TORONTO – TV programmers and BDUs should consider their TV Everywhere offerings as a way to retain paid TV subscribers, in the face of increasing consumer use of OTT services and the continuing trend toward channel-trimming and cable-cutting.
That was the consensus among broadcasting industry experts who spoke at CTAM Canada’s 2014 Broadcaster Forum, held on Wednesday at the Sony Centre in downtown Toronto. More than 250 were in attendance.
Gord Hendren, president and CEO of Charlton Strategic Research in Toronto, presented research done earlier this year which indicates the vast majority of paid TV subscribers are very likely to keep their current subscription service in order to access their provider’s or broadcaster’s TV Everywhere product.
“TV Everywhere is very relevant to retention… in the sense that 8 in 10 Canadians said it is influential in their retention of their paid TV service,” Hendren said. “And what’s more important is that it’s influential in terms of those who are considering trimming or cutting.”
According to Hendren’s survey of more than 3,000 Canadians, done for CTAM this summer, 77% of survey respondents said they were likely to keep their current subscription service in order to be able to use its TV Everywhere offering. However, only 49% of those who identified themselves as potential cord-cutters said having TV Everywhere products available was likely to influence them into keeping their current paid TV subscription.
So far, consumer adoption of TV Everywhere products has been modest in Canada, he said.
“The results that we’ve seen are moderately good, meaning to say that only 25% of Canadians today say they have engaged with a TV Everywhere product. So as you can imagine, there’s potential to roll that out and to increase that number,” Hendren explained.
Looking at overall awareness, Hendren said only 47% of survey respondents indicated they were aware of the TV Everywhere concept. However, when asked about specific TV Everywhere services — such as Bell TV Online, Rogers AnyPlace, Cogeco On Demand, and Shaw VOD or Shaw Go Apps — reported awareness among respondents increased to 71%, Hendren said.
When asked about specific mobile TV apps currently available — such as CTV Go, TSN Go, Global Go, and Sportsnet Now — 35% of survey respondents said they were aware of at least one of the mobile TV apps mentioned, but only 13% said they have used one of them, Hendren said.
“As programmers, we’re still struggling with that.” – Domenic Vivolo, Bell Media
Domenic Vivolo, EVP, content sales and distribution marketing for Bell Media, said during a panel presentation he agreed TV Everywhere is first and foremost a customer retention tool for TV service providers. He added building consumer awareness of TV Everywhere products, such as The Movie Network’s TMN Go App, for example, is the first challenge. “As programmers, we’re still struggling with that,” Vivolo said.
Once TV subscribers are aware of the TV Everywhere products on offer, then they need to be given a reason for why they should use the product, Vivolo said. He added that TV Everywhere products need to offer more than just streaming video-on-demand content. Making it easy to log in, providing a more attractive interface and making it easier to search and navigate content are ways to attract subscribers to TV Everywhere products on an ongoing basis, he said.
“When you look at it from a sports properties (perspective), if you’re looking at TSN on the set-top box versus TSN on TV Everywhere, the TV Everywhere product should definitely have more to it, more features than just a simple stream of the actual game that’s going on,” Vivolo said. “These are all things that help you get the consumer engaged with your product, and once you engage with the consumer they are going to continue to subscribe.”
One of the barriers to higher consumer usage of TV Everywhere services has been the lack of a consistent and seamless authentication process to access the services. Rahul Sharma, director of VOD platforms for Rogers Communications, acknowledged the login experience for customers of the Rogers AnyPlace TV service has not been an easy one over the years.
Sharma said Rogers has spent a lot of time and money in 2014 on improving the login experience for customers, by introducing a new authentication system for Rogers TV Everywhere that works across all 16 device platforms that support the service. “We spent a lot of time this year migrating our customers over to a MyRogers identity management system, and we migrated all of our devices over to this MyRogers authentication, and we’ve seen our success rate on logins increase 30%, so that’s been a tremendous effort for us,” he said.
“It’s about making it easier for people to migrate from app to app, device to device, and making it easier so they don’t have to actually log in.” – Rahul Sharma, Rogers
The next step will be to offer single sign-on for Rogers TV Everywhere customers. “It’s about making it easier for people to migrate from app to app, device to device, and making it easier so they don’t have to actually log in. So you can sort of take your login credentials across (platforms),” Sharma explained.
Speaking from a U.S. perspective, Jens Loeffler, Adobe’s principal technical evangelist for video solutions, said some service providers want to allow customers to use their social media accounts to log into TV Everywhere services. “Obviously everyone has a Facebook or Twitter account,” he said. “Using that for authentication (is) technically probably not so hard. I think the biggest challenge there is who owns the login and the relationship? So it’s more of a political than a technical challenge.”
Amanda Ploughman, vice-president of marketing for Shaw Media, said one hurdle from an ad revenue perspective is not currently having cross-platform reporting and audience metrics to provide to potential advertisers, which makes it difficult to monetize TV Everywhere services.
“We have about a 20% authentication rate (for Shaw Go and Global Go), which we think is in line with best practice in the industry,” she said. “What we like about that is those authenticated viewers are watching about two times the video content of the non-authenticated viewers, so that’s a fantastic stat for us. And what we really like about it is those viewers are also watching 40% of that content in livestreaming (so they see the ads).”
TV Everywhere service providers are currently at the “crawling stage”, added Sandy Howe, SVP, global marketing for Georgia-based Arris, adding they are now in a similar position to when DVRs were first introduced to the market.
“We as an industry are sitting the same place we were when TiVo came to market with the first DVR. We’re sitting in that catbird seat to really seize upon the opportunity of TV Everywhere, because we understand everything that’s going on in that home,” Howe said. “But we’re at that crawling stage, and I think it’s so exciting because we have a long way to go and we can own this space.”
We'll have more to come on the CTAM Broadcaster Forum later this week.
