Four things Australian TV broadcasters should do to keep their audiences
With the ratings battle of 2012 officially over, Rodd Messent lays out four ways FTA broadcasters need to adapt to the new viewing habits of consumers.
2013 is shaping up to be a massive year in the Aussie free-to-air TV industry. Online ad revenues are expected to overtake free-to-air TV ad spend. Pay-TV competitor Foxtel is aggressively seeking to improve its subscription numbers by pursuing content deals like its recent exclusive one with HBO. There’s even talk of a consortium of channels launching a Hulu-like aggregated service to try and compete.
The standard individual broadcaster response seems to be to race to launch a fuller suite of web and mobile apps to meet the demand for viewing content at home and on the go (the ABC’s lovely iView currently winning). However, meeting demand for content on connected devices isn’t enough.
Unless Aussie TV networks start to think and act in truly user-centric terms organisation wide, the barriers to desperately needed service innovation will remain. Here are four things they (or a consortium of them) could do to become better user-centric companies:
Did Rodd pay for this sales pitch for his company?
How about they simply start and finish programs on time. And that’s just for starters!
When the networks can’t even get the basics right, then I don’t think any of these suggestions are really going to make a difference. Have consistent programming, be honest with the viewers, air things quickly to curb piracy, use multichannels effectively and yes, start things on time. Until they get these basics right there’s no chance they can possibly be effective at any of these suggestions
With all due respect, digital experts aren’t really in a position to tell TV networks how to monetise their audience.
Maybe with regard to drama a start might be to move away from the shockingly outdated model of Producer as Showrunner. Why Australia does this I have no idea. America has experienced a golden age of TV mainly due to the quality of the writing and writers having more of a say in the finished product. I have never met one Producer in this country who has impressed me with their ability to write effective drama..don’t even go there with comedy. And maybe producers will start surfing the net to find a generation of local content creators making quality productions that could easily morph into TV content. Australian TV is a joke and has been for sometime, mainly because of the solidified fossils running the stations haven’t a friggin clue as to how bad their programming has become, too many people in positions of power who are utterly out of touch.
@Shamma – and that type of mentality has got the TV networks into the position they are in today. #upshitcreek
95% of video viewing is still done on a traditional TV. Just saying.
Would be great to see a FTA think outside the box and create an on-demand video library – they must have a huge back catalogue of films/documentaries/specials that just sit around gathering dust.
I’d definately have no hesitation in paying to rent these services – plus any associated bandwidth costs.
@Kate Richardson: It’s true that around 95% of TV is still broadcast over traditional broadcast technologies. However, I would argue that when we bandy this stat around in our industry it misleads us to what is actually going on….
In addition to being used for viewing TV on the go, connected devices are also present in most homes when users are consuming said “traditional TV” (so called second or “cross” screening). This has changed the behaviors and expectation users have of BOTH their linear TV and connected device TV experiences. Behaviorally I would therefore argue this makes us all “users” of TV, regardless of the network used to deliver the content.
– Rodd Messent.
Hi Rodd, you’re right of course, the concept of the second screen has become more prevalent, however most research I’ve seen suggests TV watchers are interacting with a second screen, without actually specifying what they’re doing i.e. facebooking their friends vs ‘engaging with second screen content’.
Hi Kate – it’s true that the breakdown of what people are *actually* doing (i.e. TV content engagement or other things like FB, email etc on the second screen) is mostly proprietary application data held by the broadcasters (lets see if Zeebox releases anything in time about their numbers :)). During the TV viewing experience I do believe though it varies by content type (i.e. live tv, sports, etc high second screen TV content engagement vs premium drama low engagement), but along with predictable peaks and troughs at given times for most content types (e.g. ad breaks) and whether the experience is physically shared or not with others in the living room.