26

Nov

The Future Of TV – 10 Nuggets

I attended a great event yesterday pm at The Guardian in conjunction with Red Bee Media to discuss The Future Of TV. The session was hosted by Kate Bulkley and comprised a panel of four leading commentators in the TV world: WPP’s Mark Read, Kip Meek of YouView, Bill Patrizio of Red Bee Media and Facebook’s Christian Hernandez. The following is a selection of points I found particularly relevant:

1. Bill Patrizio observed there is a dramatic change going on in the world of video. Consumers appear to have an insatiable appetite and this is driving dramatic change in the supply and demand chain for video
2. There are 686 TV channels in the UK but the model of delivering TV to households is evolving to delivering TV to individuals on 2/3 different viewing devices
3. Kip Meek said that noone truly knows the future of TV but there are consistently new tools being developed which are there to drive the business of TV forward
4. From an advertiser perspective, there has not yet been an opportunity to apply any of internet benefits to TV but this is now changing with increasingly relevant advertising opportunities
5. Youview will launch anytime from June 2011 and enable a new price-point of entry for TV channels, allowing local TV to grow and develop and businesses to create a TV channel (Glyndebourne Opera was sited as an example)
6. Facebook is looking at how to integrate TV and create hubs for passions, offering additional ways to monetise around content
7. Bill Patrizio added that the change in video-viewing is generational and that 18-35s as they grow older will increasingly expect to be able to interact with video. This has implications for tools such as today’s EPG
8. Facebook was described as a discovery engine and comparisons were also drawn with Google and iTunes as the new type of EPGs
9. It was suggested that TV is scared of Google after what it has done to newspapers. There is the potential danger of it being too powerful in the digital advertising market-place. If TV goes on to be trade by Google, this is a worrying development for broadcasters.
10. Patrizio commented the future of the ‘plumbing’ needs to be look at carefully i.e. will the UK infrastructure be good enough to deliver the volume of content that consumers will crave

For more info and to watch the debate in full, visit: http://www.redbeemedia.com/news/live-webcast-industry-leaders-debate-future-tv

912 days ago Short URL Comments

Content/Digital/TV

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10

Nov

10 Nuggets from Sport and iGaming 2010

I attended a great event today, presented by SportBusiness and iGamingBusiness, and attended by a selection of movers and shakers in the rapidly growing world of sport and online gambling. As background, online gambling brands are the fastest growing sponsor of professional sport. In the UK alone, 28 per cent of Premier League and Championship football clubs have a gaming company as a shirt sponsor.

The following are 10 nuggets that I’ve picked from the day’s presentations and discussions:

1. Steve Keall, Pinsent Masons LLP, revealed that 9.9% of the UK population participate in some form of igaming. His session included discussions around the Gambling Commission and its role as a restrictive rather than permissive body.
2. Andrew Croker, Perform, presented the Watch&Bet service, an online TV for bookmakers facilitating in-running betting, which he likened to the old world equivalent of a TV in the corner of the bookies. In-running betting represents 90% of the betting market in Asia.
3. Key sports for in-running betting are football and tennis because they appeal to all territories and have multiple betting opportunities during the match.
4. Alex Gough, Professional Squash Association, outlined the strategy to sell squash through a much-improved TV product. They started by realising the value of the betting rights and built a TV property for the Watch&Bet service using the content available. This has allowed them to fast track the growth of the sport to the point where they can begin to properly market the sport rights to TV.
5. During ‘The changing face of iGaming’, Mike Falconer, Bettorlogic highlighted the big change for bookmakers was that they were now interested in all content to bet around to provide a 24/7 offering to customers. This was highlighted in anecdotes around the interest in Filipino basketball because it is scheduled for a Wed and Fri at 10am.
6. It was also suggested in the same session that the regulated betting markets deal with issues of cheating in sport and that the current issues (in particular, for cricket) are being caused by the unregulated markets.
7. Kevan Moretti, Racing Post, raised an interesting point as to whether taxation levees on betting can be used in such a way as to protect live sport against virtual sport, which is having an impact on sports and betting.
8. In ‘The challenges in iGaming’ session, Nick Hawkins, Danoptra observed that sponsors want sports to be clean and that this will be an issue for sponsors around the next England v Pakistan test series. He stressed that online bookmakers do not cause the fault for this failure in cricket, that the opposite is true as they provide unprecedented levels of data for audit trails and that this needs to be highlighted to the anti-gambling lobby.
9. Mike Shaw, Comscore, presented a comprehensive set of data on online gambling sites highlighting that the UK is one of the most active gambling nations in the world with 18.5% of UK traffic goes to line gambling sites. The 365mediagroup had the highest representation of heavy gamblers in the UK.
10. The day was rounded off through case studies from Betfair and Bodog about their experiences of sponsoring Manchester United and Fulham FC respectively. The Betfair CityvUnited campaign delivered for the derby in April 2010 was fascinating and well worth checking out.

If you’d like further details, don’t hesitate to get in contact with me at matt@braben.co.uk. I’m now off to place some bets for this weekend’s England v Australia game and the Haye v Harrison bout.

927 days ago Short URL Comments

Digital/London 2012/Sport/TV/World Cup 2010

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09

Nov

Shirky on The Times’ paywall

Fascinating blog has been posted by Clay Shirky entitled The Times’ Paywall and Newsletter Economics.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/11/the-times-paywall-and-newsletter-economics/

It’s a very useful summary of what’s happened to date and the challenge facing News International which he describes as looking like ‘a referendum on the future’ of newspapers.

One particularly pertinent point is the following:

As of July, non-subscribers can no longer read Times stories forwarded by colleagues or friends, nor can they read stories linked to from Facebook or Twitter. As a result, links to Times stories now rarely circulate in those media.

I highlighted this at the time of the paywall starting as being something which may force PRs to consider other media for stories that they are looking to build awareness for across a broad audience. It remains true still today.

Shirky also suggests that The Times is becoming an online newsletter and goes so far as to suggest that it is an online newsletter for the Tories. I’m not sure I agree with this point.

Personally though I have found that, despite daily dipping into The Times site, I have come across little of value that I couldn’t find elsewhere.

However, The Sunday Times site is becoming a must log-in to of a Sunday morning, particularly its brilliant Culture planning tool!

929 days ago Short URL Comments

Digital/Newspapers

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01

Nov

Media Guardian outlines new strategy

As Dan Sabbagh joins today (following his successful stint at Beehive City) there is a perfectly timed article in Press Gazette, outlining the strategic plans for Media Guardian. It sets out very clearly its ambitions to become a media portal, following in the steps of the Guardian’s environment section. It’s rare to hear from the Media Guardian publicly re: strategy but useful from a media PR’s perspective all the same. It also reinforces just how important the sites that have RSS feeds onto the mediaguardian.co.uk home page have become, including Press Gazette, paidContent and Brandrepublic. Further details of the article are below.

At the same time, a new media portal has recently launched (with senior team members from Incisive Media, Reed Business Information and paidContent) which is also well worth checking out at http://www.themediabriefing.com/.

It’s a mixture of curated content on the business of media from around the web – there are more than 200 sources – and original journalism and opinion from a suite of regular expert commentators.It covers all types of media including B2B media, consumer mags, newspapers, TV & film, radio, digital media and agencies.

Media Guardian retreats from B2B territory
1 November 2010

By Dominic Ponsford

The appointment of Dan Sabbagh as the new head of the Guardian’s media and technology team coincides with its retreat from seeking to compete with established trade players such as Press Gazette, Broadcast and Media Week.

Sabbagh was media editor of The Times for five years and resigned from that job in January. He then launched independent media news blog Beehive City.

Talking about media trade websites in general, Sabbagh said: “We don’t want to compete with you – where we do compete with you, we want to back out of it. We want to showcase your stuff.”

In recent weeks, Media Guardian has begun carrying a selection of links to stories from rival media websites on its homepage. Sabbagh said that this is a strategy which it wants to expand and develop: “We want to become more like a media portal, so that you find everything you want to find through us.”

He told Press Gazette that Media Guardian is also planning to carry content from a network of independent bloggers who may want to come under its umbrella.

The change in tack is similar to the strategy adopted by the Guardian’s environment website, which carries content from a variety of partner websites in the sector as well from independent bloggers.

The move signals a significant shift for Media Guardian, which launched ten years ago and has previously covered much of the same ground as titles such as Media Week (which closed as a print title last year but continues online) and Press Gazette.

Like other titles in the sector, Media Guardian has seen a reduction in editorial headcount over the last couple of years.

Sabbagh said: “We want to acknowledge that there is only so much you can do yourself and the web is so much bigger than that.”

He added: “We can’t do everything and we don’t want to do everything. The Guardian needs to concentrate on the things that it’s good at. It needs to look at the big picture in media and technology.

“There’s a lot of interesting bits of detail underneath that – but it’s not our job to report on those because we don’t have the people.”

937 days ago Short URL Comments

Digital/Newspapers

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