Doing Words

The future of TV is not on TV

// April 29th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Advertising

My favourite louche photographer, Mike Walsh, has a great new post up on the shaky future of broadcast television amongst a YouTube generation. I couldn’t agree more: the broadcast television companies were corporate giants for the last fifty years, but they will be media minnows in another five to ten.

While the television industry has been focusing on delivering ever-higher resolution and more channels of sound, the new web audience is already proving they don’t care – they are quite happy with the web’s low-res, low-frame rates and crap sound.

Choosing what you want to watch, and when, having it recommended to you or bookmarked by friends, choosing the kind of device you consume it on: who wouldn’t choose that over traditional TV programming in HD?

A big cash investment in a large HD LCD and all the components necessary to provide the HD program input and sound/vision output is something that the >35 generation will do for the bragging rights alone. The <35 generation shies away from spending that much on anything, much less something that can only do one thing – deliver television.

Few of them even aspire to own the home containing the room featuring the wall such a system might be hung on. It makes much more sense to them to also use their laptop as a TV, or their phone.

When I demo my iPhone or my AppleTV to friends – particularly young adults – it is the ability to watch YouTube on it that excites them much more than being able to purchase and watch broadcast programming, even great shows like This American Life, which I predict is about to sweep the world and be as well known outside the US as The Office has been outside the UK.

Broadcast TV will continue but its margins will shrink as big brand budgets continue to move online in order to have more of a targeted, interactive relationship with their customers. That shrinking of margins will force the networks to reduce the average cost of production, reducing the quality of programming, which will in turn drive more users online.

The only way to save a broadcast media company is to admit this is unstoppable and start producing content for the new medium first and foremost, using your broadcast network primarily as a marketing tool to drive your audience there – flip the current network strategy on its head. If you do it first and execute well, you might build a bigger business than the one you have now.

But you won’t: the immediate revenue loss is too hard to justify to shareholders and the ongoing investment in broadcast infrastructure is an oil tanker that takes years to turn around.

So in the future, free to air broadcast television will hold about the same position in the minds of marketers and consumers as talk-back radio does today. Not gone, but not quite the powerhouse it once was. A medium of SMS-to-win single-camera gameshows, of $1,000 giveaways between programs to try and keep you watching, of a thousand insta-celeb lives all trying to out-outrage each other. All these program types are on broadcast now, some of them even in timeslots that were once premium programming. But in the future, they will be all there is to watch on broadcast TV.

I Watch This – TV Guide recommendations on IceTV

// March 11th, 2008 // 0 Comments // strategy

I Watch This – TV Guide recommendations on IceTV
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Regular viewers will know I have a major jones for Electronic Program Guides (EPGs) and digital television. Early Aussie pioneer IceTV is still hanging in there despite being dragged backwards through the hedge of the courts by the unlimited resources of the interests backing Channel Nine.

Now IceTV have finally launched their recommendation feature, iwatchthis.com.au (hmm… shouldn’t that be “Youshouldwatchthis.com.au”?). Whatever it’s called, it gets you to tell it which shows are your favourites (or you can let it watch what you record) and it’ll come back with recommendations.

How well does it work? Well, my experience is limited because although I still have a login, my paid subscription to IceTV lapsed and I haven’t renewed. Unluckily for IceTV, recently I fell in love with AppleTV and buying shows from the US iTunes Store and haven’t had much time for Australian free-to-air television since then.

But my login allowed me to ‘favourite’ a few good shows in IceTV, including Foreign Correspondent, Lateline, Media Watch and Cutting Edge, just to test out the recommendations (‘cos regular readers will recall, I also have a major jones for all things recommendations).

I expected IceTV’s recommendations to be fairly good: highly engaged customers providing relatively accurate data, genre and cast relationships providing clear pointers to recommendable content, and most of all in Australia, a relative paucity of content to choose from!

So sure enough, IceTV scored a nice 5 out of 10 in terms of other shows I’d like to watch. But is that really helping me much? I mean, there’s so little on free-to-air in Australia I don’t really need recommendations at all, much less recommendations that are as likely to be wrong as right.

To really make the payoff, IceTV should be there to let me know when a new series of Top Gear is starting, because it knows I enjoyed the last series. It shouldn’t be distracted by a repeat of a previous series, or the same series being screened a second time in a different time slot. Does it do this? Dunno, not possible to tell from my exploration.

Perhaps if IceTV offered me streaming previews, independent reviews rather than synopses, or even production stills. But the local commercial networks aren’t about to help – they still see IceTV as stripping away revenue with ad-skipping features, when really they should see IceTV as one of the few things that can help them win and retain what remains of a viable media audience. Sigh.

BBC’s Inside Dot Com: so not inside!

// January 8th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Media

Initially I was excited to hear that The Beeb was running a documentary series, Inside Dot Com, following the trials and tribs of a few early-stage interweb startups.

But judging by the clips on YouTube, it stinks. It could only seem “inside” to someone standing very far outside, or perhaps someone standing inside but experiencing it all for the first time, from a video-editor’s visitor’s chair, like a documentary producer who’s previous body of work was on antique furniture or wildlife documentaries.

LOL: this crowd call in an “advertising agency” to tell them what consumers “think of the site’s design”. Like almost every time I’ve seen an ad agency give feedback on a website, the conclusions are all about the site’s graphic design – it’s brand feedback, not its user experience. A branding study is valid, but you should be conducting that before you buy a domain name and design a brand, and you should never, ever confuse a brand focus group study with a usability study.

Somehow, advertising agencies got away with pitching TVCs as storyboards and radio ads as scripts for so many years that they think it’s OK to test websites basically the same way. It is so not.

Classic moment: the ad agency guy presenting the focus group results says, “and my son didn’t even like it” as if that’s the killer blow. Any time I hear “I/my kids/my wife didn’t like it” I know it’s time to stop paying attention and wind-up the meeting. That’s a big, pulsating warning sign above your head that says, “I do not understand that this should be about something deeper than initial reactions to colours, shapes and styles. And I do not understand that this is about a target audience, of which I am not a member. Neither is my brat emo child, who hates me enough to veto all of my work.”

Disagree? Your honour, I call Larry and Sergey as my first witnesses. They certainly didn’t waste any time getting an ad agency to show a few A3 printouts of the Google homepage to 20 people prepared to spend an hour in a small room for $50 and a few sandwiches. Nobody in that room would have said, “Oooh, I like ‘google’ as a name. When I think of search I immediately think of the word ‘google’.” Nobody would have said, “I think showing each letter in a different colour is a great idea. And you can’t have too much plain black text on a white webpage, if you ask me!”

This one isn’t even an interweb startup – it’s a shop with a website – not even remotely the same thing. If The Beeb can’t appreciate the difference, I’m afraid watching the series may be a waste of time.

Final insult to our intelligence: the Beeb won’t allow YouTube users to embed these videos on their own pages (or I would have posted them here instead of linking them.) They’re not full eps, they’re just highlights. Ack!

Another example of the old media not grokking the new. Did we need another?

BBC’s Inside Dot Com: so not inside!

// January 8th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Media