Perspectives What's this?

The post-cable era is upon us. At INTX this week, key industry players discussed the trends that have ushered in this new age. Consumers are no longer tethered to living room TVs and set-top boxes. Technology that was once proprietary and took years to deploy is now virtualized, able to scale quickly, anywhere. Traditional video delivery is under pressure from over-the-top (OTT). 
 
Also consider the now global nature of competition and sizable price tags accompanying the biggest content deals. Netflix says it will expand into 200 countries within two years as it spends more than $3B per year on content. ESPN is shoring up rights to popular worldwide content like the Cricket World Cup and the Indian Premier League games via the Web, without requiring a cable package. Liberty Global is spending $2.5B per year on content as it continues to eye expansion in worldwide markets.

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It's important to think about how the worlds of entertainment and media have evolved, from cable packages/bundles to over­-the-­top content providers, from the living room television to tiny screens everywhere. Niche content owners and creators can now truly own their audience by taking advantage of all of the power currently at their fingertips.

How do I start owning my audience?

I've seen these five hacks for premium content owners work, from large content library owners to individual content creators.

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We all know the Internet is big - some 3.5 trillion web pages big, by the latest comScore estimates. But you wouldn't know it by looking at the current state of the online video market.

Nearly a decade after advertisers started batting around the idea of the Internet's "long tail," highly branded video publishers have yet to grasp the meaning of the phrase. The online video market is now pulling in over $6 billion. That's not bad. But with an injection of democracy, the market could grow to three times that size in very short order.

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Video viewability is broken - but not for the reasons you think. The way the industry measures viewability does not reflect actual human behavior, and it fails to meet advertisers' real need, which is making sure people actually see their ads. While ad-tech and viewability vendors, publishers, and agencies negotiate what should be considered "viewable" (pixels and time spent on-screen, etc.), actual people are moving on to mobile devices.

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Over the past year, a strong wind has blown in the sails of the TV Everywhere market. More content owners are making programming available on this increasingly popular platform and the content is finding an audience on programmer and operator apps across platforms. Adobe reports TV Everywhere and online video consumption is up 146% in the last year. Ad server company FreeWheel noted that 38% of all ad views on long-form and live content came from behind authentication walls. NBCU made a push for TV Everywhere education with its Super Stream Sunday that offered open access to its Super Bowl-related programming.

Riding high on this growth, the industry should now focus on how to make the opportunity even bigger.  Based on our ongoing work with programmers and MVPDs on authenticated video, as well as our data analysis of sources such as watch app reviews, below is a sample of the strategies we think will help take watch apps to the next level:

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Go to nearly any online media conference these days, and it feels like half of the sessions inevitably touch on programmatic ad buying and selling. Programmatic ad buying technology has existed for nearly half a decade, but still, the term gets a lot of attention as if it’s the new idea. And despite all the hype and conversation, it's pretty clear that the term itself, "programmatic," still scares away certain folks, especially those at the ultra-premium end of our industry.

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2014 was the year during which the "Big Game" became the "Really Big Game." From the Super Bowl and Sochi Olympics kicking off the year, to the college football Bowl Season closing it out. One could hardly turn around in 2014 without hearing of another programmer boasting cutting-edge streaming coverage of tent-pole sporting events or unprecedented depth of exposure for previously hard-to-find games.

Live sports serve a dual function for programmers trying to expand their digital footprint. In addition to bringing significant numbers of viewers to ultra-premium, high-CPM ad inventory, live sports have also been deployed as an entry point - hooking new adopters and indoctrinating digital viewing habits.

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With the ongoing dialogue surrounding measurement, brands are eager to embrace any metric that can help evaluate video content in today’s digital world.  

However, most marketers are still using the number of video views as a key performance indicator to assess video initiatives – a method of measurement that is severely flawed.  Video views in a vacuum – or alone – are not only misleading but also potentially damaging when it conceals poorly performing content and drives wrong investment decisions.

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