One TV show, 20 providers
In this guest post, AdStream boss Peter Miller warns that its not just content that’s fragmenting – content providers are too
Reading of Fetch TV’s game-breaking deal with Optus gave me a slight headache. Or is that Optus’ game-breaking deal with Fetch TV?
TV is just going wild isn’t it? It’s hard to keep up even when you’re planning on keeping up.
Most people don’t know that LG have produced a smart fridge with a TV in the door. This is good news for everyone. You’ll never be far from a beer, and you’ll never miss you favourite ads whilst fetching one.
We can also watch television on our TV; via the TiVo and the Foxtel iQ; on the TBox; via the Play Station and the X Box; on your PC; on your iPad and iPhone and Blackberry.
And just when you thought you had acquired the maximum amount of hardware, along comes Fetch TV. Yep, it too comes with its own set top box which is great if your house rests on a concrete slab and you are a device glutton.
Now it’s pretty much bedrock theory that content drives demand. If you are at a debate and that’s the topic, you don’t want to be arguing in the negative.
But what happens when the same programmes are available from 20 different providers?
You might immediately think – price? If I can get the same re-runs of Get Smart at sixteen different price points, I’d choose the lowest? Where the lowest is usually free by fair means or foul the answer is usually ‘yup’.
So, all this proliferation is kind of bad news for Subscriber Television. No wonder Kim Williams has stumped up so big on the footy.
There is a different overlord kind of plays going on though, where entertainment drives bundled telecommunications purchasing.
The TBox isn’t much good to you if you aren’t doing business with Telstra and the Fetch TV Box isn’t going to be any good unless you are buying your broadband from Optus or iinet. Or something called Adam Internet which is in Adelaide. Oh, and Internode which started in Adelaide too. Oh, and something called Westnet which started in Geraldton and is really iinet.
But if you are active enough to want to shop around, you might just give your Telco the heave ho in return for a reasonably equivalent broadband deal plus a hot entertainment package. So IPTV is shaping as the next theatre of operations for the broadband sales war.
It’s far simpler to change your ISP than your bank after all. I mean, we’re all motivated to shank our bank at some point and we still don’t do it.
There is one group of consumers who don’t play by the old rules. They are the same annoying people who want a pay rise in a bad year and demand more positive feedback than they deserve. Yep, the 20 something’s! They are going to be a real pain the neck for Telco’s and entertainment providers alike for a long time to come, under the general heading ‘churn’.
Peter Miller is the managing director of Adstream.
Great post Peter!
I recently attended the TV Show Australia conference and the future opportunities / challenges in TV (video-based content might be a better descriptor) driven by technology are mind-blowing. Talk about trying to drink from a fire-hose on full!
Still, it’s what makes this industry such fun to be a part of, even after 25+ years, isn’t it?
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When drowning in choice I also think people use the easiest, most familiar option, even if it’s less quality/ more expensive which is why the FTA’s/ Pay Tv still have some life in them.
However considering uptil the introduction of pay tv 15 years ago, the only real advancement before that was colour – the last five years has definitely been a fast moving game in TV.
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I rarely watch ‘ordinary” TV except when I am in hotels.
For example in Bali I was very taken with the Asian Food Channel. . . Yum.
If I was going to take out a Pay-subscription in the future, I would make sure that was one of the available channels either as part of a package or an add-on to one.
It is a shame you can’t build your own preference package.
ITVdigital used to offer this in the UK back in the day.
Now the onus is on me to find a provider who has it..
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Set-top boxes, TBoxes, XBoxes all only talk to one thing – a signal either terrestrially through a wire or xtraterrestrially through a satellite connection.
IPTV will be useful only when the NBN rollout allows me to watch what I want when I want without any more propriety hardware or long term contracts.
So I am now going to prepare a business plan for the next government handout to those in the community when they all need to be connected to the NBN.
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Well you need some sort of screen at least.
If you are prepared to watch TV programmes retrospectively on dvd/ iplayer/youtube type thingies. . . you don’t need a contract or incoming signal hardware.
You don’t even need an address.
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