Category: Content Creation

It Has Been a While – And Nothing Changed!

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I have been away – (Seems quite a recent thing these days) – In fact I havent been in the TV space for some time, as I am now in the world of ‘Direct-to-Consumer Sport Streaming.’ Another mighty complex space that is unfolding as we look to bring new technologies and business models the market. This sector has more of a business model problem than it is does tech challenges. It is very exciting I must say.

Soooo … Did anything else change in our TV world? Not really! – Broadcom is suing Netflix for streaming patent abuse … ATSC3 is blighted by Patent $ demands. This is nothing new in our ‘bindustry.’ Content is more than ultra-fragmented – It has grown exponentially over the last few years and SVOD prices are rising – There is a modicum of consolidation, and many streaming giants are realizing that it is a costly business – HELLO! Life is expensive! My Cox bill was a horrendous $270 dollars last month (that is without all of the streaming services we add on top). Cord cutting can only be driven positively by this kind of situation. I hang on in here out of respect to my employee and the industry I represent. However, many people I know (within the industry) are cord cutting and password sharing – shooting their own businesses in the foot.

In a world of data, it, like software, only rises in bytes exponentially. Just look at any latest APP update and you will see 45MB-1GB of new data needed to make your apps work … Then you are required to stream additional operational and functional data into most of them for there to be any value. Costs to the consumer are rising exponentially. Meanwhile back in the bat cave …

AI popped up and we all went nuts for it. Hollywood went on strike because of it. TV shows ground to a halt in fear of it … AI didn’t fill the gap though – and it really can’t at this point. My one take is that Media and Entertainment is emotion and AI has none: end of story.

The industry invented some new acronyms and new people on LinkedIn are trying to make us believe that we have invented something new and amazing. The whole industry is pretending we are advancing when in fact we are going backwards – FAST! (That is the latest acronym for streaming linear Ad supported content.) Yawn!

The next thing will be someone will invent a better EPG (Programme Guide) and a UI/UX to improve the experience that is too much to scan through and nothing to watch … A system so we can filter the 1000s of channels into a manageable amount for human consumption … and then someone else fresh out of tech school will suggest we need ‘personalization’ and interactivity – maybe second screen synchronisation, and we will see everyone hop on the Merry-Go-Round once again.

Social Media is another train wreck. Nobody X’pected what happened. That will be a lead for another musing.

Alan Wolk has said it all so succinctly today and it leads me to think in TV we are now in the era of business models because we have all the tech in the world needed to deliver to anyone over any type of transmission and to any type of device – even the refrigerator:

“Rather than look to emphasize features that will benefit consumers, services all too often look to benefit advertisers or engineers. Apps—free and streaming—are designed in ways that make sense from a business perspective, but not from a consumer one.”

Until the next post – Hasta La Vista

TVANGELIST

A Hiatus and Nobody Cared #LOL

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My Blogging is Really a Diary That Nobody Reads

There is one thing about blogging and that is – unless people care it is really simply a diary of sorts isn’t it? You put down things on digital paper and hope people read them and enjoy what you write. Well I am not going to give up as I own the bloody domain name and put a lot of effort into this in the past. Time to re-ignite the passion … While I am not specifically in the TV business per-se anymore I am in sport and that is still media & entertainment.

Looking forward to getting my thoughts down once again.

Anthony

The Pay-TV Industry’s Long Game

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Let’s jump straight in. Linear TV is dead because online VOD services are what people want. This headline from 2014 was a typical attack on broadcasting –

“Netflix CEO says broadcast TV will be dead in 16 years.”

Just recently and six years into that prediction, Netflix started a LINEAR TV service akin to broadcast, online (in France). Streaming linear is now the norm for many online services. In the end, and to please most of the viewing population, you have to create small changes to existing habits and please as many people as possible with different access choices. I have discussed this often in previous posts. To gain volume viewership, you have to satisfy a vast demographic, and many people don’t want to spend 20 minutes searching for content, which is the norm in streaming – Linear is convenient and has been in the market using the good old EPG since 1981.

DAZN, who professed to be the new ‘Netflix of sport,’ talked about their LINEAR service offering just a few days ago in a conference and added insight into why they are signing up with Pay-TV Service providers. Their streaming dream and takeover of sports stuttered to a halt, exacerbated by COVID with the lack of live events. However, before COVID, DAZN was already struggling, and when the pandemic really hit, they immediately sought investors to shore up the company. The volte-face of the ‘Netflix of Sports’ and D2C disruptor was a pragmatic move and a strategy change needed to keep the DAZN legs pumping.

Broadcast TV isn’t dead nor dying; it is merely morphing and has another medium (the Internet) upon which it rides. Pay-TV is TV that you pay for but the phrase is often used to describe the traditional cable and satellite service bundles are now aggregating streaming service as channels or additional VOD stores. Its all going to look the same soon.

In fact in the USA the ATSC 3.0 NextgenTV will be an IP Stream over the air, which means that they will have the ability to offer streaming-like service. 5G will too look to be the new TV ‘high-speed-access-to-the-home.’ While all of this is good for consumers the business model of TV remains as complicated as ever – You have to pay for access to premium content (Pay-TV) – unless it is funded by another method such as advertising.

The difference today is that you can take as little or as much content as you want, depending on your budget (not necessarily desires). Consumers are simply giving up on certain pay-walled content or pirating it in this complex a la carte landscape. The technology boundaries are blurring – how long will it be before the subscription costs start blurring, and we have a market that levels out price-wise … not long methinks.

TV Fragmentation Reigns

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Some years ago, it was plainly evident to anyone who has any common sense that the world of media and entertainment content would fragment. In the transition from broadcast to online, the opportunity seemed clear to content owners that a global reach for their content was as simple as putting it all online and direct-to-the-consumer. However, the business, at the time, just wasn’t ready for this and quite frankly still isn’t prepared to allow that to happen ‘carte-blanche.”

I wrote on this topic in 2009 and an update in 2012. It is now 2020, and content rights, geo-blocking, and market dynamics all inhibit the passage of content from broadcast to over the Internet worldwide. Like websites, there is a myriad of Apps all purporting to offer the same content, but in reality they do not. Still, the truth is that national, regional, and content licensing remains an industry sticking point – there is not going to be a central repository of content that we can dip in and out of.

Sports are the most affected in recent years and coming up against the complexity of the industry. Pay-TV has been able to keep sports as one of the mainstays of its premium tier offers and, in some instances, they offer less popular sports (lower tiers), often at odd times of the day i.e. not prime time. This causes a dilemma for these sports as they sign-up to broadcast deals (often behind pay-walls), limiting their rights to show the games on other platforms such as OTT in particular. Happy to be considered good enough for broadcast TV, but then caught in the mouth of the lion.

The industry adage of ‘What I Want – When I Want – Where I Want’ still cannot be satisfied. Content owners have fragmented or gone vertical, leaving the consumer foraging for certain content across all manner of locations. The costs are mounting up and the consumer is becoming disheartened.

On a recent weekend, I wanted to watch Wales against Scotland and saw that it was not on my NBC Sports Gold app. I quickly went hunting and could not find the match on any platform that I was subscribed to. How frustrating! Very, very disappointing! Even the pirate sites that I found were asking for money (naturally) so its not an option.

At home I have a Cox subscription (it wasn’t being shown on any channel) … I also have a NBC Sports Gold rugby pass but it didn’t show it, Netflix – don’t do sport – Hulu – don’t do sport – HBO Max – don’t do sport … then there is DAZN purported to be the Netflix of sports – don’t do International rugby in the USA – Rugby Pass – geo-blocked … #WTF what’s the point? I am feeling hard done by and frustrated. I am tempted towards piracy – it is cheap and is available. Doesn’t the industry understand that they have an issue?

I’ll keep up my hopes of getting – What I Want -When I Want – Where I Want, but I don’t think that will be for quite some time, if ever!

THE HOW-TO GENRE IS THE BIGGEST ‘CON’ IN ‘CON’TENT MARKETING

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I followed a Twitter link on a HOW-TO subject that interested me for the simple fact I have to write case-studies … I naturally fell upon this typical ‘Content Marketing’ nonsense advice.

Desperately disappointing and so typical of the WWW repository of nothingness!

How to write a credible case study

At XXXX we have written hundreds of case studies for clients like Microsoft, HP and LinkedIn. Based on our process and experience, here are ten tips to help you write better case studies:

  • Do your groundwork.  NO SHIT SHERLOCK! I AM NOT GOING TO WRITE ABOUT SOMETHING FOR A CLIENT THAT I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT AND THEY EMPLOYED ME!!! Understand the product or service being sold, and research the companies on both sides of the deal. This can be as simple as reading the ‘About Us’ section on a company website, or their company news page. You need some context for the deal you’re writing about.
  • Get some background. I AM CONFUSED HERE ABOUT OBVIOUS QUESTIONS! Try to get hold of the person who was on the ground and made the deal, and get them to tell you what happened. Get some background so when you speak to the client you aren’t wasting their time with obvious questions.
  • Interview the right person. WELL I NEVER! … WHAT? GET HOLD OF PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY WORKED ON THE DEAL! … The real story will come from the people actually involved in procurement, implementation and customer relations. Avoid interviewing marketing or PR people, as they will only tell you a repackaged story, which will sound hollow when you write it up. You want the real customer, preferably a champion of your product.
  • Find the story. A USE CASE IS A STORY OTHERWISE THERE IS NO STORY! This is the crux of the case study. There has to be a story: a struggle before, a journey to improve, and a benefit in the present. This doesn’t always mean profits: it might be improved employee retention, saved time or a new business model. The focus is on what matters most to the person you interview. And make sure you tell the real story – no inflated figures.
  • Create a template. NOT THE CREATE A TEMPLATE ADVICE – WHOOPEE DOO DAH! Once you have your basic story you can build a structure. Most case studies fall into company biography, challenge, process and benefits. Structures are there to emphasise the story, not shackle it though. Tweak it to the story, and give yourself four or five subheadings.
  • Categorise your transcript. GO THROUGH YOUR NOTES… ARGHHH! OH YES … IT BECOMES AUTOMATIC DOESN’T IT? Take your interview notes and go through them, assigning each part to one of your subheadings. You should end up with three to five key points for each section. The more you write, the more automatic this step will become.  The flow of the story will be obvious as you do the interview.
  • Find your key quotes. WHAT THE EFFS A FRANKENQUOTE??? Never use frankenquotes in a case study; people can spot them a mile off. It is best to use short, snappy quotes, dotted throughout the case study that underline or explain one of your bullet points. Let your interviewee’s personality shine through.
  • Flesh it out. OH MY – NOW WRITE IT ALL DOWN????? You have a structure, bullet points and key quotes, which means the writing part should now flow easily. If it doesn’t, you haven’t got to the real heart of the story: go back and reassess the structure to make sure you are emphasising the right points.
  • Clean it up. EDITING BABY EDITING_IMPORTANT STEP N’EST CE PAS! … Don’t use too many marketing phrases or clichéd product explanations – keep it human, but make sure you are referring to products correctly, and types of implementation or acquisition in the right way. Keep the story accurate. And be sure to include specifics.
  • Cut your copy. WHAT RANDOMLY SAYING ANYTHING A MILLION TIMES IS NOT GOOD???? MAKE IT VITAL HA! HA! HA! – SERIOUSLY PEOPLE!!!! A case study shouldn’t be longer than 500-750 words. Any more and people just won’t read it. Cut out repetition, shorten quotes, and make sure everything you write is vital to the story.

The rigours of life and television … is still the same as it ever was.

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Let’s open with a quote from Colin Dixon’s (of NScreenMedia) well written article on TV viewing habits, where we are debating (in the comments) the merits of the small screen in the mix of viewing devices.  We all have our opinions on that.

On-demand, live, and online viewing peak at the same time

What is interesting and to me, and hardly a revelation, is that people all watch TV when they can or want to. It is generally around the same time, in the evening after work, after homework and after the kids bedtime (if you have some of course) – This is called PRIME TIME VIEWING – i.e. it is when you are most available to consume content uninterupted. So no matter where it comes from, Prime Time content is still Prime Time content.  The TV industry and ‘wannabee TV operators’ (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat et al) think they can all have you as their sole Prime Time viewer…

I have covered this time and time again – Despite all of the content that is available, on all of the systems we have, we all have a limited window of time that we can offer this particular entertainment medium.  Most stats reveal that it is the same window of opportunity on a per country basis, which is enough for the news, a couple of TV shows and/or a film.  There is simply too much TV available today to fill everyone’s 15 years-of-lifetime-TV-viewing (yes we spend around 15 years of our lives in front of the TV).

Nothing new: Rebecca Lake a financial journalist from North Carolina – published this in 2015

What’s the most popular time of day for watching TV?
Prime time is when the majority of viewers are tuning in, with nearly 2 hours of daily TV watching taking place between 8 and 10 pm. Daytime TV airing between 11 am and 4 pm comes in second, with people watching about 1 hour and 40 minutes on average.

However when Robots take over our jobs we will have more time to watch much, much more .

The Reality of the Lazy TV Audience

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So let me start with a few extracts from a blog piece that was written by Mr. Will McKinley a New York writer and author. Why? Well, I want this subject matter (Streaming versus Linear TV) to not be seen as my opinion (because I don’t have the clout when it comes to people taking note of what I say … But I do say things that other more famous people say, often way before them – Sometimes that is frustrating. Sometimes it reassuringly delights.)

I love the convenience of streaming. It’s thrilling to have easy access to every episode of shows (and movies) I love, and have loved for my entire life. But, in a landscape where there’s so much choice, having everything can almost feel like having nothing. There’s no call-to-action, no immediacy, no reason why I should watch one thing over another right now. But perhaps more importantly, there’s no shared experience…

But perhaps most importantly, a linear network means that someone else is doing the work for you. Because sometimes you just want to plop down on the couch and watch, not assemble your own custom lineup from across multiple streaming platforms (and I speak from experience, because I subscribe to pretty much all of them)…

Will on-demand streaming be a dominant force in TV? No doubt. In a sense, it already is. But creatively curated linear programming will always be an important option. They call TV viewers couch potatoes, not couch amateur TV executives for a very good reason. Never underestimate the laziness of the American public.

While this ‘Linear versus Streaming TV’ narrative plays out across the world, it was interesting to see at IBC 2016 show in Amsterdam that TV technologists can now introduce SVOD content into EPGs as if it were a Linear channel. There are also companies that will, for a small fee per annum, curate Free on-line programmes for you (e.g. Rabbit TV’s Freecast) so that you do not have to do the hard work of being your own amateur TV executive – Thank you, Will McKinley, for that expression, which I too have used in many previous articles to express the burden TV viewing is becoming.

Let’s not forget that TV, despite its modernisation, is a product that has to appeal to the masses. i.e. The old, not so old and the very young. I don’t like to use the term Millennials because they too will have life-events that will make them lazy couch potatoes. So as far as the majority of TV viewers is concerned, being entertained must not be hard work. So if TV streaming becomes the norm, we will be expected to be our own TV show curator, which means that we will end up stuck in a viewing rut, as our limited knowledge of what is available from the global pool of entertainment is limited by our ability to memorise the planet’s content. Yes, we are we now expected to take the cognitive burden of knowing what content is available from what provider and whether we have already seen it or not by having to dig through all the buried content.

Live broadcasts are also an opportunity to encourage sampling by channel-surfing new viewers, in a way that streaming will never offer.

I agree with Mr. McKinley when he says that we still need the lazy person’s option for a long time to come.

TV Viewing HAS NOT Changed – The Gap Filling Has!

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We have yet another set of statistics that declare the living room TV Viewing habits are changing.  Let us look at this from another perspective:  I would put it to you that it is not TV Viewing that has changed it is human habits that arhave changed due to the advent of ‘New Technologies’.  If you were to take away the smart-phones and tablets from a TV centric family (as I have done at home recently) you will see that the TV viewing on the BIG Screen once again takes principle place.  Not book-reading, or board-game-playing but TV, and it quickly becomes a fight for the remote control with unhappy, sulky members of the family who are not interested in what the others are viewing….however we noticed that slowly but surely a migration back to sitting as a group with sharing-as-a-group takes place and an agreement to share what is on the TV, as it did in the time before these other access devices entrered the fray.  As a family we searched for common-content that all the family could get a little something from, be it a documentary, a film or even a cartoon that pleased everyone .  We became part of our children’s TV world and they ours, once again.  We also adhered to the ratings and respected the different viewing options based on quality of content – NO MORE VIOLENT, SEX RIDDLED,  TRASHY OR STOOPID content.  It was a pleasant and fulfilling exercise.  During the ads we went to the loo, talked and did what we always used to do during the Ad breaks – Watched some Ads and not others… (BTW Ads do not require ‘viewing only’ for them to have effect – the audio part subcontiously enters the brain even if you are not watching!).

Allowing the phones back instantly became the new distraction thus proving that easy access to communication (messaging), access to fun & stupid videos (via the internet) and access to ‘work and private’ emails urghhh, highlighted a penchant for instant gratification and removed the need to ‘work to find common-TV Centric ground’ and once again enabled what we call ‘gap-filling’ .  Each to their own simplistic and shallow needs.  The IAB piece on chaging TV Viewing Habits IAB Article states the following:

extract: For example, the incidence of checking emails is consistent during TV programmes and ad breaks (both 34 per cent) whilst texting or Instant Messaging is only 1 per cent higher during the ad break than the programme. The device tracking showed, overall, there was actually more online activity per minute during a programme than an ad break.

The information in the article is not startling and supports the findings of the experiment we carried out at home . It shows that if the viewer is not fully engaged with the programme they will still feel the need to do something else.  We saw distraction in the form of speaking and fidgeting or leaving the couch when the TV show did not fully delight a particular family member.  So what does that tell us?  It only tells us that TV is all about engaging the viewer as much as possible.  It has never been that we all sat avidly from start to finish without some form of mental distraction, UNLESS it was a TOTALLY compelling content from beginning to end.

In the old days we had a lot less content to choose from and it was a lot less ‘same-same’, as it is now in the world of 24 Hour channel stuffing. It is not TV Viewing that has changed it is the enablement of filling the ‘distraction time’ without having to get up and do something else and it is the masses of same-same stuff on TV that drives people to look for fresh and exciting, different content elsewhere, which makes the stats skewed.  The people surveyed must have been sat in front of the BIG Screen for those statistics to have been gathered…The only difference is from yesteryear to today we have technology that has made it simple to ‘visit another place’ for instant gratification. The dwindling ‘attention span’ is bad content and boredom, no matter how minor, leads to ‘gap filling’.

And to finish: The Kettle Surge moment, written in the article, is also a just sign of the developing times – We have much more efficient coffe machines and probably hear the sound of corks popping much more, as NESPRESSO and WINE has replaced the TEA drinking of yesteryear. LOL.

 

 

How To Kill The Creative Process – Ask a Machine for Guidance!

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KretivRobotscript

I have met Josh Sapan, and I admire his passion, insight and flair.  I agree with him when he rails against analytics and the creative side of making content – I feel that he is absolutely right to state that the the future of content production should not be based on analytics, algorithms, and big data.  What AMC is bringing to the market in terms of content is already great because thier creativity abounds. Creativity and flair has to be nurtured; it must be allowed to fly free.  Content creation guided by algorithms and too much kowtowing to everyone’s opinion will see us end up with banal same-same productions that break no boundaries and do not push the envelope of imagination.

I loved ‘Mad Men’ but I could not get into ‘Breaking Bad’, unable to get past season 1,  yet amongst my peers I was a complete outsider on this particular show; that does not mean it was not a great show, brilliantly done. Ultimately why the hell should my opinion count – I am a viewer not a creative writer of TV shows?

Who better for guidance in the scripting and content flow for future shows but the people whose job it is to come up with the goods – I wouldn’t ask the local butcher to write a show and I wouldn’t ask a hollywood storyteller to be a butcher – horses for courses I say and let’s please stop trying to give credibility to computer algorithms goddamit.  NO I say! It should not be ‘Joe the plumber’, or ‘Fred, the banker’ or any Tom, Dick & Harry who has shouted out on Twitter or Facebook and the like,  that should determine how a show plot is developed.  Leave to the professionals.

See Here:  Josh Sapan – Data use to pick shows a disaster