And it needs to be much better
TORONTO – Getting your latest TV show discovered and viewed in a fast-changing media landscape may be as easy as asking Alexa or an X1-powered voice remote.
"Voice search is now revolutionizing how content is being discovered," Michael Gray, senior manager of on demand and SVODs at Rogers Communications, told the CTAM Broadcasters’ Forum in Toronto on Tuesday.
The days of just scrolling through channel guides may be numbered, agreed Erik Ramberg, vice president of global business development at MediaKind, formerly Ericsson Media Solutions. "Alexa: watch The Handmaid's Tale," is all you need to ask, he ventured.
"Being able to use your voice. Everyone gets it. They value it. It makes sense," Ramberg told conference delegates.
Except, how do you ask the burgeoning tech for the perfect police procedural when Canadians don't know which one to ask for?
The answer to that question sent a panel on discoverability at CTAM into the weeds of metadata – or the precise descriptive information you supply about a TV show, including its title, storyline, cast, genre and images – to best ensure the search algorithms can identify and recommend a great series via universal voice search.
The bottom line: broadcasters and producers at CTAM were told to do better with their metadata, which is the information about their show which is supplied to cable, satellite and streaming services (via the major programming data curators like Gracenote and TiVo) whose job it is to get content out into the market. Without robust and correct metadata, search and discoverability fails.
Poor quality metadata, it turns out, is pervasive.
"You can have some really great, powerful experiences, but if we're not getting the right pieces of metadata and the right keywords and the right inputs from you guys as content producers, that's definitely something you want to look into," warned Rebecca Twardy, sales manager at Gracenote, which provides TV schedules, synopses, imagery and ratings information to carriers.
Jimena Velarde, director of product management at TiVo, whose DVRs have introduced support from Alexa, was equally diplomatic in urging industry types gathered at the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts to do a better job assembling and sending in their metadata.
"We understand the challenge of knowing what needs to be offered… It's an ongoing challenge. There's always going to be new platforms that your data and your content will have to service and needs might change from platform to platform," Velarde said.
“Discoverability is simply the most important aspect of our multiplatform, peak TV world." – Greg O'Brien, findtv
The irony is the abundance of content on the Internet these days has made discoverability for Canadian content makers and distributors even more of a need, and a serious challenge, especially when the cost to produce premium content keeps rising. “Discoverability is simply the most important aspect of our multiplatform, peak TV world,” said panel moderator Greg O’Brien (editor and publisher of Cartt.ca and owner of discoverability tool findtv). “If you make content, no matter its form, it is a struggle to get noticed, to rise above the noise, then to engage viewers, then to make sure they return.”
The good news is you can always just say "Tune to Sportsnet," as happened recently when Conor McGregor at UFC 229 fought, and lost to, lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov during a pay-per-view show, said Gray, who also recalled the dedicated home page for the UFC event which Sportsnet provided to drive viewers to the hyped mixed martial arts fight, and bump up buy rates for the pay-per-view.
"We used a bunch of ways to drive people to a consolidated destination, and within there was the ability to purchase, in advance of the event," he explained.
"We had a detailed content page that linked past fights, upcoming fights, YouTube clips, a whole bunch of content that allowed the user to have a deeper experience that I don't think we had previous to this," Gray added.
David Safer, an innovation fellow at Accenture Strategy Consulting, also told CTAM delegates about added discoverability at hand from Brazil-based Vivo TV, which is expanding to Canada after allowing American broadcasters to quickly and easily create short-form video clips from traditional TV content.
"They have a platform where, after content airs, you can quickly chop it into bits and replug it onto different platforms," Safer explained.
So a TV viewer who didn't get a chance to watch a scheduled newscast the night before can on the morning after open their iPad or pick up their smartphone to see clips from the earlier broadcast.
"For sports, the ideas are endless and they can be placed on all these platforms and allow people to access that content in ways not necessarily tied to the TV screen," Safer explained.
But the metadata still needs to be clean and correct.
Photo borrowed from CTAM Canada Facebook page of (l to r) Greg O’Brien, Michael Gray, Erik Ramberg, Jimena Velarde, Rebecca Twardy and David Safer.
