TORONTO – The emerging era of multi-screen video offers both great opportunities and daunting challenges to traditional media players and equipment suppliers, according to a panel of industry experts who spoke at the Canadian Telecom Summit here late Tuesday afternoon.
With consumer adoption of smartphones, tablets, game consoles and other web-enabled devices exploding, the four panelists agreed consumers will increasingly use three, four or more screens to view video content whenever and wherever they want.
In fact, smartphones accounted for a whopping 80% of all handsets shipped in the Canadian market in the first quarter, said Paul Bannon, vice-president of the enterprise business division at Samsung Electronics Canada. He also noted that tabloid shipments climbed 30% on a year-over-year basis in the winter quarter.
“All devices are getting IP-connected,” said Upinder Saini, vice-president of new product development for Rogers Communications, which is heavily promoting its Rogers Anyplace TV offering for multiple screens offering right now. “Today there are three or four screens. Tomorrow there may be a fifth or sixth screen.”
Contrary to the expectations of many experts, the developing four-screen environment (TV, PC, smartphone and tablet) is actually driving greater consumption of all media so far, said Chris Hodgson, head of industry-retail for Google Canada. Despite some new evidence that traditional TV viewing is starting to dip in the U.S., he said Google’s research indicates that each new video-capable device is not cannibalizing the other video devices.
Based on test brand awareness campaigns that Google has conducted with Volvo and Nationwide Insurance in the U.S., Hodgson argued that multi-screen video offers much promise to advertisers seeking to reach large audiences more effectively. “Companies that leverage all those screens can enjoy disproportionate benefits in value,” he said. “The incremental benefit of promoting across devices is really worth the investment in getting it right.”
But Hodgson and the other speakers warned that service providers, programmers and advertisers must work harder to improve the user experience across all the video devices. In particular, they called for greater consistency in the look and feel of video content on each device. “It’s not just the experience on the device, it’s the consistency across the devices,” said Gary Schwartz, CEO of Impact Mobile. “You have to be able to start in one place and move consistently across the multiple screens. It’s the cross-channel disconnect that kills us.” He likened the task to playing “very complex three-dimensional chess.”
Such a goal is easier said than done, given the different bandwidth, format and encoding requirements of the various video devices. “The multi-screen world had made our lives more difficult,” Hodgson said. “It’s a living hell for those of us in this space.”
Besides these technical integration headaches, the speakers said service providers must work out other issues as well, including video streaming standards, customer identification and authentication, service reliability and content security. In particular, they agreed, service providers must hash out the business model for delivering multi-screen video with the programmers who hold the content licensing rights. “It’s content rights and the commercial morals that go along with that,” Saini said. “The key is figuring out what is the new value chain… We have to work out who’s going to get compensated and how.”
But, given the nasty squabbles between programmers and service providers over retransmission rights and programming fees recently, that business model may take years to work out. In particular, it may take a while to resolve the pesky issue of out-of-home content licensing rights.
“There are so many balls in the air,” Schwartz said. “They’re not going to drop in a neat pile… I just think things are going to get more difficult first. We’ll muscle through but it’s not going to be beautiful.”
– Cartt.ca staff
