Advanced TV Needs New Math
August 2, 2010 - Openet
As advanced TV and video platforms gain new capabilities, they also create new opportunities and challenges for measurement. Metrics can support the growth of new platforms by reflecting added value created for consumers, content distributors and advertisers.
Advanced TV platforms — such as addressable ads, interactive TV, video-on-demand and digital video recorders, as well as the “over-the-top” TV Everywhere models like online video and mobile — require cable operators to adapt with flexible, software-based solutions that can measure audience engagement across multiple platforms and adapt in real time.
A recent report by The Diffusion Group found that 60% of adult broadband users, which represent about 95 million consumers, were “enthusiastic” about TV Everywhere services and 34% (about 54 million customers) were willing to pay at least $5 per month for online video. The report also showed that 39% of pay TV subscribers would pay $5 or more to access their favorite TV shows on a PC (about half of them would pay $5 extra each month; onethird would pay an extra $10 per month; and one-fifth would pay more than $15 per month).
With new TV Everywhere models, operators need an audiencemeasurement solution that allows them to upsell premium content with flexible (payper- use, buy access for a week, etc.) pricing models. They need to increase viewership of nonlinear content (both paid VOD and premium TV Everywhere). Doing so will require them to have the price flexiblity to compete with such rivals as Apple’s iTunes Store and Netflix.
Today’s audience-measurement solutions, such as Nielsen, only provide data-storage and reporting capabilities inside siloed environments. In today’s multiscreen world, cable operators are demanding a single technology solution that allows them to capture, leverage and evaluate audience engagements and interactions across multiple viewing platforms — from linear to nonlinear (on-demand) to viewing data and click-streams associated with ITV viewing behavior and subscriber events.
In order for operators to capitalize on advanced TV and video, they need to create and optimize new revenue streams and eliminate redundant systems that are typically focused on service silos. This allows cable operators to gain comprehensive, real-time insight into every way that subscribers use, view and interact with video services across multiple platforms.
Operators need a solution that uniquely extends across all systems within the network, including legacy systems, in order to remove the headache of gathering data from disparate locations — it is crucial to aggregate and unify end-to-end visibility across all video services.
With an architecture designed to holistically address issues such as revenue leakage, audience measurement, loyalty and promotion analytics and network congestion, operators can create a holistic approach to converge network and service data, enhanced by information from offline subscriber systems, which unlocks the latent OSS/BSS data assets of operators and ensures information can be analyzed and transactions executed using all available network and system data.
A vertical-specific data model, convergent data collection, cleansing, aggregation, normalization and enrichment of storage greatly simplifies the readiness and availability of data for both business intelligence via a data warehouse and service-delivery platforms with a centralized real-time transactional database. This allows operators to act in real time, managing identity, subscriber-entitlement and service-usage rules across all services and networks, providing a horizontal profile capability to enable services such as ITV, TV Everywhere, advanced EBIF applications, e-commerce authentication and parental control authentication.
Operators also need to aggregate data to be shared with third parties to enable business relat ionships, helpful for industry-wide efforts, i.e., col laboration on advanced advertising and other industry- wide initiatives, like Canoe. This gives operators the ability to offer their subscribers personalized content or discounts based upon their viewing habits (e.g. downloading the soundtrack to a film directly after viewing the movie on demand), which adds value to the consumer and expands the operator’s opportunities to monetization.
Measurement is a critical component to successful advanced TV and TV Everywhere models, because if you can’t count it better, you can’t sell it.
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