ABC taps Yahoo to drive live viewing
Posted by drew | Filed under DREW.TV Blog
It’s the flip side to the ongoing upfronts for 2012-13: the current season is drawing to a close. CBS’s Big Bang Theory has ended already, with Howard and Bernadette getting married. Fox’s American Idol now has its final four.
Revenge-ABC
But not every show has as much momentum as those top-rated shows going into the final episodes. Dramas especially are susceptible to being recorded, which can reduce ratings numbers. Aiming to counteract that tendency, ABC has tapped a second-screen application platform owned by Yahoo to drive live viewership of Revenge, a society drama starring Emily VanCamp and set in the Hamptons, the exclusive seaside community on the northeastern tip of Long Island.
Last week ABC and Yahoo announced that Revenge fans would have a chance to win a weeklong vacation at an oceanfront house in the Hamptons, presented Toyota’s luxury brand Lexus, if they tag the show during the final two episodes using Yahoo’s IntoNow TV check-in application on their mobile phone or tablet.
Yahoo bought the audio recognition-based app maker IntoNow in April 2011. It has teamed with ABC on other projects, including the Republican Party presidential debates in December. In addition to the vacation getaway, the Revenge app enables viewers to connect with other fans on Facebook and Twitter, answer trivia questions, follow cast and crew and access related video and information on the show.
Audio recognition technology from Civolution remains in its early days for synchronized apps, with viewer attention often shifting back to the “single” screen after the initial ten minutes. ABC appears to be looking at IntoNow as an experiment.
ABC exec Victoria Chew told the Associated Press that while expecting a strong finale to Revenge, she wanted to encourage more live viewing. In about two weeks, it should be possible to see whether the app has had an impact. “We’re really interested in learning more about the second-screen experience,” she said.
-Drew J. Kaplan
Source – Videonet
Tags: ABC, Big Bang Theory, Drew J. Kaplan, DREW TV, Revenge, Yahoo
Discovery taps into Rev3’s digital video content
Posted by drew | Filed under DREW.TV Blog
Discovery Communications announced last week its intention to buy online video content producer Revision 3 for an undisclosed amount. The seven-year-old San Francisco-based startup produces 27 episodic and personality-driven channels, ranging from software programming to consumer electronics to computer games to food. It boasts more than 23 million monthly unique viewers..
Rev3-Iphone
The deal comes at a time when digital media players have been mimicking television producers by pitching their platforms to the New York advertising community in the so-called “Digital Upfronts.” Last week, the rap musician Jay Z appeared at a You Tube-sponsored upfront party held at the Beacon Theatre on the Upper West Side. You Tube has committed more than $100 million to fund 100 original channels, and now plans to spend another $200 million to promote them.
Revision 3’s revenue is undisclosed. Investors have sunk at least $10 million into the venture, and the purchase price is reportedly in the $30 million range, a figure that Discovery is neither confirming nor denying.
“On the one hand, I’m sure that’s a huge multiple,” said Bernstein Research Senior Analyst Todd Juenger in an email. “On the other hand, it’s a lot cheaper than Discovery trying to build something themselves to become involved in the space.”
Discovery used the word “immaterial” in Tuesday’s earnings call to describe the Revision 3 investment and associated earnings or loss, according to Juenger, who remains bullish on the cable network despite a 6 percent drop in its stock apparently linked to the earnings call news of a large equity write-down in the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).
Juenger said he thought the spooked investors were overlooking two of Discovery’s strong growth drivers: “a structurally superior and sustainable cost advantage, and superior operating leverage in fast-growing international markets.” In buying Revision 3, Discovery is entering the even lower budget digital world. The question is what that buys them.
In an interview with Peter Kafka of the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital, Discovery executive JB Perette said that Discovery produces content in the $500,000 to $750,000 per hour range. “Producing something at a tenth of that cost has to be very different,” Perette said.
To date, Revision 3’s low-cost content has drawn a number of marquis advertisers. Its formula of mixing content that appeals to a predominantly young male demographic with attractive and geeky female hosts (see GeekBeat.TV, Annie’s Bits, OS.ALT, Nixie Pixel) appears to be a winning proposition for sponsors such as Proctor & Gamble’s Old Spice deodorant brand. (Go figure.) So Discovery is acquiring some revenue streams. There also is potentially synergistic overlap between those online shows and of some of Discovery’s existing content, such as MythBusters, the popular science program that typically features explosions.
But on another level, the media giant that reaches more than 1.5 billion cumulative subscribers in more than 200 countries and territories through more than 140 worldwide television networks (Discovery, Animal Planet, Science, TLC, etc.) could be simply running its own little experiment.
“I believe Discovery’s motivation is primarily to get involved firsthand and understand the online video space, much like the broadcast nets did with Hulu,” said Juenger. “(Discovery) doesn’t know whether this is going to be a big deal or not, but now they have a front row seat at the table with an organization that seems to share the same low-cost approach to programming, for little risk.”
-Drew J. Kaplan
Source – Videonet
Tags: Discovery, Drew J. Kaplan, DREW TV, Revision 3
Verizon wants deeper partnerships with TV makers
Posted by drew | Filed under DREW.TV Blog
Verizon, the U.S. telco and one of the most successful IPTV providers in the world, has made one of the clearest indications of any major Pay TV operator that it would like to work more closely with the CE industry to reduce the number of set-top boxes it deploys. Speaking after the Connected TV Summit last week, Brian Whitton, Executive Director at the company, made it clear that he believes it is a realistic goal to offer an IPTV service through an app for second and third rooms but continue to rely on set-top boxes where there are no connected TV devices present. However, this relies on major CE vendors becoming true partners and working with platform operators to share the ongoing support and customer care burden.
Verizon-FiOS-TV-app-on-Xbox-360
Asked if it is viable for Pay TV companies to become an ‘Operator in an app’, he confirmed: “I think it is viable but in practice getting there is going to be much more complicated than people have been led to believe.” Whitton says there is an opportunity to use connected TVs in place of set-tops in many instances in the home. “That would be attractive for us if you can get it all to work and deliver services without compromising the experience.”
Though still committed to the STB as a proven way to deliver a controlled service with 100% quality assurance, Verizon has clearly been thinking through the implications and requirements for using connected TV apps in their place. The big issue relates to Quality of Experience: ensuring customers get the same premium service they have come to expect via a set-top box, for which they pay good money. This means replicating the customer support model Pay TV operators use today for their own devices.
With FiOS TV, the company is dealing with six different models of set-top box, each of them requiring software development and Quality Assurance (QA). If a customer calls with a problem, the support centre must triage using its knowledge of those six models. But Whitton points out that if an operator wants to replace set-tops with an app then the support staff will have to be familiar with the various Smart TVs from Philips, Samsung, VIZIO and others. If technicians are called to a home, they must understand the different televisions, too.
Whitton suggests Pay TV operators will therefore work with a limited number of Smart TV brands. These will probably be the early adopters and market share leaders who also show an interest in, and understanding of, the deeper partnership opportunity. It is a prerequisite that they buy into the Pay TV customer care model. “The partners will be the ones who understand it is in their interest, and our collective interest, to make sure the experience works,” he explains.
“They have to be our partner in triaging problems. If we have an issue that we cannot triage ourselves, we must be able to escalate it to them and they cannot say, ‘It is after 5pm so we cannot answer the call’. We have to understand the number of customers that could be affected [by the same problem]. They have to be actively involved in solving issues and creating a software environment that is as refined and as stable as what you find on set-top boxes.”
Whitton would like to see the connected TV makers embrace the MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) standard to support in-home IP home networking over coax. This provides high capacity and reliability for video distribution and is widely supported by North American operators, where coax is widespread in homes. Whitton estimates that MoCA chipsets have a similar cost to Wi-Fi and he points out that you do not need the mobility benefits of Wi-Fi in a 50 inch television.
MoCA is already being used by operators to support multi-room TV and multi-room DVR services for classic, managed TV. “The reason we were early adopters of MoCA technology is that 90% of homes [in the U.S.] have coax cable and overall throughput is more than what we need for HDTV,” Whitton notes.
Connected TVs can be used as client devices on an IP server/client home distribution architecture and this is one of the instances where they can replace second or third set-top boxes, fed from a central DVR. “We would be able to deliver a video stream from the cloud or from a server in the home [the DVR hard drive] to a MoCA device like a television with MoCA,” Whitton points out. “The reality is that Wi-Fi, off-the-shelf, is non-deterministic and you cannot ensure that there is no packet loss when someone is watching the ball game. The big point, which I cannot stress enough, is that when people buy video – at least in the U.S. – they want 100% assurance that when they turn on the football game it is not going to be disrupted.”
LG, Samsung (Associate Members) and TiVO (Contributor Member) are the biggest CE brands within MoCA today. The standard has widespread support among STB vendors, SoC vendors and North American Pay TV operators, among others.
Is it reasonable for a Pay TV operator to expect partnerships where the TV maker integrates MoCA at their request, and then takes a share of the customer care burden where Pay TV subscribers are using an app on their TV? “Those discussions would make sense,” Whitton says. “You need business terms that are in everyone’s interest and it has to be a genuine partnership activity; the CE manufacturer has to embrace the operating model that the operator has and then invest in the right solutions to ensure that the TV is sufficiently hardened that operating costs do not rise.
“I think there is a steep learning curve for the CE industry when it comes to embracing the concerns of Pay TV operators and what is required on their part. But my sense is that there is definitely an interest from them in this.”
Verizon is already harnessing connected devices. If you subscribe to FiOS TV, FiOS Internet and have an Xbox LIVE Gold membership, you can watch live streaming channels on the Xbox 360 using the Verizon FiOS TV app. And the company is working with Samsung to make the FiOS TV App available to a potentially wider audience via Smart TVs and Smart Blu-ray players. In consumer marketing for the Xbox option, the company makes a point of telling consumers: ‘No Verizon set top box needed!’
-Drew J. Kaplan
Source: Videonet
Tags: Drew J. Kaplan, DREW TV, FiOS Internet, FiOS TV, IPTV, set-top boxes, Verizon
Kindle Fire surges; screen-size impacts page views
Posted by drew | Filed under DREW.TV Blog
Amazon grew its share of the U.S. Android-based tablet market in recent months, with its Kindle Fire surging ahead of the Samsung Galaxy. Amazon introduced the Kindle Fire in November 2011.
Kindle fire
A full-color, 7-inch, low-cost alternative to the iPad, the Kindle Fire was the Android market leader with 29.4% in December, but by February 12 had seized 54.4%, according to data released last week by digital metrics specialist comScore. Meanwhile, the Galaxy family, which includes higher-priced 7” and 10” displays, fell from 23.8% to 15.4%.
The Kindle Fire was the first major tablet to sell for less than $200. It runs a custom version of the Android 2.3 (“Gingerbread”) operating system, uses the Amazon Silk cloud-accelerated Web browser, and leverages Amazon’s cloud storage and book and video content available through the Amazon Prime service. Amazon launched the Kindle as an e-book reader in 2007.
Motorola’s Xoom came in third in the December-to-February period, according to comScore’s Device Essentials tracking service, the latest version of which comScore introduced last week.
The overall (Android and iOS) tablet market remains dominated by the Apple iPad, although its share is declining. In March, IDC released data indicating that the iPad’s worldwide share fell from 61.5% of the total tablet market in Q3 2011 to 54.7% in Q4 2011.
The new comScore sevice also released data correlating tablet screen size with browser page views per tablet. Not surprisingly, the larger the screen, the more the page views. Ten-inch tablets had a 39% higher consumption rate than 7-inch screens and a 58% higher rate than 5-inch screens. (See table below.)
The comScore Device Essentials service measures unique devices (by brand and operating system) accessing the web, including home, enterprise and secondary devices across all age groups. It is based on comScore’s Unified Digital Measurement data, which uses census-level information from tagged web page content.
-Drew J. Kaplan
Source: Videonet
Tags: Android, ComScore, Drew J. Kaplan, DREW TV, Kindle Fire, tablet
TV-driven social media interaction popular among U.S. viewers, says survey
Posted by drew | Filed under DREW.TV Blog
Television broadcasters for years have wanted to somehow integrate an interactive viewer experience into watching their programming, and it appears their wish has been granted thanks to the relatively recent emergence of smartphones, media tablets and social media.
social_media_meets_online_television
Still, the question remained: Will viewers take advantage of these tools and the hooks broadcasters provide on screen — such as integrated social media symbols — to satisfy the desire to make TV interactivity a reality?
New research from Accenture reveals that 64 percent of U.S. consumers surveyed said they remembered seeing social media symbol, such as Facebook “Likes” while watching television, and a third said they interacted with social media after seeing the symbol on their TV screens.
The Accenture survey, which polled 1000 TV viewers, shows the most respondents said they noticed and were also familiar with how to interact with social media symbols while watching TV.
Respondents identified seeing and interacting via a variety of symbols, including the Facebook “Like” symbol (42 percent), QR codes (28 percent), Twitter hashtags (18 percent) and Shazam symbols (9 percent).
“Social media and social networking are exploding across television screens as networks use social media to enable audiences to interact directly with related content for a richer viewing experience,” said Robin Murdoch, Accenture’s global Internet segment managing director.
The survey also reveals respondents overwhelmingly were happy with the content they received via social media symbols while they watched television. Seventy-four percent reported such content met their expectations. That compares to 10 percent who said the content “did not meet expectations,” and 15 percent who said it “exceeded expectations.”
Generally, the younger the audience the more likely there was an interaction. Sixty-three percent of those between 18 and 24 years of age interacted, according to the report. For those 25 to 34 years old, the percentage of those who interacted dropped to 46 percent; for 35 to 44 year olds, the rate was 19 percent. People aged 55 to 64 reported a slight bump to 24 percent, and only 11 percent of those 65 or older said they interacted with social media symbols while watching television.
The survey identifies several reasons why people use social media while watching TV. They included:
· Getting more information on a show, product or service: 43 percent;
· Receiving coupons and promotional codes: 32 percent;
· Entering a contest of sweepstakes: 31 percent;
· Watching another video: 26 percent;
· Interacting with others who share similar interests: 21 percent;
· Sharing or recommending a video or the program to others: 20 percent;
· Buying something: 16 percent.
Accenture conducted the survey online in March. It polled 1000 U.S. consumers older than 18 years. The sample was selected to represent the U.S. population, weighted by age, gender, geographic region, race and education.
-Drew J. Kaplan of DREW TV
Source - Broadcast Engineering
Tags: Accenture survey, Drew J. Kaplan, DREWTV, interactive viewer experience, social media, Television broadcaster
NBC Olympics joins with partners to hit multiple screens
Posted by drew | Filed under DREW.TV Blog
The summer Olympics open in London on July 27, but already several companies are touting wins with NBC Olympics, the division of NBC Sports Group responsible for producing, programming and promoting Olympic coverage across the NBCUniversal networks.
NBC Multiple Screens Olympics
The NBC networks have a long Olympics history, having produced twelve previous events, going back to Seoul in the summer of 1988. Last year Comcast acquired NBCUniversal (NBCU) for $13.8 billion and spent another $4.4 billion for U.S. media rights to the winter and summer games through 2020. As in the past few events, NBC Olympics is aiming to distribute—and monetize—its coverage across multiple platforms.
Cisco is working with NBC to deploy an IP video contribution network from London to New York that will enable a range of services, including multi-screen video delivery. Coverage of the quadrennial games involves a mix of technologies, including production, management and distribution. According to Cisco, the combined multi-vendor solution will enable real-time shot selection and editing in multiple locations, and the transmission of large video files to TVs, PCs, mobile phones and tablets.
“Cisco helped us exceed our goals in Vancouver and Beijing, delivering thousands of hours of Games coverage to multiple screens via all-IP networked video technology,” said Craig Lau, VP Information Technology for NBC Olympics, in a statement. “We expect to once again lean on Cisco for their IP and video systems expertise to reach viewers on more devices.”
For its part, Harmonic announced that it is providing its shared storage systems and enterprise transcoding software to NBC Olympics. These systems will enable quick processing and delivery of content within the file-based NBC Olympics Highlights Factory, which is driven by edit and media asset management systems from Avid.
Sony XD-CAM professional media stations will record incoming HD sports content and transfer it along with a low-res proxy to a 288 Terabyte (TB) Harmonic MediGrid system at the International Broadcast Center in London. Meanwhile, Harmonic’s ProCast IP accelerator will replicate and transfer full-resolution recordings to a 432 TB MediaGrid system at NBCU’s New York City facility. Its ProdMedia Carbon performs transcoding at both systems.
“When we’re able to give our production team unrestricted access to all media, with search tools that help them find the best shots, we enable them to create segments with high emotional impact,” said Lau. “”We’re storytellers at heart, and by facilitating fast, flexible media access, the (Harmonic) MediaGrid storage systems with ProMedia Carbon get right to the core of what we’re trying to accomplish.”
These and other companies have used NAB 2012 in Las Vegas to announce their work on the Olympics. Miranda Technologies noted that NBC Olympics deployed its technology for the move to all-HD coverage in 2006 and this year is using its hybrid routing, multi-viewers and other infrastructure and monitoring equipment.
-Drew J. Kaplan
Source – Videonet
Tags: Cisco, Drew J. Kaplan, DREWTV, IP video, multi-screen video delivery, NBC Olympics, Olympics, summer Olympics
Ad widgets being deployed by Charter Communications
Posted by drew | Filed under DREW.TV Blog
Charter Communications last week announced its intention to deploy FourthWall Media’s addressable interactive advertising solutions to some 800,000 subscribers in five markets. The fourth largest multiple system operator (MSO) in the U.S., Charter has worked with FourthWall previously on interactive TV technology related to video on demand.
Charter Communications plans ad widgets
The FourthWall ad widgets are based on Enhanced Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) and Stewardship and Fulfillment Interfaces (SaFI), two CableLabs-related interactive television specifications that enable the kinds of advertising applications and data that marketers are beginning to find useful.
“Interactive TV has proven to be an effective solution for advertisers and a good experience for consumers,” said Jim Heneghan, President Charter Media, in a statement. “It connects businesses with viewers in real time on their television.”
Until recently, the major U.S. cable operators divided any talk of interactive advertising into two tracks: one concerning internal initiatives and the other referencing their national partner Canoe Ventures. After Canoe shuttered its interactive TV ad business in February 2012, advanced advertising news has returned to MSO’s own markets.
But whether such efforts were leading to internal local avails or Canoe-based national campaigns, prior to launching any EBIF-based apps, operators needed to conduct system-wide tests to assure good two-way conduits for interactive signals traveling from headend to set-top box and back. As of last fall, Charter was still involved in these EBIF “pipe-cleaning” exercises. This announcement with FourthWall suggests that the pipe is nearly clean.
-Drew J, Kaplan
Source Videonet
Tags: Charter Communications, Drew J. Kaplan, DREWTV, FourthWall Media, Interactive TV, U.S. cable operators, widgets
LG says power of 2012 Smart TVs changes the game
Posted by drew | Filed under DREW.TV Blog
2012 is the year that Connected TV platforms have come of age – the point at which they start providing the sheer processing power to fulfil the promise they have always shown in terms of changing the user experience. That is the view of Stacey Seltzer, Head of Smart TV at LG, who thinks we are going through the same development cycle seen with mobile Internet, where the market evolved from WAP phones to the smartphones that made the experience truly compelling. And expanding on the analogy, he points out that while the early smartphones had some good apps, nobody could have predicted the power of apps like Twitter and Foursquare a further 4-5 years down the road.
LG-Magic-Remote-for-its-Smart-TVs
“All these incredible apps have been developed on mobile platforms and I think we are at the starting point with television now. Smart TV apps are a different proposition to mobile and there is a bunch of very good apps on the LG Smart TV platform today, but now we also have a platform that is robust enough to make it attractive to developers who want to make exciting new experiences.”
Perhaps just as importantly, LG is promising some stabilisation in the platform, something that will be welcomed across the content and Pay TV industries where a common complaint about connected TVs generally is that you have to develop apps individually to suit each manufacturer but also develop apps again as the platforms are upgraded, something that has happened regularly in this immature and dynamic marketplace.
According to Seltzer, the 2012 Smart TV platform from LG, and indeed the new ranges from other major CE manufacturers, are game changers. For his company, one of the benefits of additional power is the ability to provide a slicker user interface. A major focus for LG this year is the speed and simplicity of navigation.
The company’s Magic Remote remote control (which uses gesture control and mouse-type scrolling) can also exploit the increased power of the 2012 platform. Having demonstrated this pairing to broadcasters and studio executives, Seltzer says they are ‘wowed’ by it and start to wonder about the new possibilities this kind of input control presents when it comes to viewer interaction and content discovery.
Magic Remote helps to overcome difficulties traditionally associated with text input on televisions and the LG companion apps for smartphones and tablets take this a stage further. “I think we are right at the forefront of delivering an easily navigable experience for the consumer,” Seltzer declares.
-Drew J. Kaplan
Source Videonet
Tags: Connected TV, Drew J. Kaplan, DREWTV, LG, LG companion apps, LG Smart TV, Magic Remote, Smart TVs
Computer Tablets like iPad are grabbing high growth attention
Posted by drew | Filed under DREW.TV Blog
Metrics surrounding the computer tablet, a category dominated by Apple, have been fuzzy. At one point iSuppi was predicting that Apple would sell 36.5 million in 2011. (See graph.)
ipad chart
As it happened, Apple announced that the number exceeded 40 million, and analysts are now converging on the number 42.5 million. As for growth, whereas the forecast for 2012 iTab shipments once looked like 50 million, now analysts are expecting Apple to sell 62.5 million.
Even as new screens emerge, the television remains the basic viewing platform. “TV is still at the core of the experience,” said Jeff Weber, VP Video Products at AT&T U-verse. “The second and third screen complement and enhance traditional TV viewing with content and services available across screens.”
Online video consumption, however, has soared. Last June, comScore clocked Germany with 45 million Internet users viewing an average of about 20 hours per month, the highest in Europe. At the same time, comScore counted U.S. Internet users watching 18.5 hours per month, up from 4 hours in 2008.
-Drew J. Kaplan
Source – Videonet
Tags: Apple, AT&T U-verse, ComScore, Drew J. Kaplan, iPad, second screen, television
U.S. study sees more homes attaching TVs to Internet
Posted by drew | Filed under DREW.TV Blog
A study released last week by Leichtman Research Group (LRG) found that nearly two-fifths of all households in the U.S. have at least one TV set connected to the Internet via either an IP-enabled video device or the TV itself. Internet-based TV connectivity hit the 38% mark this year, up from 30% last year and 24% two years ago.
Internet Connected TV's
Connectivity leans heavily toward gaming platforms, with 28% of all households having a video game system connected to the Internet. Many connected consumers, however, use a mix of devices. Only 16% are connected via game systems alone. Blu-ray Disc players are the second most popular Internet-connected devices, followed by connected TVs and finally an Apple TV or Roku set-top box.
“One of the morals of the story is, it’s not about smart TV,” said LRG Founder and Principal Analyst Bruce Leichtman. According to his research, consumers were four times as likely to be connected to the Internet by a game system alone than solely by an Internet-enabled TV set.
Not surprisingly, weekly viewing via connected devices is also up. LRG’s 1,251-household survey found that 13% of all adults tap into the Internet weekly through these devices, compared to 10% last year and 5% two years ago.
Leichtman also noted that Netflix, whose clients are integrated into most Internet-connected video devices, plays a large role in the weekly viewing patterns, but he emphasized that Internet-delivered video is creating a both/and rather than either/or model.
“Video is increasingly being watched on different platforms and in different places, yet these emerging video services still generally act as complements to traditional television viewing rather than as substitutes,” Leichtman said.
As a result, LRG sees few households dropping Pay TV entirely. With time spent watching TV holding steady, Leichtman said there was “little evidence” that a significant number of consumers was dropping multi-channel video services “to watch video solely via these emerging services.”
The cord-cutting debate nonetheless continues. According to a report released last week by Toronto-based Convergence Consulting, 2.65 million American cut the cord between 2008 and 2011, with more than 1 million leaving cable in 2011. For his part, Leichtman reports that the Pay TV industry (cable/satellite/telco) grew by 380,000 subscribers in 2011.
A related trend, discussed by Bernstein Research Senior Analyst Todd Juenger in a recent note on U.S. media ratings, is the loss of some 400,000 U.S. TV households, especially in the 18-to-49 year-old bracket. Suggesting that only 70,000 U.S. households may have cut the cord from Q3 2011 to Q3 2011, Juenger thinks that reduced household formation, especially among the so-called boomerang generation (i.e. children, especially young men, who are returning to live with parents) is a contributing factor in the much larger contraction.
-Drew J. Kaplan
Source - Videonet & Leichtman Research Group
Tags: Connected TV, Drew J. Kaplan, DREW TV, Internet-connected video devices, Leichtman Research Group