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Command economy
Posted By C21 Reporters On 27-03-2015 @ 3:32 pm In Features | Comments Disabled
Dilshan Swaris, media director at planning and buying agency Carat, argues that social media has revived appointment-to-view television and ushered in a new era of ‘television-on-command.’
I will bet that anyone watching the final episode of Breaking Bad had been itching for the entire previous week to find out whether a certain chemistry teacher kicked a certain bucket. I’ll also bet you were talking about it all week (on and offline). I will also make a final (and slightly more specific) bet that 33% of you were also talking about it on social media during the actual episode.
According to a recent study using our proprietary research tool – a survey of 11,000 UK consumers’ media habits – this is the proportion (33%) of people using social to talk about what they were watching during the show. The research also found this sort of appointment-to-view TV was driving 35% of people to plan their evenings around the schedule – a rise of five million from four years ago.
What this means is that TV-on-demand – the one-time hero and saviour of the (apparently) struggling medium of television – is actually making way for an emerging viewing trend, TV-on-command, where people want to sit and watch a programme as it airs, so they can feel part of the show and the buzz.
No one wants to be the dreaded spoiler and people don’t want to wait four days to get around a watercooler. They want to experience that moment there and then, where they can interact with friends and strangers.
This is particularly important, as our research also shows that 20% of people say friends and family are a huge influence on their TV viewing (up from 5% in 2010) and this referral traffic can positively or negatively affect a show’s progress.
This obviously also has huge ramifications for advertisers. It turns their advertising from a monologue to a dialogue. Using second-screen opportunities allows the user to access more content, means more dwell time with the brand for consumers and also helps to drive convergence and get the consumer closer to the point of purchase. This is something that advertisers have been trying for a while with more traditional advertising methods such as TV.
And social is the engine driving all of this. Facebook and Twitter launched just 10 and eight years ago respectively but now seem intrinsic to our culture and day-to-day behaviour. What’s probably even more surprising is how harmonious social media is with traditional TV – facilitating the conversation, opinion, driving viewing up and opening up formerly cult TV to a larger audience. Would Walter White’s escapades have enjoyed the mainstream success they did before Facebook, Twitter, etc? I’m not sure they would.
However, also important was the introduction of the tablet, seen as the rejuvenation of the press world, it has actually had a major influence on how people consume and interact with content.
It has also evolved the broadcaster distribution model and opened up second-screening and on-the-move content to the masses in all age groups, not just tech-savvy millennials.
And it’s the global tech firms that will also lead the way in the next 10 years. Google, Apple and Microsoft will undoubtedly make a big play in the TV business and have shown interest already. Other significant global players, such as Amazon, will make a more concerted move in TV content. This will make the current market far more competitive and even traditional TV trading models may evolve and become more programme-based.
As consumption becomes more platform-agnostic and the choices available to an average viewer become even more expansive, success will be determined by those players who own their own content. These players will continue to become more dominant and those who don’t own the rights to their content will be increasingly under threat.
When you get down to the crux of it, it’s really quite simple. It’s all about quality content and ensuring content is available to view as easily as possible. The broadcasters know this already and this, as a core, will remain unchanged.
Will we still watch TV in 2025? Of course. Human need states don’t change. People want to escape, be entertained and indulged. No other medium offers this as much as TV. That is the reason why appointment-to-view TV continues to perform so strongly and will continue to do so. Technology is only as good as the needs it fulfils and the behaviour it enables.
In 2025 we’re still going to want to be entertained. By then, the chemistry teacher trying to provide for his family and the talent show might be dead and buried, but there will be other event TV pumped through viewing devices to tell us a story or sing us a song and sweep us away from our lives for a while.
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