TELEVISION HAS ALWAYS been served to a household. At first, people had one TV in their homes, then another and then another which received the signals from broadcasters over the air, then via cable, satellite and now telco TV too.
The signals were – and are – the same, sent at the same times to everyone, whole households, which contain any number of people at any age with many tastes. As the TV phenomenon exploded through the 1960s and ’70s, broadcasters began to segment, finding spaces in their schedule to serve, for example, stay at home moms (soaps) or kids (after school and Saturday morning cartoons) or men (Monday Night Football, Hockey Night in Canada). News is a public service and airs right after work while prime time is supposed to be for everybody (sometimes comedies, sometimes drama), with the “safer” shows on from 7-9 and the more risqué stuff after 9. Even the night owls got programming (Heeeere’s Johnny!).
Advertisers ate this up and spent billions upon billions of dollars trying to reach us all with their brands. Those advertisers are still at the table, spending those billions.
Then along came specialty channels. Movies and sports first. Then music, arts and myriad other channels – all with the goal of providing more personalized, or genre-alized, content for strong, segmented groups of consumers – and to deliver much more valuable, targeted, viewers to advertisers. Specialty brought in ever more subscription dollars, too. It was – and continues to be – a fantastic business.
But again, those TV feeds are all still delivered to homes in bulk, and not individualized.
Then came video on demand, which provided much more choice in movie content, but more importantly, more choice of times in which to watch them – without having to retrieve a physical copy of the DVD (or back not too long ago, the VHS tape). Being able to watch a movie whenever you wanted was revolutionary when cable rolled out VOD. But it was not a good advertising vehicle. Ads have a limited shelf life and VOD titles are on the MSOs’ servers for some time. Only now are dynamic ad insertions happening, but those are not yet earning any big dollars.
Then came DVRs and the addition of TV and other content to VOD – all aimed at letting people personalize their entertainment. But still, those TV signals are delivered to the home set top box or boxes, albeit with far more choice for the individual viewers in each household.
Which more or less gets us to the present day where, thanks to the broadband networks also provided by our cable and telecom providers, people can deploy all sorts of gizmos and software to bypass the TV system described above and get the content they want, anywhere, any time. That scares the holy heck out of many of the people running the traditional TV business, but it shouldn’t. The march towards personalization of video entertainment has been moving along for decades.
The problem for the traditional television companies is that along with this shift towards personal video is that control has also shifted to the end user, too. Appointment viewing is often “when I’m ready to watch.” Other, newer, companies have done a better job at recognizing and acting on the personalized video trend and are reaping rewards (Hello, Netflix) while some of the incumbent companies struggle with what to do or with copyright issues.
Personalized video should be considered as another line of business and a huge opportunity for the industry. Surely this was part of the thinking behind the vertical integration of our cable/telco/broadcast companies. Those big companies can now provide two streams of service – a household one and a personal one – and make both pay off.
The household subscription will act as an anchor and the personal one would be something like what Rogers is doing now with Rogers On Demand Online – authenticating home subscribers and allowing them access to content they’ve paid for already on any device. TV everywhere. Additionally, if a customer is watching on a tablet or phone, they’re most likely the only person watching. Then if Rogers, to use it as an example, knows who these online viewers are, they can target advertising directly to the right demographic or even try some new retail pricing beyond RODO. (Perhaps the iPad-only single-male household would like a $7/month Sportsnet-only app?)
MY WIFE AND I often watch Modern Family on the Citytv app on my iPad. We have season one on DVD, we use my cable DVR to record it, and I’ve also watched it on the linear TV channel on its air date and time. Clearly, we like this show. (Note to Citytv, it would be great if it was AirPlay-enabled so I can take it from the iPad to the big screen via my AppleTV box). We can’t be the only ones doing some of this and data like this must be able to be crunched and used for analysis and to help sell advertising as more folks explore this type of viewing.
So with the many ways I can get Modern Family (and many other shows), am I looking to cut the cord? Nope. My kids are 13 and seven and like a bunch of things I don’t. My elderly in-laws are Italian and like to watch RAI and Telelatino when they come over and need to see it on as big a screen I can provide. This means we’re not unlike any other family and it would seem that because of what the family needs, most households will generally keep some sort of home-video subscription while augmenting it with a selection of personal video conduits.
Simply put, it’s hard to see how all the options we have to consume video will hurt, as long as our industry is innovating (much more than it is now). Providing more people more ways to see more video can only be a good thing for those in the video business.
We are getting close to where we have limitless choice that supports hyper-targeted advertising. Business models are busting out all over the place. Some are ad supported, some are subscription, some both. Personalized video, OTT, or whatever it might be termed, is the natural evolution of the video business in our hyper-connected world.
But the companies that don’t see that and don’t embrace it, will suffer.
Greg O’Brien is editor and publisher of Cartt.ca. Like what you see? Dislike it? Let us know in the comments box below or drop a line at greg.obrien@cartt.ca.
