s now many other ways that you’re going to communicate with your audience, and that your audience is going to communicate with each other about you”, he said during the event’s evening reception. “There’s now a whole other network out there called the digital network community talking to each other about new programs.”
Bernie said that while monthly on-line video viewing time per person is still much lower than television viewing, it’s important to note that on-line video is only a few years old and “growing incredibly rapidly” from almost a standing start. In Canada, 89% of the Internet audience is watching video (slightly higher than 86% in the U.S.), and that the average viewing time per person is 19 hours a month (versus 16 hours per month in the U.S.).
“Broadcasters don’t have their heads in the sand about this”, said Barbara Williams, SVP of content for Shaw Media, who noted that her company’s digital team now has a permanent place at the weekly ratings meetings.
“There was this paranoia from a number of years ago that came from some notion that it was all one big trade: ‘if they do this, they won’t do that’”, she continued. “And I think the big learning in the last few years is that ‘they will do this AND they will do that’. They will do it all, and it’s become less about worrying about whether they might go to that platform instead of this one, and it’s become more about how we engage them across all platforms all the time.”
But it means that Shaw Media’s conventional network Global now must acquire all of a show’s rights – for linear television, tablets, smart phones, websites and VOD platforms – which are not always available, and if they are, are often hugely expensive.
“It’s challenging for us to figure out what the value is that we should pay for those rights when I’m not at all sure that I can monetize those rights”, Williams acknowledged. “Until advertisers are confident that there is measurement in place that is reliable and trustworthy – and advertisers may whine about that forever – we do not have adequate, confident measurement for all of those platforms at this point in time. So, the advertiser is not necessarily willing to see their ad go everywhere, or if they are, they’re sure not necessarily willing to pay what we think that they should pay for it. The advertising piece is far from solved.”
Bernie said that his company measures digital views using a system that tags both programs and ads, but admits that the current lack of a generally accepted standard is a challenge.
Another fly in the digital viewing ointment, Williams continued, is the impact that it is having on the specialty channel business model.
“The specialty model in Canada is built on repeats – you buy a show for a 5 year term, you buy the right to exploit it 10 times over that term – which is a great repeat pattern”, she said. “If, through the availability of all this content on all these other platforms, it means that people have done their catch up viewing, then what does that do to the value of that repeat next summer? The value of first play may be enhanced, but will advertisers pay so much more for the first (view) to compensate for the value that is no longer there for the second, third, fourth or fifth? There are a lot of complications to this ‘perfect’ world.”
But perhaps, at least in some ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
“There’s a thinking now, that where appointment TV was a drifting idea with all these other choices, that because of social media, we’re coming back to the value of appointment television”, Williams continued. “If you’re interested in knowing who got voted out on Survivor, you’d better watch Wednesday at 8 because the spoilers that are out there will tell you within 5 minutes. (Social media) is actually pushing people to be more and more involved in the moment, and actually taking what was three or four people sitting around the living room sharing that moment together as a social event, to putting 100,000 people together to share it. It’s ultimately just the biggest water cooler that you’ve ever dreamed of.”
The second Digital Convergence Executive Series seminar, called ‘Leveraging Digital Business Models’, will take place October 12 in Toronto. Click here for more information or to register.
