Making TV more personal

Interesting document from Videonet on the future of content discovery and its benefits for adressable TV

Content discovery and synchronization
With access to rich data about their subscribers and what they do, operators can improve recommendation, encourage social TV and exploit second screen synchronization.

Recordings get more personal
One of the next big steps in multiscreen TV is giving people access to their personal recordings on every screen. This is the moment for nPVR to finally make its entrance.

Evolving the User Experience
As service providers go beyond household level and address individuals, the role of log-ins or context will become important. There is a place for social TV and big data.

The role of audio in personalization
Audio has a huge impact on how much we enjoy video services. Now it can help to personalize them. ‘Allegiance’ based audio choices are one possibility.

Making advertising more targeted
Addressable advertising is in its infancy but has a bright future, helping to fund the growth of on-demand and multiscreen viewing.

You can download the document here

 

Stievie bilan Q1 2014 : 10K abo’s, 20K gebruikers. Offline kijken is nieuwe feature

(press release by Stievie)

Drie maanden na de commerciële lancering heeft Stievie al 10.000 betalende abonnees en meer dan 20.000 regelmatige gebruikers. Gemiddeld wordt er bijna een uur per dag (59 min) naar Stievie gekeken: live, maar vooral uitgesteld op de dag van uitzending zelf. Vanaf half april kan je met Stievie ook je favoriete tv-programma’s bewaren en meenemen. Genieten van jouw moment, jouw tv-programma kan dus voortaan ook zonder internetverbinding.
Op 6 december werd Stievie gelanceerd. Tussen Kerst en Nieuwjaar is Stievie dan gestart met het werven van zijn eerste betalende abonnees. Intussen is de kaap van 10.000 betalende abonnees overschreden. Meer dan 40% van de abonnees engageerde zich voor 6 maanden of meer.
De Stievie abonnee heeft een jonger en mannelijker profiel dan de doorsnee TV kijker. Maar Stievie wordt niet enkel door de abonnees zelf gebruikt. Uit feedback van de gebruikers én uit analyse van de Stievie kijkcijfers blijkt dat één Stievie abonnement door verschillende kijkers wordt gebruikt. Zo blijkt Stievie erg in trek te zijn bij vrouwen en jongere kinderen. Samen met de gemiddeld 5000 proefabonnees, wordt Stievie dus momenteel door meer dan 20.000 Vamingen intensief gebruikt. Programma’s die goed werken op TV, werken ook op Stievie. 24% van het kijken is live, maar Stievie wordt vooral gebruikt om licht uitgesteld te kijken. 48% van het uitgesteld kijken gebeurt op de dag van uitzending zelf.
Als strategisch innovatieplatform, blijft Stievie investeren in nieuwe features. De feedback van abonnees en proefabonnees is steeds het vertrekpunt. Zo introduceert Stievie half april “mijn offline programma’s”, een service waarmee je je favoriete programma’s kan meenemen op je tablet of smartphone. Zo kan je voortaan ook van Stievie en je programma’s genieten als je niet online bent.
De nieuwe functie “mijn offline programma’s” wordt zeer gebruiksvriendelijk geïntegreerd in de app. Feedback van klanten én specialisten bevestigt dat Stievie enorm geapprecieerd wordt voor zijn makkelijke navigatie en intuïtief gebruiksgemak.
Vanaf half april mag iedereen opnieuw gedurende twee weken gratis kennismaken met de vernieuwde Stievie. Registreren kan via http://www.stievie.be

Waar staan we met Stievie na 3 maanden?
Drie maanden na de commerciële lancering delen wij graag enkele facts & figures m.b.t. het aantal klanten en het gebruik van Stievie:
Stievie heeft momenteel 10.000 betalende abonnees met 22% Jaar-abo’s en 20%  6 maanden-abo’s.

Platformen
90% gebruikt Stievie op iOS, 10% op Android
83% gebruikt Stievie op tablet, 17% op smartphone

Stievie heeft meer dan 20.000 intensieve gebruikers : 10.000 abonnees en hun huisgenoten en daarboven nog  gemiddeld 5000 proefabonnees en hun huisgenoten. Een abonnement wordt door verschillende mensen en toestellen gebruikt

Profiel
Stievie abonnee heeft een jonger en mannelijker profiel dan de doorsnee tv-kijker. Uit de analyse van de Stievie kijkcijfers blijkt ook intensief gebruik door vrouwen en jonge kinderen
64% van de gebruikers kijkt elke dag, en 24% kijkt live – 76% kijkt uitgesteld (waarvan 48% op de dag van uitzending zelf). Op zondag wordt meer live gekeken (= sport)
Gemiddelde kijkduur per dag = 59 minuten
Wat goed werkt op TV, werkt ook goed op Stievie. Topprogramma’s op Stievie feb/maart 2014: Wauters vs. Waes, The Sky is the Limit, Tegen de Sterren Op, In Vlaamse Velden, The Voice van Vlaanderen, Thuis, Alloo in de Vrouwengevangenis, Scheire en de Schepping, Kroost, De Parenclub.
Kinderzenders scoren merkelijk beter op Stievie dan marktaandelen op TV

Is 15% the upper limit for time shifted viewing?

Source : Videonet. Analyses by Thinkbox on UK data

UK. Time shifted viewing is rising steadily over the years. But this is highly correlated with the rise in penetration of Digital TV Recorders. If you look only to those that are able to Timeshift, the habit is quit stable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thinkbox offered a prediction for just how far PVR viewing will develop, pointing to evidence from long-standing PVR homes (or homes with Digital TV Recorders/DTRs, as it prefers to call them) that time-shift viewing tops out at around 15-20% of total viewing. So once everyone has a PVR, Thinkbox expects this kind of time-shift viewing to account for 15-20% of all viewing nationally. Other on-demand viewing may eventually nibble into this figure, it added

The marketing body is not prepared to go further and say that the likely limit of all on-demand viewing, taking PVR and other catch-up and on-demand sources together, will level at 15-20%. But its feeling, as previously expressed in the ‘Screen Life’ study, is that viewers do have an inherent attraction to linear that is driven by psychology, and this will limit all time-shifting.

Live TV viewing remains limited on Other screens.

Interesting overview of the split between live and VOD video consumption on other screens in Europe vs. US.

From :Ooyala-Global-Video-Index-Q2-2013

The main conclusion remains that the consumption of video content on computer , tablet and mobile screens and connected TV’s is to an important extend non-linear.

Hours of video streamed :

Buying TV with the internet style model

Original Article on: Videonet, october 17 2013

U.S. cable operator Cablevision wants to give marketers a way to buy linear spots using the audience targeting, aggregation and buying models similar to those already used online.
Brands can target segments of viewers who are spread across a long-tail of smaller channels or who are watching larger channels but in low numbers during certain day-parts – audiences too small to register on a traditional audience measurement panel but which can now be identified thanks to set-top box measurement data.

In July the most popular 100 channels available on its platform accounted for 83% of the live audience (based on their cumulative tuning hours). That means the long-tail of channels had 17% audience share. Cablevision is giving advertisers the means to measure the audiences across this long tail (and across other channels) more effectively and therefore make them a part of their campaign.

Just as importantly, the advertisers can then buy these audiences on the basis of CPM (cost per thousand) multiplied by the number of impressions.  This is the way online advertising is bought and differs to how television ads are traditionally traded using GRP (Gross Ratings Points), a measure of reach (% of the audience reached by the ad) multiplied by average frequency (the number of times that audience sees it).

Cablevision data is based on tuning records of 98% of the set-top boxes in its homes. This means it can provide far more granular audience measurement than an audience panel.

“If you are prepared to embrace new methods of measurement, like set-top box data, you are able to find audiences that before were not visible with traditional measurement,”
“You can put advertisements on a network that appears to have almost no reach but which, when analyzed with set-top box data, is actually well travelled. Before, there was no evidence that anyone was watching the channel or show.” For this reason he talks about the “newly discovered” long-tail.

 

What about targeting ?

Once the advertiser defines its target audience the advertising system correlates its requirement to the characteristics that have been associated with a given household (using all the necessary checks and balances to guarantee privacy). If the set-top box  in one of those homes is tuned to any number of channels then a suitable advertisement is delivered and the advertiser is charged on an impression basis or on a CPM basis. So television advertising becomes more like direct mail and the Internet.

He accepts this model is not for everyone. “If you want to buy reach then it makes sense to buy in the traditional way, but for brands that are focused more on audience and less on context, and who do not need a particular show placement, this new approach gives them extremely good value.”

This initiative is separate to Addressable Advertising products, another weapon in the advanced advertising arsenal. Cablevision has already showed that it can split a linear audience into two sub-segments during an ad spot, delivering different messages to each group. Overall the company’s ambition is to make advertising more relevant and more efficient to the benefit of advertisers and also subscribers.

Australia : 9% of all viewing is on Other screens

Results from the Australian Multi Screen Report 2013 Q1 by Oztam , Tam Regional and Nielsen

This report gives an overview of the TRENDS IN VIDEO VIEWERSHIP BEYOND CONVENTIONAL TELEVISION SETS on the Australian market.

attention : this is a mix of live viewing and consumption of non linear video content.

If we break down the viewing on other screens per age group, we get to the following results (this my own table that I made from the data in the document)

Click here for the link to the full report.

Live TV viewing on multi screen – UK data

Source : Ofcom – The communications market 2013 – UK

Challenges of addressable TV adverting

Original article : Adage “Addressable Ads’ most valuable customer : the TV industry?”

Highly addressable advertising has been a long-standing plan for the TV business, which wants to rival the ad targeting available online.

While there’s no question that marketers want to make their spending more efficient, however, the biggest beneficiary of addressable commercials so far may be the TV industry itself. It is clear that Cable networks and Providers can have immediate use to upsell video content / upgrade subscriptions (look for more info on this in the article)

Challenges to wider use
Auto, insurance and financial marketers have also been using the addressable technology, but the limits of the pay-TV systems’ reach have held back widespread adoption.

DirecTV‘s addressable platform is in 12 million households — the ones with HD DVRs — of the satellite operator’s 20 million homes. Dish Network‘s addressable system is in about 8 million homes. And Comcast, the country’s largest pay-TV operator, intends to roll out its targeted-ad system to more than 20 million homes by the end of 2014.

Some in the TV business also worry about the impact of easy, highly targeted TV commercials. “There’s a fear factor,” said Mr. Marcus, the Visible World executive. “The concern is if media buys become more efficient, does money come out of the marketplace because advertisers can do more with less?”

But the biggest challenge is educating the marketplace, with many media buyers and planners still thinking in traditional gross rating points, according to Mr. Guyardo.

DirecTV is trying to overcome that by pitching directly to CMOs, especially those who are data-driven. “If they value and appreciate data and analytics and they have a good understanding of exactly who they want to target, the beauty of this addressable product is it provides all of the reach that they want without the waste,” Mr. Guyardo said.

RealTimeBidding and Programmatic TV

Article on VAN : Interview with Claudio Marcus, EVP Marketing and Research at Visible World 

When we talk about selling TV programmatically, does this every mean TV inventory is being sold via RTB?

No, we’re not talking about real-time bidding (RTB). That was a big lesson we learned from the Google TV Ads experience when they tried to bring the Adsense model to TV inventory, but they focused on creating an RTB marketplace for that inventory. That model didn’t work for the TV ad inventory suppliers. And it didn’t work for TV advertisers either – large advertisers need to know they have sufficient weight, so they can’t hope to depend on whether their bids are going to clear at the last minute.

On the publisher side, the TV ecosystem players have a lot of clout and really aren’t interested in having the kind of transparency you can get with real-time bidding. So that’s a huge difference between the online and mobile space, where you have literally hundreds of thousands of publishers and tens of thousands of advertisers.  When you talk about the serious buyers for TV, in the US we have eight companies that control 85% of all the TV ad inventory. Then you have about 200 brands who represent about 80 percent of the TV ad spend. So it’s highly concentrated and because of that the sell-side has a lot more say in how things get done.

Because we’ve had long-term relationships with the traditional TV companies and because we’re a technology company, we understood what their concerns were and decided to make use of programmatic to address those concerns, so you can make it work for the inventory that is undervalued today. So we’re not talking about the premium inventory that is part of the upfronts or the direct relationships they have with the large advertisers. We’re talking essentially about undervalued inventory that could be valued more as audiences than as traditional spots.

On the buy-side, how far do you think the big brands want to take addressability on TV?

It really depends on the brand and the mindset of the CMO. I think TV is prized because of its storytelling capability and because of its ability to efficiently aggregate large audiences – and much more so than the Internet. While TV is highly fragmented, it’s not nearly as fragmented as the Internet. The storytelling dimension of TV spills over into the watercooler conversations and into social and online. When you pair up the digital strategies with a TV campaign, you get very strong synergies.  The advertisers who understand those relationships are the ones who come out ahead of the game.

People from a digital or direct marketing background tend to be more interested in the targeting side of things, mainly because they want to have better measurement and attribution. That’s a good thing too, but I think TV has compelling capabilities to service both traditional brand campaigns as well as response-oriented advertisers.

What proportion of TV spend in the US is bought programmatically today?

It’s still very small. The TV space is so huge that it’s still low single digits percentage-wise. But it’s obviously growing very quickly – and partly because it’s growing from a small base – but also because the sell-side is starting to embrace the fact that they have to be proactive about this instead of being defensive. I think they’re starting to realise they now have a way to exert some control over the process from a pricing perspective, a transparency perspective, and an execution perspective.

Automating the buying part is one component, but you also have to automate the traffic part. On the Internet you can take for granted that the ad server will take care of the traffic. On TV it’s not like that. Until we implemented our targeted TV traffic automation and married that to the buying front-end. For example, it is relatively straightforward to identify and target audiences more efficiently, but then when you turn it over to the sell-side it’s a total nightmare to execute those campaigns, because you’re talking about weaving a number of small audiences into a much larger audience. So from an execution perspective it was a major pain. Now that that’s all automated, the sell-side is much more willing to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to take this undervalued inventory and turn some of it over to this platform, and because I don’t have to worry about the execution of it I’m simply just going to make more money than I otherwise would for that inventory’.

What kind of  data sources and targeting options are available to programmatic TV advertisers?

There are two sets of data sources available. You have the kind of data sources that are the ‘coins of the realm’ for the transaction part of the equation, which for the most part is still Nielsen. Then we use Rentrak data and we’ll soon be using some smart TV data that let’s us be much more granular in terms of understanding audience segments in a way that is different to what Nielsen typically reports on. Nielsen have an excellent grasp of the national representation of the audience for certain specific demographics e.g. gender and age-based demographics. But when you’re trying to do something much more refined around audiences, such as ‘Hispanic families with more than two kids’, then you can’t do that with Nielsen as your estimates just fall apart.

So you still need Nielsen as a transactional currenty, but we need to use a host of third party data in order to understand the segments first. So to understand the specific advertiser-defined segments on a campaign by campaign basis. And we can do that by doing matches against their customer database and identify what those segments look like; if they already have segment definitions we can find and apply third party data to identify those segments in terms of audiences on TV. Then once that’s done, the system then automates the programmatic buying of those audiences, even though the transaction is still taking place using the traditional metrics.

What type of brand uplift do you see with addressable TV when compared with traditional TV campaigns?

It really depends. You have traditional TV advertisers and more DR-focused advertisers. On the direct response side, they tend to be much better at measuring the response as they can look at the number of calls they got in the call centre, visits to the website or actual sales, so you can measure the impact pretty quickly.

From an overall reporting perspective – just because you get reports overnight on the reach of the specific segment you were going after, the frequency, the impressions etc. Historically you would have gotten this data at the end of the campaign, but being able to get that data overnight enables them to match it up with their website data and call centre logs. It’s still early days, so the lifts vary quite a bit, but the way we like to describe it is as a toolkit that allows you to improve your performance, rather than having a base lift that you can expect, because that would be unrealistic and would fail to take into account the offer, the creative, the product etc.

Is the TV industry looking for a way to provide addressable advertising using their current infrastructure, or is there a general acceptance that the future is IP-delivered content?

I think there are some technological factors that make addressability easier to implement on an IP platform. So from a technology perspective, it certainly makes it easier to implement at scale. But from an opportunity perspective, it’s interesting that the operators in particular are recognising that addressability is important to them on the advertising side, but where the push is really coming from is there own marketing organisations.

You have to keep in mind that these pay TV operators get most of their revenues from subscriptions. Advertising is a small portion of their total revenues. In the US it’s just 10 to 15 percent of their total revenues. Subscription is what really matters, so the marketing divisions have been the most aggressive in pushing for addressability as they’ve got short-term incentives and competitive pressure for making the most of the TV ad inventory they use for their own marketing efforts. Cablevision have been one of the more aggressive cable operators in the US and they’re the most advanced with addressability.

The other groups that are interested are the networks as programme promotion as TV shows tend to be very broadly targeted, so you might promote shows alongside similar shows or on networks that carry similar shows. But if you went down to household addressability you could do a much better job of targeting your product promotion inventory. But that also has some challenges in that it requires working closely with the operators to change how they currently work and very few have been willing to do so thus far.

 

Personalisation of Multiscreen TV

Original article : Videonet, Sep13 2013

According to Tvinci, the next stage is to make multiscreen truly personal and use that personalization to monetize the services better.

OTT.I.am
“Each device could be used by any number of people in the household. Whilst a smartphone may have just one primary user, a tablet could have three and the PC or connected TV could have four or more primary users,”

This is an important point because there is often an assumption that multiscreen devices are inherently personal. They are in the sense that one person uses them at a time, but they are not necessarily unique to one user. There is growing evidence that parents share their tablets with small children so they can watch TV, for example.

So one of the first things we need is an understanding of who is actually using the device, after which the Pay TV operator can start to give them their own personalized experience. For consumers, apparently simple improvements can have a big impact, like giving recommendations on what you watched personally rather than what everyone else in the house has been watching, and lining up the next episode of the show you have been watching based on where you are in the series – not where somebody else has reached.

Netflix is moving towards individual user accounts within a household and this service has shown previously that it can raise consumer expectations when it comes to multiscreen viewing.
“I want my TV service, on-demand and OTT, to reflect my history, my habits, my preferences and my friends,” This starts with individual log-ins on any device to provide viewing history, preferences and favourites for individual users, regardless of what device they are logged into. Then the service provider can send notifications to that individual user, like when a new episode of their favourite show has been added to the service.

When the service you see is personalized to you, users can really start to harness social media :  “subtle and relevant integration with social networks” so users can discover content based on friend activities, which could mean a social EPG with social buzz to indicate what programmes are hot right now (but based only on your friends).

Tvinci believes service providers can definitely monetize more effectively in a more personalized multiscreen scenario. “You can monetize the number of devices per account and the number of users per household, and you can also monetize the number of concurrent streams permitted,” the company suggests. There is already evidence of this at work: in the UK BSkyB now offers a premium version of its free (to subscribers) Sky Go multiscreen offer where for £5 per month you can use four devices instead of two and also enable ‘download-to-go’.

Tvinci believes a truly personalized service is the Holy Grail for multiscreen. Wiesenberg echoes what is now accepted wisdom: cord cutting is no longer a significant threat to Pay TV providers who have seized OTT technologies and added multi-screen solutions to their offer. But there is no time for self-congratulations. Consumers are already demanding more than just content on the different screens or even a reliable and slick user interface: they want to stand out from the rest of the family.