The Future of Web TV is........much like its past

Was invited to the Telco 2.0 Brainstorm on Thursday to hear about where we now are with digital media, and especially to hear Keith McMahon, my collaborator on our 2008 Web TV research, do an update on some of his research on the TV & Film industry's value chain. I felt the first 2 sessions gave the most insights (ie stuff readers of this blog may find new) so here is a precis:

First up was David Touve, Professor of Strategy, Williams School of Commerce - his talk was based around the 2x2 matrix above - initially Digital Media thought the Immersive experience (top right) was the "killer app" but it turns out we use all 4 quadrants to educate, inform and entertain ourselves as they have different capabilities. Increasingly for service providers the issue is "toggleability" between the service types. He felt the new smartphones (iPhone onwards) are a major step forward as they toggle well and are fast to use - and, of course, mobile so can be used more often

Next up Adam Smith, Global Futures Director, GroupM who confirmed something we noted 2 years ago - ie there is not enough Ad revenue on the planet to fund all the digital media services people want to build. He noted the revenue is being re-allocated into Social Media and away from pure search as other forms start to adopt "Cost per Action" pricings. One observation I liked is that Traditional advertising gets you to the door, digital advertising gets you into the shop - and they are not competing with each other, more complementary from an advertisers point of view - and the cost and effectiveness of Trad Ad is still way better than digital. Thus in fact the digital behemoths are actually spending increasingly more money in traditional Advertising (cf Google advertising on TV and on billboards).

Then Andrew Bud, Chairman, Mobile Entertainment Forum who argued that Mobile Digital Media is being transformed by 3 forces today:

Consumption Terminals
Mobule no longer means "phone", it means the car, laptop, game console, tablet etc are all now mobile consumption terminals. Power is moving to the owners of the terminal (the fourth and most downstream phase in the classic 4 box model of the media value chain ) from the content owner, aggregator, and distributor (the upstream elements in the 4 box model). Apple paved the way, others are following suit and this is driving new ecosystems.

MultiChannel Worlds
Bud argues that by 2008 it was becoming clear that "mobile" as a separate media business was doomed and its increasingly become all about multi-channel media relationships (cf "toggleability") (I'd agree, but in 2008 when we mooted this there was strong resistance)

Enablers
Bud believes a new layer has emerged - the Enabler - that is driving that seamless "toggleable" consumer experience, and that these are the new areas of value growth. Key rules are (wait for it....)

- Fast and Simple
- No Questions - Must know beforehand what you like, so needs previous input
- No surprises - like sticker shock on music downloads

If that sounds much like Planet Mobile 2005, I'm afraid its because it is. However, we now have a new tool (ta da) - The Enabler - to finally make it all happen. The MEF has projects looking at Enablers for Delivery, Billing (especially refunds), Handset context and Subscriber Insight. Again, 2005 redux methinks.

Well, you know our view of Planet Mobile - for any New Thing, halve the predicted value, double the time taken. We see no reason not to apply that to Enablers. I added this session if only to show that in Planet Mobile things the more things change, the more they are the same.

To be fair to Andrew, he did make the point that since Planet Mobile is moving so slowly it was highly likely that other over-the-top service providers - especially terminal makers - are likely to steal the game away (I had to smile wryly, I was immersed in all this in 2004/5 when we were trying to show Planet Mobile that the music market was going to be stolen from them)

Keith's talk was on the dynamics of the Movie market, and there was quite a bit of stuff on the problems with windowing (ie timing the release of a movie in cinemas' on DVDs, by country etc)- but I want to combine that with a talk given by Caroline Wiertz at our recent TEDxTuttle conference in a later post. For the purposes of this post, he listed a number of areas where studios need the help of the digital community:

- Data Mining
- Measurement across channels
- Reach
- Improved Content Discovery
- Optimising content 9especially Ads) across the User's profile
- Lowering Distribution Costs
- Simplify Transactions, but at the same time....
- Protecting against Theft, to...
- Get better value online

Tell me you haven't heard all that before

In fact, as Keith pointed out, what is interesting comparing now vs when we did our report in 2008, is just how little the mainstream media industry as a whole has changed its structure and concerns, despite its rapidly falling profitability.

The last 2 sessions were on Mobile Apps (if you read Techmeme and use an iPhone you know the state of the art) and Devices as a source of new business (see above, but in more detail)

I will leave you with an interesting little aside from the day - I can't recall who said it (notes are a bit awry) but one person showed graphs noting that if one looks at the total amount of Music Piracy over the 'Net 2000 - 2010 it is minute compared to say the total number of songs played over radio in the same period so the industry doth definitely protest too much. I will try and find them and reproduce them.