Decipher’s Themes for 2022

Covid lockdown over the last two years had a momentous influence on TV.  The TV industry played a significant role in making lockdown, and our emergence from it, bearable for so many people.   The impact of new tech, new players and new commercial models has been relentless through the period.  Unlike many industries, TV is generally good at riding the storm and turning the ‘new’ to its advantage.  New entrants get rapidly absorbed and become ‘old hands’ incredibly quickly, and our definition of ‘traditional TV’ expands with every new format or distribution method. We have continued to do that through the year.

2022 has continued in this vein. We think that its already possible to identify those issues that will be challenging us all, and we are putting in place workstreams to address them.  So this year we are expecting to focus our thinking into five areas and over the next few weeks we will expand on each of them. For now we thought we would share an outline of them with you for comment:

Changing of the Guard? – The last 12 months have been great for platform and device launches in the TV industry as we had a major new launches from the established players like Sky (with Sky Glass) and Virgin (with the new Virgin ‘Stream’ all-IP platform box) and Freeview Play (the AndroidTV PVR), as well as new services and devices from new players like Google, Roku and Amazon.

Recent developments have been notable for the way that the big tech companies began to use the power of their operating systems to shift from powering simple media players (like Chromecast) into other areas of TV distribution. Google had long ago expanded the remit of the Android TV OS into Smart TVs and this year took it back into set top boxes with Freeview Play and a range of platform boxes across Europe. This year we saw Smart TVs built by Amazon (using their FireOS software), in the UK for the first time (following last year’s launch in the US) and also SmartTVs from Roku (using their RokuOS9 software).
So far, the unit sales of these new OS devices aren’t significant so we don’t know their likely impact on users of traditional TV platforms or the likely impact on the current distribution share between them in the UK. This seems to us to be a fundamental question in UK television.

So, as well as assessing the potential impact of Virgin’s new platform on its market share, monitoring and assessing the shift of distribution share to a new cohort of players will be a key focus for Decipher in 2021. In particular, we will be watching how the regulators deal with the growth of TV platforms with interfaces that fall outside the ‘Prominence’ regulations, but have a growing offering of ‘live’ TV.

 

Continued Convergence – from a device perspective, the convergence of the TV industry with the phone and computing industry was a done deal a few years ago. Lockdown showed us that this convergence process is still continuing but with a new range of devices and industries. Recently, new devices like virtual assistants and audio systems, which had appeared in 2019, became mainstream in their integration with the TV industry and its device landscape. What was once a set of luxury integrations (eg ‘audio’ and ‘voice’) for high end devices ( became hygiene factor for any platform or device.
This poses two key questions for the next 12 months: firstly, how far can these existing integrations go to deliver new services and functionality. Voice control, in particular, feels like its only beginning to deliver its potential. The TV industry’s use of voice is still limited (some systems still won’t let you use voice to turn on the TV for instance). Secondly, there is a wider ‘smart home’ question of what new devices, services or industries can get pulled into TV’s orbit. New screen based innovations like Amazon’s Echo Show and Facebook’s Portal, flag up that there are still screen-based devices being invented for specific uses around our home. Services like video conferencing, utility management and CCTV are increasingly using the same devices and network connections to TV.

How these could all fit together, and whether the TV industry is a driver or passenger in the integration will become clear in 2022.

 

The Social Shift – After a few abortive attempts at building apps for the big screen, 2021 indicated that some of the social giants had begun to learn the lesson of what it took to succeed on TV. The apps of key social-video players like YouTube, Vevo and Twitch had already migrated up onto the big screen via Smart TVs and set top boxes. This year it has felt like content strategies were being developed to exploit this – with a growing focus on live events, sports and music being delivered on a big screen, but through a social app. If you are a gamer in particular, the arrival on TV of the massive live gaming events previously only popular in the Far East, meant your interests were represented properly on TV for the first time. As this happens we are seeing a shift in viewing share towards these social players, but also a change in the way we define them.

Last year we began to understand Netflix as a broadcast competitor not a platform.  In 2022 we will be watching the social video apps make the same journey and we will be monitoring the viewing going to social apps on big screen and trying to understand the implications for traditional broadcasters.  This will challenge our definition of what a ‘broadcaster’ is in 2022 – and in particular the question of how they are regulated.  The PSBs are in effect now competing head to head with Netflix, Prime, Youtube and Vevo.

In 2022 we will be trying to define what a broadcaster looks like for the ‘Twenties’ and how the market and regulators should respond.

 

‘Addressable’ To ‘Advanced’ TV Advertising –  In 2021 there was a significant focus, in advertising circles, on the growth of ‘AddressableTV’ and ‘CTV’ ad formats and buying systems. This is a natural outcome of the convergence trends discussed earlier, but Decipher like to think that this is part of a wider shift hitting TV advertising at the moment. We are now looking at the cumulative impact of a group of parallel but linked initiatives that are creating what could be described as an ‘advanced’ TV advertising culture. These initiatives include:
• The shift to addressability as data becomes further embedded in targeting and buying systems, and the potential for integrating 1st and 3rd party data more simply into delivery systems
• The acceleration of the process of automation of TV buying and the shift towards greater self-serve in these systems, prompted by the success of the systems built by the social video giants.
• The beginning of the trend for the sales of linear ads, VOD ads and ads in recorded programmes as a single TV advertising product eg Sky’s recently launched OneCampaign.
• The push to include TV measurement in new combined ‘all media’ measurement and evaluation (eg Dovetail, CFlight, Origin).

In 2022 Decipher has been reviewing the separate initiatives in these areas, but more importantly charting the cumulative impact of all the trends driving the industry towards a new ‘advanced’ state.  There is a regulatory question around these shifts as well, as we increasingly question how TV advertising on social platforms needs to meet the regulatory standards required of broadcast advertising.

 

Commercial to e-Commerce – the last 12 months have seen an explosion in the launch of ad-free content apps from major broadcast groups, along with their integration into mainstream TV platforms. The amount of ad-free TV by available volume and number of suppliers continues to grow along with un-attributable viewing hours that need to be accounted for.
The TV industry has undergone commercial ‘shocks’ before. When BT gave away the crown jewels, rewarding broadband customers with free football and movies, it turned our notion of value in the industry on its head. When Netflix showed that it was possible to build a commercially successful content business without ads it similarly changed our perception of the industry.
However, there is a third wave of change that is arriving with the integration of Amazon into parts of the platform market. As well as ad-free and subscription content, Amazon is bringing the impact of its vast e-commerce infrastructure to the table. Unlike many TV start ups, Amazon arrived in the TV market with a fully-fledged and large scale advertising capability. It started off in the market in a place of technical maturity that has taken some platforms a decade to get to. More importantly, its ability to use free TV to reward e-commerce activity through its Prime subscription base gives it the ability to monetise investments in content through a much greater variation in revenue streams than broadcast competitor.

In the next 12 months Decipher will be exploring the changing commercial base for television in the UK and examining the impact of non-TV revenues on the industry.

We look forward to debating these issues with you over the next few weeks and we would like to hear your thoughts on whether we have missed anything you think is important.

CES 2019 – Through the Lens of The TV Industry

This article first appeared in Broadcast Magazine on 25th Janaury 2019

Nigel Walley

Sept 2011 - New NW BW Head & Shoulders (thumbnail)Its that time of year again – CES. A hundred thousand people descend on Las Vegas to revel in new consumer technology, try and make sense of hundreds of corporate announcements and rack up our first expenses for the year. For the TV industry a show like CES is a mixed bag. Large parts of the show are irrelevant to our day to day. As well as TV, it covers health tech, car tech, drone tech, ed tech, sex tech and various other ‘tech’ areas where you might not have anticipated a tech intervention.

For the TV industry the show splits between device innovation and commercial announcements. Some companies even manage both. But before experiencing a single piece of tech you become aware of the politics of this kind of show just walking around Las Vegas looking at the billboards and the sponsorships. Apple never turn up, preferring to do their own announcements in their own venue. Even so, this year they managed to be present on various stands and even took a poster site outside the main venue with a sarcastic message targeted at other phone users. In the sections of the show dedicated to Smart Home tech, there were also multiple ‘works with Apple HomeKit’ labels attached to stands. They were on the TVs as well, in a more limited way as they announced partnerships and distribution deals with TV manufacturers.

Two years ago, with the launch of the Alexa, Amazon managed to pull the same trick – putting their devices and logos onto 500 stands without actually having their own presence. This year, Amazon took a small exhibition hall in the Venetian to explain the breadth of their tech and services offering. In response Google took over the whole town.

It felt like every major digital poster and sponsorship opportunity in Las Vegas had been taken over by Google, including the inside and outside of the monorail – even the recorded announcements on the monorail started with a ‘hey Google’ message. Outside the convention centre Google built their own pavilion with demonstration kitchens, theatres, car ports and a ‘Google Experience’ ride. Inside the convention centre they flooded the floor with Google clones dressed in Google boiler suits and woolly hats. 1800 stands had some form of Google presence on them, with 200 of them having Google manned demo rooms bolted onto the main stands. The message was that Google are coming for every part of your home.

What is clear is that the tech industry is trying to make sure our homes are ready to accept them. A consistent theme around the show this year was screens built into the most unlikely places. Before PCs and smart phones, TVs were our only screen. Now they are ubiquitous. CES showed us that any flat surface – fridges, cooker hoods, mirrors etc can be made into a screen that can run telly. Netflix on a mirror next to your bath? Amazon Prime on your shower screen? Clearly TV has a role in the smart home of the future but there isn’t much we need to do to play in this world. In Smart Homes it feels TV is a passenger on someone else’s journey.

Where we are on more familiar ground is on the TVs themselves. The mantra this year from the TV manufacturers was the same as it is every year – bigger, thinner, smarter, sharper. The signature gateway into the show is always the LG TV wall – 200 flat screen TVs linked together into an overwhelming waterfall of 8K content that you have to walk through and under to enter the show. It is a perennial demonstration of why TV always provides the figurative ‘sex’ at CES and why so many devices and innovations want our content on them.

Beyond the LG stand, most manufacturers demonstrated gorgeous 4K and 8K screens of increasing size and refinement. However, these were often coupled with utterly pointless ‘features’ to try and stand out from the crowd. We saw bendable, foldable and rollable TVs – all promoted as ‘benefits’ but really just attempts to mitigate the awkward fact that TVs are getting too big to fit into an average home. They also haven’t shed the nasty habit of including Netflix, and now Amazon Prime, buttons on their remote controls, demonstrating how the tech giants are trying to buy their way to dominance through tech deals.

A second major theme was TV software integration with the virtual assistants. Last year we were told that TVs could ‘talk to Alexa’ with a software patch. This year we were told that Alexa had been built-in to their core software. Most TVs now include a microphone and have software from Amazon, Google and in a few cases Apple, to ensure integration with the emerging voice landscape.

Clearly these deals include the requirement to have their logos on exhibition stands, not just remote controls, and many TV stands trumpeted their tech partners with stickers from each of the major ones. Samsung TVs went further than just assistant integration and included Apple AirPlay software, alongside its native casting software. As a result, Samsung were the furthest down the road to the ‘any content on any device’ vision.

A consistent theme throughout the show was the increased co-operation between the major players. Samsung demonstrated this by showing an iTunes app integration on their Smart TVs. This sat alongside the existing apps from Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu etc and showed that we are all on a journey towards every app on every device. The fact that Apple have felt the need to join in highlights the weakness in their TV device and service strategy to date. We were teased with an impending Apple SVOD service announcement, but the app didn’t appear at the show. We can only assume it will follow iTunes onto Samsung TVs before spreading out onto every other major brand. This will be as meaningful as Netflix arriving on Sky, but with global importance.

The TVs were interesting from a content presentation point of view. Samsung and LG are still pursuing their own operating systems and so were showing off menu designs that have borrowed heavily from the graphically rich Netflix approach. Some of the many Chinese manufacturers had bought their way into the market by adopting other software. TCS were showing their Roku TVs. However, the dominant software in TVs was Google’s android TV. This has become the default TV software for any company without its own software strategy, and gives Google an increasingly powerful gateway role for TV. Your app and content now need to be Android compatible or you aren’t in the game. It also puts TV at the heart of Google’s wider smart home strategy as all these TVs come ready to talk to Google Home and Nest.

One of those companies pursuing its own TV strategy was Amazon. With Prime now ubuiquitous on other devices, Amazon were showing off their own TV kit. Having shown they can build screen devices with their Kindle strategy they now targeting the big screen. In the US they have been trialling their own TV’s, made by companies like Toshiba, and running the FireTV software that runs in their sticks and mini-boxes. Their vision is an Amazon TV in the main room of your house and a stick plugged into every old TV in the other rooms. All plugged into Alexa and your ecommerce account.

They also demonstrated their new FireTV PVR. This is quite a shocking departure for a company that is so integral to the rise of on-demand TV. It has pioneered VOD through its own Prime service, and by hosting so many other VOD services on its own AWS platform. So to launch a broadcast recorder is really interesting statement about the TV market. It shows a pragmatic understanding that over-the-air broadcast is not going away anytime soon. It also shows an understanding of the power of local storage of recordings – particularly given the patchy quality of broadband in key markets like the US and the UK. Expect an Amazon Home Media server with integral PVR capability this year.

Stepping back from the details of the devices and the deals, the message CES gave the world is that TV is still at the heart of the tech revolution but new players are beginning to drive it. Pragmatism is breaking out between these tech players meaning content, apps and tech is increasingly shared and interoperable. The TVs that a consumer will buy in the shops will be increasingly competitive with the set top box based services from the pay platforms but are increasingly plugged into a global network of smart home, artificial intelligence and e-commerce software. For the consumer this is a fantastic outcome, but the global scale of these deals puts pressure on UK-only players.

 

This article first appeared in Broadcast Magazine on 25th Janaury 2019

Television Research and the 12-18s: the FutureTV Viewers Speak

By Matt Walters – @matthew_walters – matt.walters@decipher.co.uk

Head and shouldersIt has become a recurring theme among observers of the TV industry that young people have rejected broadcast television and “don’t watch TV any more”.  The huge take up of alternative video formats and new devices is continually interpreted as evidence of this rejection. Recent analysis of viewing patterns and quantitative research from Ofcom and Thinkbox has shown that linear still plays a significant role in the viewing mix for young adults. These reports also show that over half of viewing amongst 12 – 18 year olds is now non-linear VoD and OTT.  While the new data has reset our understanding of “what” is happening, what we haven’t known until now is “why”; what is motivating this shift, and will it remain in the future? more “Television Research and the 12-18s: the FutureTV Viewers Speak”

Down Periscope

The use of Periscope during Mayweather v Pacquiano raises interesting questions

Periscope is a streaming media app owned by Twitter. A consumer, with the Periscope app installed on their smart phone or tablet, can use their camera to film something and send a live stream of what they are filming over the web. The integration with Twitter means that a user’s Twitter followers are notified of the live stream, and can click through to it directly from Twitter.

On Saturday night, boxing fans in the live audience for the Mayweather vs Pacquiao fight in Las Vegas were using the app to send live streams of the event out over the web to their Twitter followers. Dick Costello – CEO of Twitter –rather foolishly declared Periscope the ‘winner’ of the fight, incurring the wrath of the rights holders for seemingly endorsing piracy. more “Down Periscope”

TVOD: the crown is there for the taking

Head and shouldersIt’s been a busy few days for Google Play, Google’s digital media store.  First came the announcement last week that Google Play was to be added to the “channels” on Roku’s streaming boxes in the US, UK, Canada and Ireland.  Shortly following this was the company’s Google+ post in which it revealed that Google Play’s movie service had been rolled out to nine more countries (many in Eastern Europe, and three – Iceland, Macedonia, and Bosnia – where they’ve got in ahead of iTunes).  And now Decipher’s latest wave of Mediabug research has thrown up an interesting perspective on a service that’s not only finding its place but performing well in the UK TVOD (transactional video on demand) marketplace. more “TVOD: the crown is there for the taking”

Decipher’s VOD Audit Q4 ’13: iTunes dominate total VOD size; but Sky lead catch-up

Decipher’s latest VOD Audit report is now available and with 84% of data collection automated, it provides the biggest and most robust picture of the UK video on demand landscape yet. It dissects the biggest 20 video on demand services in the UK giving an unrivalled overview of all VOD in the UK. 

The new expanded report reveals that Apple’s iTunes service comprehensively trounces the competition by offering a total of 65,063 video assets, 193% larger than the next largest service Xbox Video, and 275% larger than the largest TV VOD service BT TV/YouView. The biggest growth overall in VOD was seen in  Sky’s NowTV  service which is 208% larger than in September’s Q3 report. Other providers who grew strongly include Xbox Video (87%), Sky TV (+35%) and Netflix (+26%). more “Decipher’s VOD Audit Q4 ’13: iTunes dominate total VOD size; but Sky lead catch-up”

Decipher’s VOD Audit Q3 2013: YouView now provide more catch-up TV than Sky

Total Catch-Up TV by Platform
Total Catch-Up TV by Platform

Decipher’s latest VOD Audit reveals YouView is now the largest catch-up TV provider in the UK, growing by 24% to offer 2,677 assets. This gives it the lead over Sky by 85 assets with the satellite provider’s catch-up service totaling 2,592 assets, reflecting 11% growth since June. Importantly however, Sky’s claims to having the largest catch-up service still have some grounds: Their service offers far more breadth, giving subscribers access to content from up to 32 channels compared to YouView’s 15.

Looking at total video on demand on services audited in this quarter (which excludes iTunes and Google Play until next quarter), the most on demand is available through Sony’s Playstation Store, accessed via the Playstation 3 games console; the Store offers access to over 24,100 episodes and movies. The Audit places Blinkbox in second (20,800 assets) with Microsoft’s Xbox Video in third place (20,400 assets). more “Decipher’s VOD Audit Q3 2013: YouView now provide more catch-up TV than Sky”

Its Time To Break Up BBC iPlayer

Sept 2011 - New NW BW Head & Shoulders (thumbnail)Steve Hewlett published an article in the press last week that suggested Tony Hall’s big challenge was to sort out the BBC’s ‘digital’ strategy. Steve was onto something in latching onto ‘digital’ as a key area requiring attention, but we think he erred in thinking that ‘digital’ was somehow a separate problem to core strategy.  This article makes the case that you can’t separate ‘digital’ from the rest of BBC strategy.  More importantly, it makes the case that there is a fundamental flaw in the way new media, and iPlayer in particular, are organised and managed within the core of the BBC. We believe that this flaw is now having a significant impact on the arguably more important BBC broadcast brands. Three BBC announcements in the last month have highlighted the need for a fundamental re-think.

more “Its Time To Break Up BBC iPlayer”

What We Want From CES This Year!

PrintWe are about to make our annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas on our clients’ behalf, so we thought we would create a shopping list of the things we are hoping to see and the announcements we expect. We would love to hear your views:

Smart TVs  –  In 2013, these really have to start living up to their ‘smart’ billing.  A number of companies (including us) started to get under the skin of Smart TVs in 2012 and realised that they weren’t that smart (see our blog – here).   The main issue was the poor quality of their operating systems.  No one believes that Smart TVs will be running a proprietary OS in five years, so we need to see some light at the end of  the OS tunnel.  LG are showing their Google (ie Android for TV) sets, but will the rest follow?  More interestingly, will Microsoft announce a Smart TV OS based on Windows 8 for third party OEMs?  This could see the Xbox look and feel arrive on a TV screen.  Samsung make laptops with Windows8 so why not TVs?

more “What We Want From CES This Year!”

We’re Crawling Not Leaping into the 3rd Dimension

By Lloyd Mason – March 2011

Few innovations in TVs history have caused as much divisiveness as 3D. Currently the darling of consumer electronics, manufacturers and retailers far and wide are actively demonstrating this revolutionary new form of TV. However consumers don’t seem to be buying it; either the idea or the technology itself.

So what explains the public’s apparent lack of affection for 3D?  According to What Hi-Fi? magazine, 135,000 3D screens were sold in 2010, the first year the technology has really been available to British consumers. This seems respectable until you consider that nearly 10m TVs were sold in total and set sales were bumper last year due to the boost of the football World Cup in South Africa, always a driving point for sales of new sets. 3D sets totalled 1.35% of sales.

more “We’re Crawling Not Leaping into the 3rd Dimension”