Magic and Lies

With the entry of Netflix, Amazon and Apple into the content provision business, traditional and even satellite broadcasters can be forgiven for looking somwhat uneasily over their shoulders. These intruders are not to be ignored, they are serious players with serious infrastructure and marketing nous behind them.

The business of broadcasting, be it public service or commercial is relatively straightforward. Commission content, broadcast content, listen to audience, start again. This applies whether the broadcaster is in the business of creating original content or buying in existing content. In terms of revenue streams, advertising, syndication, format rights all follow from a successful program. Budgets we hear are shrinking, this is because advertising revenues are shrinking. Furthermore, the diversity of platforms including download and catch up TV militate against the viewer actually watching live TV. Ever wondered why there is so much sport, so many reality shows, so much fake jeopardy in modern broadcast TV? It’s to keep you watching until the next ad break – “who’s been voted off?”, “Will they bake the cake in time?”, “Who’s winning?”

So is traditional broadcasting a total anachronism? Should they just pack up their valves and transmitters and shuffle off into the distance? Well, no. Let’s examine that basic business model for a second and see if it is still relevant. Content still has to be obtained, so we can tick that box. Strike broadcast and substitute the word “Delivery” – more appropriate considering the number of channels and platforms available these days. Listen to the audience? There’s an idea. The traditional broadcaster’s method of retrieving audience feedback is via focus groups and reviews, surely an anachronism in what should now be a global industry. The focus group method takes weeks to deliver any coherent finding. Weeks in which the real audience may be rising or falling. In this day and age we can provide feedback in the form of statistical analysis to the commissioning process even to the program makers much more quickly.

The new content providers are looking at social software as a means of analysing response. Recommendation engines are key to streaming and download providers like Amazon and Netflix. Experiments have even been carried out in the UK with real time twitter feeds being made available to presenters. This I suspect will be a temporary phase – there are much more interesting uses of Twitter than amplifying sentiment into some kind of infernal feedback loop. Social software is also incredibly noisy in that it encourages people to vent. Furthermore, the more enlightened producers are beginning to realise that social software is a good means of promoting content. All of this noise needs to be filtered if meaningful data is to be extracted, but I can’t imagine a broadcaster answering the question “Would you like to know what people are saying about your show?” with a negative. Can you?

Analytics tools nowadays are more than capable of trawling social software sites and converting that unstructured data into something that can be analysed. In fact a company, Trendrr.TV has been set up in the US to provide precisely this function. This stuff is no longer being talked about behind closed doors in the industry – it’s in the public domain now. And its powerful stuff. Imagine the implications of being able to demonstrate that viewing patterns match a profile that says – “This show is going to be a slow burning hit” – and this is where I think analytics will really make a difference. Commissioners need all the help they can get in times like this – the person who is prepared to hang on in there with a series that appears to be bumping along the bottom of the audience ratings is a person with a private income or a death wish! I’d like to see more risks being taken and I think analytics have a part to play in augmenting the creative business of commissioning content. TV was once a medium that entertained, challenged and educated in more or less equal measure. Is that still the case?

The broadcaster of today could be looking at finessing that feedback mechanism between delivery and commission. Get this right, and the switched on broadcaster will be able to accurately predict audience behaviour and therefore advertising potential, will be able to assess the popularity of characters in the shows, study reaction to plotlines and subtly calibrate content accordingly. Internet time, as has been famously observed is a lot quicker than real time. Broadcast time it seems is a lot slower. There’s the gap that traditional broadcasters must fill if they are to fend off the challenge from Silicon Valley.