Guest comment: It’s time for TV to get personal

Punters have been predicted for years that people will be surfing the internet on their phones and TVs, but there’s a new trend on the block: the web is making these old platforms obsolete.

Charlie Dunstone, of Carphone Warehouse, recently said that “the laptop is the new mobile phone”, Sky’s web browser on the TV initiative has been sold to a management buy-out team, ITV is broadcasting Gossip Girl on Bebo, and Five is running the news on Myspace.

This growth in online content is going to cause further headaches for  traditional broadcasters: their audience shares already fragmented by the multi-channel universe, and those without access to public funding have seen advertising revenues hit by the shift to online advertising.

Yet the question that everybody wants to have answered is how people are going to find TV shows to watch online?

Google and Apple hope that they already have the answers, but the growing amount of TV content means that something has to change. If you’re looking for a Wikipedia article, Youtube video, or a place to buy something, Google is great but tends not to bring up the right results for more specific searches.

Trying ITV’s new show “Gossip Girl”, Google gives me a page of US links, the ubiquitous Wikipedia article, but no link to the page on Bebo where you can watch it. Searching for “Eastenders” provides similar results, when what I really want is the iPlayer link to watch the show.

This instant access to content is going to be key to getting these online services beyond the low levels they are today. When it comes to watching television online, users are looking for three different things: specific shows, new shows, and shows that match their personal interests.

Specific shows are illustrated by the Eastenders example: someone goes to a search engine and types in the name of a show. The search engine should recognise that it’s a TV show, and provide links to the online content. With multiple episodes, users should be offered a choice of which episode to watch, and if some are paid for, this should be made known to the user.

New shows are harder to handle in the online model as people don’t search for what they don’t know about. In the traditional set-top-box services, new shows are promoted heavily in the broadcast stream with trailers before and during relevant shows, and the set-top-box EPG itself promotes the shows on key channels during peak times, which are usually the newer shows anyway.

Online, newer shows are often promoted through traditional ad sales: banners and MPUs show the latest shows available on different services, and it’s only a short leap to see that broadcasters will start embedding advertisements for their latest shows into the online video streams.

The third and final part of the recipe is personalisation, and this could prove to be the killer-app for TV on the web. Personalisation has never worked very well on set-top-boxes: television by its very nature is watched by a group of people – typically a family – rather than individuals. It’s not straightforward to see who’s watching what, and in the same way that I don’t want to have CBeebies recommended to me, my wife would rather not know that the latest re-runs of Star Trek are on.

On the web, all of this disappears. If the laptop is the new mobile phone, then every member of the house will have one and teenagers will sit in their bedrooms watching TV over the web, rather than on TV. Personalisation makes complete sense here: users who like science fiction can be told when the latest alien invasion is being broadcast, and those who are more interested in films can be similarly kept up to date.

We’ve been running a personalised TV reminder service for AOL for the last year, and our experience is that the vast majority of users specify more than one preference: the average is three, with many specifying 10 or more. However, you don’t need that much information to understand your TV viewer: people only set reminders for shows that they have a strong affinity to.

You can be confident that fans of Battlestar Galactica will be interested when The Bionic Woman is on, and be certain that they won’t be upset if it’s recommended to them – actually they’d be unhappy if it wasn’t.

This is the kind of personalisation the web retailers like Amazon have been running for years, and this is what will make a success, or failure, of traditional broadcasters as they move online.

For now, the BBC and ITV have the benefit of huge audiences that they can use to drive traffic to their online sites. If they can turn this traffic into a loyal base of viewers online then they will be well placed for the future.

If they can’t get this loyalty, then they’ll face further fragmentation from the major online brands, US based broadcasters, who all want a slice of the TV pie.

By

Tom Weiss

CEO, TV Genius

www.tvgenius.net