TORONTO – The good news is that people are consuming video like never before. The market for such content will never go away and is currently growing rapidly.
The bad news for broadcasters is there are now not just dozens or even hundreds of games in town, but millions.
During a panel session at this week’s Canadian Digital Broadcasting Summit, Solutions Research Group president Kaan Yigit noted that “from a broad perspective, video is healthy.” What’s ailing is the broadcasting business model, which Yigit termed “in decline.”
He pointed to a curious trend his company has tracked among the music buying public to demonstrate not everything will go as planned or predicted, nor is everything transferable from analog to digital. As we all know, of course, “analog” music buying – CD sales – has been in free fall for some time, with just 29% of Canadians in 2006 saying they have bought four or more CDs in the last six months (the figure was 54% in 1998).
The curious part is that while analog sales have fallen off the world, digital is not making up the difference as only 7% of Canadians in the fall of 2007 report buying a song on line in the past month, up just a single percentage point from 2006.
Yigit predicts video just may go the same way once it’s quicker and easier to download. “We will see this in video,” he said. “A lot of the value of the content seems to disappear,” in the digital space.
Of course, many say that advertising or other revenue opportunities will be what saves the broadcasters’ or creative types’ bacon – or at least puts bacon on their table – but with such a precipitous decline in traditional sales – and enormous revenue gap between that and the new digital world, “are there enough advertising dollars,” to pay the difference, asks Yigit.
And, broadcasters still have to figure out how to capitalize – if they can – on where the new viewing is taking place – on YouTube, Facebook and others like them. The number of Canadians who say they have visited a social networking web site almost doubled from the summer of 2006 to the summer of 2007, with 53% telling SRG in August 2007 they have visited one. When it came to online video, 66% said they have watched at least one, up from 39% who said the same in September of 2006.
“I can’t think of another instance of such rapid adoption,” added Yigit.
And this means producers are seeing opportunity and looking elsewhere to place their content, said Glyn Evans, CEO of production house, Stonehenge. When it comes to some projects, Evans thinks, “should we start on the Internet and then work backwards to broadcasting?” It depends on the project itself, he explained, but added such thinking is “a big shift in just a few years.”
But alongside all this new Internet living and streaming video, is the booming market for huge high definition television sets, too. So today’s consumer does, in fact, care about picture quality, but only for certain types of video.
“You want that (movie or ballgame) to be an experience, so you want a flawless picture… and people pay for experiences,” explains Yigit.
