Multi-Screen World Offers Promise and Peril for Media Players, They Say
TORONTO -- Multiple video screens offer multiple opportunities and challenges for established video service providers, programmers, advertisers and equipment vendors, executives said. They told the Canadian Telecom Summit last week that multi-screen video has quickly become a fact of life for all media players, whether they like it or not. With consumer adoption rates for smartphones, tablets, game consoles and other Web-enabled devices soaring, speakers said there’s no turning back to the old one-screen, linear TV world. They predicted consumers will increasingly use three, four, five or more Internet Protocol-enabled screens to view video content whenever and wherever they want.
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"All devices are getting IP-connected,” said Rogers Communications Vice President Upinder Saini. “Today, there are three or four screens. Tomorrow, there may be a fifth or sixth screen.” Seeking to take advantage of this trend, the Canadian cable operator is heavily promoting its Rogers Anyplace TV offering for multiple screens.
Smartphones and tablets are shaking up the multichannel video world, the speakers said. Vice President Paul Brannen of the enterprise business division at Samsung Electronics Canada said smartphones accounted for 80 percent of all handsets shipped in the Canadian market in Q1. Shipments of tablets climbed 30 percent on a year-over-year basis that quarter. Despite Nielsen’s data showing the number of American viewers watching traditional TV in a given month dipped in Q4 for the third quarter in a row, several speakers said the TV set isn’t headed for the junk pile.
"TV is not going anywhere anytime soon,” said Chris O'Neill, managing director of Google Canada. He predicted the current linear 100-channel universe will become a far more customized 1 million-channel universe in the near future. “There'll be a channel for every passion,” he said. “What you'll see is these niches en masse. People will choose to spend time with niche content.”
The rapidly developing four-screen environment -- TV, PC, smartphone and tablet -- is driving consumption of all video programming, speakers said. Chris Hodgson, head of industry-retail for Google Canada, said Google’s research indicates each new video-capable device is not cannibalizing the other video devices. Based on test brand awareness campaigns that Google has done with Volvo and Nationwide Insurance in the U.S., Hodgson said multi-screen video offers great promise to advertisers seeking to reach large audiences more effectively. “Companies that leverage all those screens can enjoy disproportionate value,” he said. “The incremental benefit of promoting across devices is really worth the investment in getting it right."
Several speakers warned that service providers, programmers and advertisers must work harder to improve the viewing experience on all the video devices. They called for developing greater consistency in the look and feel of video content on each device. “It’s not just the experience on the device, it’s the consistency across the devices,” said Gary Schwartz, CEO of Impact Mobile. “You have to be able to start in one place and move consistently across the multiple screens. It’s the cross-channel disconnect that kills us."
Achieving better consistency is easier said than done, due to the different bandwidth, format and encoding requirements of all the different video-capable devices, speakers said. They said managing all these varying requirements is a daunting task. “The multi-screen world had made our lives more difficult,” Hodgson said. “It’s a living hell for those of us in this space.” Schwartz likened the task to playing “very complex three-dimensional chess.” Speakers said service providers must resolve other pressing issues as well, including video streaming standards, customer identification and authentication methods, service reliability and content protection.
Service providers must hash out the business models for delivering multi-screen video with the programmers who hold the content licensing rights, speakers said. “It’s content rights and the commercial morals that go along with that,” Saini said. “The key is figuring out what is the new value chain. … We have to work out who’s going to get compensated and how.” There have been squabbles between service providers and programmers over retransmission rights and programming fees recently, and content licensing rights are an issue outside subscribers’ homes. “There are so many balls in the air,” Schwartz said. “They're not going to drop in a neat pile. … I just think things are going to get more difficult first. We'll muscle through but it’s not going to be beautiful.”
Despite General Motors’ recent move to halt ads on Facebook, O'Neill dismissed any concerns about the future of online commercials. He argued that Web’s audience measurement methods are far superior to anything that the TV industry can muster. “Online provides more data than God meant to create,” he said. “So people sometimes choke on all that data. Or they hold it to the seventh decimal.”