MicroProgramming: The New Content Frontier

I remember when I was a writer/producer at NBC and the thought of tagging a promo with an actionable url (or just a url) was "revolutionary". Then with the advent of the content-rich web, it was interesting to hear how IPTV and VOD would fragment and destroy the television experience for viewers. Of course things have evolved much further, and multiple screens have become touch-points for an experience that seems to closely mirror some crazed, content chaos theory - if it's there, and it's cool, it's likely to be watched. 

Which is what makes content portals like Hulu so very interesting. With Disney's plunge into the mix, Hulu will likely go from the world's 4th largest captive network (including all cable nets), to something that may overtake everybody's favorite behemoth, YouTube. Now, keep in mind, this has very little to with the highly coveted "video content monetization model" (which has yet to take shape), or even content development (although it should), and everything to do with how we, as viewers, consume our media.

First, we have to consider the correlates between online content viewership and long-form content on your TV. Recent studies have shown that those folks who view topical, genre or show-specific content online are likely to seek out and watch this same content in their living room. Starz Online issued a detailed report to TelevisionWeek in January and Neilsen has backed this info up with findings of its own. To boot, folks like Integrated Media Measurement have reported that during most weeks, TV viewers are spending as much as 15% of their viewing time online. And, as Lead Researcher Amanda Welsh stated, "Rather than simply cannibalizing audiences as has been feared, offering content online presents a huge opportunity for television content providers to reach elusive ad-avoiding audiences and to achieve higher engagement with them."

Well, it's no wonder then that Primetime and cable nets like NBC, ABC, VH1, ESPN, GSN, Comedy Central and a host of others are all embracing the once-feared "fragmented" programming model - it actually works. Watch any of your favorite shows these days and you can join polls, forums, blog commentaries or video commentaries, most of it captured in real-time. You'll even see more cross-promotion (network to network) between competitors. Why? Because audiences are about shared interest; increase the market for shared viewership, and you can increase your piece of the pie.

Which brings us to how show content is being promoted online, such as it is on microblogs. Nearly every major network - prime, cable, online or otherwise - has a healthy presence on Twitter, and their updates flow like dynamically-enabled news content or RSS feeds...go figure. I'm a sports fan, so I get my updates from ESPN online, then go to the TV to watch specific clips. It's both interesting and bizarre because two things are evident: a) I now watch TV in intervals, and b) I still don't want to watch these clips on my computer or my iPhone. This may change, but for now, this is my experience, and I know I am not alone.

But there's another twist to this part of the story: search. Remember we mentioned YouTube earlier? Run any datapoint on social media, and you'll find that linking - not originally sourced content - is what gets page rank; in fact, we ran a case study on this in March, and sure enough, we found that most indices are flooded with links and cross-postings. What this tells us is that content may be king, but what people say about that content is even mightier. Hence the YouTube dilemma: microtagging videos ain't gonna do the trick, especially with a Google algorithm that doesn't seem, at this point, to filter or scale very well.

YouTube has another problem in the form of exclusive content and the accessibility of higher quality, mid-tail content. The networks got smart when they realized that a seemingly endless tail of marginal video content would take a hard left and inevitably force content providers to raise the bar on quality. Case and point: people are still paying for premium content, and they're doing this in large part because they're sick of watching recycled content on YouTube, or worse, home video stunts. When you look at average engagement time of video views - even the most popular - this points even further to the fact that good storytelling wins out. Let's see if YouTube can save face with its new content deals - don't count out any of the players in this programming game.

Finally, mobile has arrived (well, it's at least on the cusp of broadband greatness in the U.S.), and will offer up a flurry of hyper-targeted video content. In other words, MicroProgramming. It's taken quite a long time for mobile content to make its mark here - it was projected by some to be a $12B market by 2007 - but we now see a relationship formalizing between text or microblogging and content engagement. This is exciting.

It's funny because 10 years ago or so, we feared that we would be watching content in a small box. Well, that still may be true, but let's not forget that good programming is good programming, and we'll watch it in, on or around the most comfortable spaces we can find at any particular time.

Cheers to MicroProgramming. The new content frontier.

TV 2.1 (or something like that...)

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes' announcement of a "TV Everywhere" plan raises an interesting debate over the claim that people should pay to have access to content through multiple channels of distribution. So basically, you pay a single fee to enjoy content streams over the web, phone and/or a cable box, regardless of frequency or in most cases, amount. While one can understand the need to produce a viable revenue model to support content development (after all, ad dollars have been paying for content), are media execs like Mr. Bewkes drastically underestimating the power of The Mid Tail? 

Let's start with share of viewership. Mr. Bewkes asserts that with this subscriber model, 85% of households would essentially be getting this access for free. But let's consider a likely scenario, which is that viewers will more often opt for a web-only or broadband service in lieu of a cable package. When you look at services like Hulu, and preference-based platforms like Slingbox, the numbers don't lie -- Hulu is now the 4th largest video service on the web. You also have to consider that video networks probably represent a larger captive base that most of the prime cable networks combined. There are rumblings that this is certainly the case with YouTube.  

Now let's look at the value of the content itself. There's a reason why people have been paying for premium channels, HDTV and on-demand services: because there is a greater demand for hi-fi content when the marketplace is saturated with mediocre channels and mediocre content. However, as the Tail extends and more concentrated pockets or niches of quality programming emerge, it seems that there will be less of a "direct" demand for hi-fi content simply because it will be readily available to you. Watch any show on VH1 or The Food Network, and you not only have great programming options, but plenty of options for interacting with that content beyond your TV.

Now we can consider the ramifications for an ad model and the demand on inventory. TV advertising is flat. Why? Because viewership is transitioning to a more "holistic" experience. This means that while people are watching more content on multimedia devices, they're also activated to watch more in their living room - recent ratings analyses support this correlation. In essence, the interactive hand is feeding the traditional hand and vice versa. This is a true form of convergence. So, there still seems to be a loyalty of sorts to ad-supported content, and it seems that the demand on inventory will continue to be, in many ways, dictated by the experience more so than the placement of content itself.

Which brings us to video advertising. Remember that adoption rate in households? Let's assume that the percentage of web-only services, per Mr. Bewkes's assumptions, trumps the 15% mark to something far more substantial - say 25% or 30%. This scenario begs a few questions, the main one being that if browsers are optimized to stream better and more interactive video content (Google Chrome, for example, is optimized for video streaming), then why charge for access to that content? Don't forget that people are willing to deal with ads if they are entertained. And as video platforms get better at delivering ads, and more importantly, integrating branded content, the ad dollar opportunities seem more and more promising.

So is Mr. Bewkes cannabalizing his own future for the need to control the access to content that is already readily available? Perhaps this may be the case. But there also may be some value to his thinking, which is that it will give the cable nets a chance to finally vet out their revenue models, as well as provide more viable options, within a media landscape that seems to be changing daily, if not hourly.