Multiscreen Behaviors
People Use Tablets While Watching TV. Now what?
We’ve known for years that a majority of people are sitting at their laptops and using their mobile telephones when they watch television. Marketers have sought to capitalize on this cross platform behavior, but it has been the introduction of tablet computers — with their easy-to-customize applications environment — that has driven forward a vision of a multi-screen video future. The open question is best phrased as follows:
We know that 70% of tablet owners (compared with 2/3 of laptop owners) are using their tablets while watching television. But tablets (perceived to be wildly influential and far-reaching devices) only reach into 5% of U.S. households (the U.S. numbers are available). So what are we to do with this energy?
By contrast, we’ve been talking about Social TV and Connected TV for several years, and it’s been a wholesale flop (outside of the technology industry and among those writers and marketers directly involved in the stuff). Yahoo! has been working slow and steady with their Connected TV platform. And Google’s recent entry has been far less successful. But why are we talking about social networks and connected TV platforms in a short piece about multiscreen video?
Cross-platform + Multiscreen = Advertising
The answer is far simpler: advertising. It’s that the true appeal of multiscreen video is to start generating cross-platform traffic, even if it’s on a single device. With mobile devices, the primary way to demonstrate cross-platform behaviors has been SMS voting for television shows. However, tablets change the game entirely, giving broadcasters (Pay TV and FTA) the ability to stream video to a device and to then track clicks and response to advertising. Of course, one could argue that this capability exists online with PC-based web video, but licensing and rights have been far more problematic for those platforms.
BIG Picture Multiscreen Research
Our approach takes the following steps:
- What do we give up (if anything) to enable multiscreen behaviors? Key differences are expected to lie in conditional access (CAS) and digital rights management (DRM) technologies that feed into audit, carriage fees and other revenue models between media companies, advertisers, broadcasters and Pay TV service providers.
- What do we gain by enabling multiscreen video? Revenues. New features. Capabilities. New media formats.
- New revenues? The Internet-centric thinking is that targeted, measurable advertising is worth more, though the marketplace hasn’t borne out that assertion in large scale. Are there new revenues, or will multiscreen, cross-platform revenues simply come by shifting money from somewhere else?
- New features/New Media Are logical outgrowths of the technology.
- Is it worth it for service providers? There are a host of management consultants, MBAs, technology vendor and media companies asserting that multi-screen video is a “must do” for service providers. Chances are good that the actual results will be a mixed bag that will (at best) weaken service providers and their business position in a multi-screen world driven by the very networks they operate.
We’ll be doing research on multiscreen video through Q2 and Q3 2011, with published results in the fourth quarter.