Throughout 2009, while most of us have remained focused on the impact of the recession, a slow trickle of internet televisions has started to enter the market. There is no standard, they all offer different things - little of which is particularly compelling as yet – and work in different ways. As a result all have access to a limited subset of consumers; at first glance not a lot to entice investment. Nevertheless it is a trend many large brands should be following with interest.
To date television has been the exclusive domain of broadcasters and pay TV operators. With the advent of internet connected televisions, the opportunity exists for brands, businesses and public services (from supermarkets to football clubs, from car manufacturers to local government) to have their own services and a direct relationship with the consumer on the TV.
Within a year or two, the industry will have solved its differences, the numbers will start to grow rapidly and the applications and services will get clever, creative and compelling. Those companies that seize the opportunity are likely to gain significant early mover advantage.
Historically TV has been a broadcast-only medium with significant wastage. Costs are way beyond most entities, you can’t target your offering, and there is little or no interactivity. In contrast, broadband connected televisions provide the opportunity to target ‘on demand’ services, with interactivity, and at a fraction of the cost. These are three big changes, all happening at the same time.
This is clearly the stuff that makes and breaks brands. Being ready to respond rapidly to the new world of internet connected televisions will be more crucial than it ever was in provisioning a web site. Whilst now may not be the time to switch the bulk of your marketing budget into TV applications and services, now is certainly the right time to prepare for this rapidly developing future - developing your strategy and maybe even playing with design and conceiving pilot services.
So where do you start?
With an assessment. There is little point worrying about the various industry or consumer manufacturer platforms and devices until you know what you want out of television. For many businesses it will be obvious that TV is a more suitable medium than web or mobile, and for some may even warrant a whole TV channel. For others, TV will be a complementary play to the core business or complementary to a web and mobile play. This initial assessment is key. Your first consideration should be about defining objectives. These will be very different for a public service offering, a car manufacturer, a supermarket, or those seeking to monetise a back catalogue of video, games or other compelling assets.
How do you reach your customer? Whilst your own TV channel, in the mould of having your own web site, may be an option, it’s also likely to be an expensive one – only viable if you can drive significant traffic. But even if your brand does command its own presence, consumer adoption and usage can still be optimised through structuring your service so that it can also feed into television aggregation services (such as BT Vision, Hulu, Tesco or Virgin Media) and mash ups, where the service is made up or complemented by a number of partner products and services.
A key challenge here is to identify how your brand offering is discovered. How do you effectively use analytics based on personal usage, habits and preferences, to ‘suggest’ rather than search. An important consideration will be how to successfully use the feeds from community and social web applications, and to identify the triggers which will pull consumers into the world of your brand; for example, widgets or even red button prompts in broadcast service provider adverts.
How do you commercially support the application or service? Whilst advertising offers the promise of free or part funded services, the ‘connected TV’ is fragmented today; though it will rapidly resolve itself into a few winning platforms, it will still take time to gather the consumer numbers desirable for advertising. And whilst connected TVs offer so many more outlets and opportunities for targeted and tighter managed advertising for the market, there will be many applications and services vying for that trade.
However, there are plenty of other options if you want to avoid advertising in your consumer relationship; subscription, purchase, rental, televoting, sponsorship, gambling and cross-subsidy are but a few of the possibilities created by the advent of broadband connections providing a fully interactive path to the television.
What kind of application or service should you offer? A fully interactive path to the TV will likely dispel the idea that television is exclusively a medium for video. Marrying gaming-like functionality with on demand and broadcast TV services, we are likely to see some very exciting developments over the next few years. It does require a different way of thinking.
How do you design and build for TV? Screen layout, the use of a remote control and most of all consumer expectation of TV are very different to that of a web site. The internet and web sites have grown with us, we see every development as an improvement. TV, on the other hand, is already established, it responds instantly, there are no “hour glasses” or pauses to let the service catch up with what’s going on – consumer expectation will be high, and brands cannot afford to slip up.
Which TV platforms should you target? Philips NetTV, Samsung, Sony and LG with Intel and Yahoo, Panasonic Vieracast, Apple, Fetch TV, Canvas…these are just a few of the options. As a consumer though, I don’t want to buy a different TV or box for every person in my family just to get all the different services. Neither do brands want to have to redevelop their service on every platform and device to get to all consumers - not least because redevelopment will soak up all the budget and creativity will be dragged down to the lowest common denominator of platform or device (unless you’re rich enough to build different offers on different platforms). So why doesn’t the TV industry get together and agree on one platform?
That brings us to Canvas. This BBC-led industry initiative's desired and stated objective is to set standards for broadband TV which will create a single platform with an open business model – so helping to get all services on all devices. Clearly the consumer benefits from this as well, in that they can replace a TV from one manufacturer with another, knowing there is continuity of service. Canvas is not the only entity pushing this agenda, but it does stand a good chance of succeeding if it goes forward, as it is favoured by the UK Public Service Broadcasters (PSBs – BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five). Such standardisation will be a significant boost to ‘connected TV’ adoption, and will appreciably benefit those brands which are ready to capitalise on this emerging market opportunity.
So where does that leave us? That television is evolving to a brand proposition is clear, with 2010 likely to see significant change. What is not so clear for most businesses and brands is how to steer through the options and derive a strategy for the impending opportunity. Brands need to plot their course carefully across this exciting and challenging new landscape – and for early mover advantage, to begin their learning journey now.
Joe Foster (previously Strategic Director at Virgin Media), Bill Scott (who ran IBM’s Digital Media consulting and systems integration practice) and Rob Walk (Chairman of full service design agency NovaRising), founded easeltv in early 2009 to provide services and solutions for the ‘connected TV’ market. easeltv offers consultancy, design, build and platform services to provide a complete route to market. The founders’ experience includes delivering the UK’s first national Video on Demand platform and HDTV service, the conception of Freeband (a framework for a standards based ‘connected TV’ market), and the proof-of-concept consumer experience for Freeband, both of which were commissioned by the BBC in support of the subsequent project Canvas.
