Television Everywhere = Application + Segmentation (Part 1 of 2)

Television Everywhere - the term now in vogue for internet-delivered TV of various sorts - is making the already-complicated experience of watching TV in a 400-channel world even more so.

In both the 400-channel world and the internet world television viewing has moved beyond flopping down on the couch, grabbing the remote and watching something. Not that people don't do that all the time - more than ever in fact. But for regular (or so-called linear) television viewing there's a lot that leads up to grabbing that remote, a lot that's needed to keep the viewer on that channel and return episode after episode.

In the internet world, it's the same, only more so. Like it or not, watching TV has for all practical purposes turned into an application with six parts: 

• Discover: making a potential viewer aware of a program. This is done via anything from promos and interstitials to ads on the side of a bus.

• Find: getting the viewer to actually locate an "airing" of a program across whatever delivery format he/she would like or has access to (linear, VoD, DVR recording, internet stream, etc.), and thus turning a general, often vague awareness of a program into the actual intent and ability to watch

• Engage: at minimum, actually watching. At maximum, the sky's the limit: sharing with friends via Facebook, buying related merchandise, texting votes about contestants, you name it.

• Organize: making it possible for viewers to organize, schedule, manage, prioritize, and otherwise control their viewing - and this is key - regardless of medium. So whether on Hulu, YouTube, their cable system, over-the-air, on the “phone”. Preferably this is an active capability - it schedules it for you, reminds, you, saves it for you, whatever.

• Retain: at the end of the day, if a viewer doesn't like a show, he or she won't keep watching it. Or if the show's a 'Mad Men'-level cultural phenomenon, viewers will find a way to keep watching without much prompting. But the vast majority of TV falls into the grey middle between love it or hate it. The better suppliers do at "Engage", “Find”, and "Organize" the better they will do at viewer retention. But it also involves occasional and creative communication to retain interest. And motivation (below)

• Reward: When it comes to rewards, TV has two things going for it. People appreciate rewards in the form of more TV and less commercials ("watch tonight's 'No Reservations' and get a one-day unlimited pass at Hulu Premium Edition"), and those rewards cost very little (vs., say, inserting a breakfast cereal sample into a Sunday paper delivery).

Today's 400-channel universe and the emerging Television Everywhere world have one thing in common - oversupply. The competition for viewer attention will continue to increase and pressure on television's most fundamental value proposition - mass audience reach - will intensify. Suppliers that treat TV watching as an application, not a passive and distant form of consumption, will be able to outdistance competitors who don't.

We'll be exploring this and much more in our forthcoming book "Television Everywhere: How Hollywood Can Take Back the Internet and Turn Digital Dimes Into Dollars"

Garbage Moguls

 

Recently, Bruce Greenwald, Jonathan Knee, and Ava Seave published “The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies”.Interesting reading and perhaps we’ll discuss some of their key theses later on.

In the meantime, however, I’d like to relate a much more pressing, if modest mogul-related anecdote of my own.

While flipping by some channel (thought it was Planet Green, but it turned out to be National Geographic), I saw a few tail minutes of Garbage Moguls. I looked up the name, and was directed to the National Geographic website where an apparently not Chrome-friendly page displayed a largely blank screen. 

Thwarted from viewing even a clip, and too lazy to try firing up a couple of other browsers on an already-slow laptop, I moved on to YouTube (a mental flip of a coin vs. Hulu, YouTube won).

At the top of “results 1-20 of about 29” were the only two entries that actually related to the show, as far as I could tell. I watched some of a 2:40 clip, then looked around for actual shows. In the right hand column (“More From: National Geographic”) was helpfully listed “Exploring Oceans: Patagonia” which, as far as I could tell, had absolutely nothing to do with the show I was originally looking for.

Ah, but I noticed near the top of the page a tab-like thing labeled “Shows”, so there we went and did our search again. Oops. “Limited results available in Shows.” So limited in fact, that the two entries that were offered had absolutely nothing to do with what I was looking for.

I think you get the point. This isn’t about bashing YouTube, or NatGeo, or the show that I still haven’t found or watched. It’s about the fact that I, like many viewers, am not going to go to multiple different websites, navigate through three to five layers of menus, hunt and peck my way through a TiVo menu that can only look ten days forward, etc. etc. etc., just to find something that seemed like it might be interesting for future viewing.

And while it’s certainly worthwhile pondering whether “content is still king” and other weighty strategic matters, it’s also worth pondering why an industry that often sees itself under siege or potential distress has so little respect for or interest in its viewers and advertisers, to the point that someone actively trying hard to engage with recently discovered content is thwarted at every turn.