In order to survive and thrive, TV broadcasters have to shift from being broadcast-only, to 360 degree service companies. Here are some ideas.
The topic of 360 degree video experiences has been around for a long time. Yet, getting there has been tremendously difficult for most broadcast companies. First, they found themselves with the complexity of setting up a real OTT platform, which would work, and which would stream correctly to all possible devices, do authentication right, do the billing side of things right, take care of DRM. The platform also had to take care of traffic, scalability, etc.
If you're reading this you probably have been there, failed, started again, went on to work for another company, made a better impression this time, and are now comfortable with the fact that things are functioning in general, without glitches or hitches. Fortunately for all, setting up an owned and operated (O&O) online video experience has changed in a big way in the long 14 years since this big revolution of over-the-top TV started, back in the day when Netflix started streaming its online catalog of DVD discs, and YouTube exploded after being acquired by Google.
Traditional broadcasting only covers a tiny angle…
Today, most broadcasters around the world are supposed to have an online platform of their own, and it needs to be good, and solid. Yet, there are some that keep looking at things in a very conservative manner. They are the ones that focus only on the broadcast operation as they would have done in the past, and are looking at only 5% of the outlets out there today. I would say they are squarely on a path of crash 'n burn, with little chances of survival.
What's expected from broadcasters today is a much broader experience: broadcast TV is not only over the air television (OTA) and cable television, or reaching homes via direct-to-home (DTH) TV aka: satellites. They also need to be able to do streaming over YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Twitch. If they do that, we’re then at 35 degrees of the sphere of competence.
Modern broadcasters also need to be present on social media channels, to keep the pressure up all the time, and show what's going on in their live operations. Are you there yet? Yay, you´re now at 90 degrees! Still 270 more to go, but we'll get there if you stick with me.
If you´re not there yet, and fail to reach a quarter of the full circle, your broadcast operation will become kind of irrelevant, because what's expected from all broadcasters today is a fully immersive kind of experience. OTT TV is not a passing fad anymore, or a fashionable nice-to-have kind of thing. It's much more of a necessity.
Let's keep turning around the wheel of needs: viewers today expect to be able to watch what's going on in television, while they're at their workplaces, while they're in the train or in the bus, while they're in a taxi cab, while they are commuting to and from work, when they are at home. And while at home, they expect to have different possibilities and alternatives to watching what they like. So let's say that a TV channel is able to grab the attention of customers, or viewers Live. Well, they can consider themselves very lucky! Because chances are that those customers, if really engaged with their programming, will want to watch what they couldn't see that precise day on their devices, or on their smart TVs, later on. That's the way of keeping the conversation going.
The continuity between Live and Catch-up is a sensitive issue these days: catch-up is a service that is expected from the broadcast station to the viewer, and not anymore from the set-top-box, the cable operator and the DVR service that TV providers offer as part of their service. We have some examples in Wildmoka of customers who do this really well. And yet, in one of those organizations, a newly released service only provides live streaming, and no catch up TV, which is disappointing to most customers because they would expect to be able to review what went on air, after it did. It's something that Google allows you to do, very well. All the time. And it´s Google, Facebook, or Twitter that are setting the bar high, innovating to succeed, and in the meantime, grabbing a piece of the advertising and subscriptions pie.
Another customer that we have in our roster does a really, really good immersive experience. They broadcast live OTA, DTH, but they also do SVOD & AVOD. All of the flavors. Television, as a service. That's the name of the game today, because broadcasters are not expected to be just a signal reaching a TV set. Reaching customers on every device? That was five years ago. Today, they are expected to have everything that's gone through, and have availability of their past content in a library for users to be able to review, when and where they want. Not just a library: a newsdesk, with everything that's gone on in their operations in the last 3 hours, 3 days, 3 weeks, and 3 months. So, if they have that kind of library, we have now reached 180 degrees: wowwww, we still have to go full circle.
Where do we start to turn things around? When the broadcast operation becomes able to create new content with what has gone on a few minutes ago, quickly, repurposing the old, the new, the Live, and the archive. In order to do this, the kind of tools that are needed are industrial grade tools, tools that will not only be able to clip, store, assemble and create new content in minutes, but that we'll be able to index, retrieve, search, and repost also content, images, whatsapp messages, GIFs, memes. A lot!
Those tools also need to be able to distribute the content to all social media and O&O platforms. As soon as it happens. Because that's the name of the game. That's when the service starts to head into being a full 360 degree service. It's not only promoting what's going on on-air, because promotion has become part of what you offer: promotion is not advertising, but a service that you offer, a reminder of things to see and to watch. Just like when you subscribe to a YouTube channel, or Pinterest: you keep receiving stuff that you'll probably want to watch. So, creating engaging content, showing what's new and reminding people of what's happening is not just a must. It's a necessity.
To achieve this kind of availability and flexibility, new tools need to be Cloud-based, so that they communicate from the Amazon, Google or Azure Cloud to the Twitter, Facebook and YouTube Cloud. It's much faster to travel by “air”, or at the speed of light, thru a fiber optics connection (in reality), than it is to download, process and upload to those cumulus nimbus or nimbus cirrus :-). On top of that, Cloud-based architecture is many times more resilient and scalable than anything one can have on the ground. So once things have aired, let's keep them that way.
One of our customers is not only a very profitable broadcaster. It's also an example of how things have to be done. They are the rights holders of very large sporting events. They handle hundreds of matches simultaneously, and while each match is happening, they need to broadcast them live on the Web: they also create highlights of each of those games, automatically, as they happen, and summaries of each of those games too, per set and at the end of each game. It's a daunting task. And here's what happens: they not only have, in my opinion, the world's record of advertising CPMs (cost per 1000 impressions), but they also get an enormous engagement from their audience, which reciprocates in turn by being engaged with them all the time. So, this is a public service company and a TV company, and they have understood the concept of TV as a service, a long time ago.
Another example is a customer of Wildmoka who just broadcasted the Olympic Games in about 50 countries around the world. They produced 3500 pieces of content: at some points during the Olympics they had 100 streams going on at the same time, in 10 or more languages each, and they could choose from each one to repurpose a lot of the content that they were generating in each of the events. So again, this is a company that a year ago wasn't expected to have to broadcast every single game (games that perhaps only mother, fathers and brothers are going to be watching at 3 AM =)), but yet they offer their service. And this is tremendously useful for audience consolidation, which, in turn, again reciprocates with engagement, and with ratings and with gratitude, basically.
So, in my opinion today a TV broadcaster needs to be a constant giver in order to reap big returns. In order to do that, a company like the one that I just mentioned (I´m not in liberty to say the name), is a company that invests, not too much money, but enough so that it can provide its own army of editors with Cloud-based tools, which will make their lives easier. This allows them to cover all angles, and all possible outlets, to reach all possible fragmented but in the end, consolidated audiences.
There is a fundamental shift going on in the world of television. And it is that broadcast companies have to become much more than they used to be. The nice story and the nice news that I have for you is that it mostly takes a repurposing of the existing human resources that companies have. That's what's needed to achieve this 360 full-service, and a little help from your Cloud-native friend, Wildmoka.