Big Brother Revisited - NMA Oct 09
by Nigel Walley, NMA - Oct 1st, 2009
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In the month when the demise of Big Brother has been announced, its great to think that we can begin to use the phrase in its original sense. It is particularly pertinent in the world of media monitoring as a new storm over privacy and ‘Big Brother tactics’ may be about to emerge over TV data.
TV VOD needs a broadband connection into a set top box for it to be delivered. As this convergence of the internet and broadcast industries ramps up, the amount of data that could be made available to the TV companies is giving the TV industry a nosebleed with excitement. However, consumer research keeps tempering the enthusiasm. It is not clear how much information consumers want their TV company to know about them?
In the TV industry there is two kinds of data, customer data and audience data but, currently these two data sets never meet. Virgin may know your address and bank account details but the industry uses completely separate panel data collected by BARB, to assess audience sizes for each show. By purchasing user rights to various databases, the TV platforms may know how many kids or pets you have or when your car renewal insurance is up. But, however much we may be nervous of their market power, Virgin or Sky have no idea what you watch through their system as their systems aren’t configured to measure this. The broadcasters themselves have even less idea. This could now change as broadband gets connected to the back of our set top boxes. We are now trying to work out what to do with it.
One feature of this debate however, is the inability to resolve the conflict in cultures between TV and the web. Initially this convergence was been viewed as a chance to bring ‘internet quality measurement to the TV’. The theory being that we can use internet connected set top boxes to draw back all sorts of useful commercial data about TV audiences. Further examination of the issue however, has merely highlighted the flaws in web measurement, rather than in TV measurement. Primary in this is the lack of debate about the difference between a solitary (or ‘solus’) viewing experience, which is the dominant condition for web content, and shared viewing, which is the dominant condition in the TV industry.
The TV industry trades by working out who is in the room when a programme is viewed, and selling as much of that audience as advertisers will buy. The key thing is knowing who is in the room. Basic set top box data can’t give you that. This is proving a particular problem around TV VOD, which currently falls between two audience measurement systems.
In the TV industry, only one company, Tiscali, currently uses ‘log-ins’. Now log-ins are a difficult issue for TV. Even if we can persuade consumers to use them, they can’t tell you who is in the room. They can’t even tell you if the person who originally logged in is still in the room. However, they will have their uses. It is likely that the next generation of set top boxes will allow individual users to build profiles, preferences, and playlists and potentially be the gateway into convergence with social networking. With online players we are seeing the arrival of social networking. Channel 4’s ‘Test Tube Telly’ and BBC iPlayer’s 3.0 iteration both use Facebook log-ins to connect TV viewing to the social network.
The final big question is why a consumer will bother. Unless there is a really good reason to get involved in all this, consumers will view it as an Orwellian nightmare. It is incumbent on the content bits of the TV industry to invent new and unique content types that can benefit from these systems or create reward structures that make it worthwhile consumers to support them.
If they get this right, we could re-write whole sections of the original Big Brother. Orwell could never have imagined that Winston Smith may have logged on to Big Brother’s monitor in the corner of his room, so that he could play scrabble with Julia or poke Emmanuel Goldstein.
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