Zeebox and first mover advantage

3 weeks ago I bought myself a sexy new Samsung smart TV, then just over a week ago came the perfect accompaniment in the form of Zeebox for the iPad.  Sure it may not be the most incredibly groundbreaking idea to create a TV listings app that delivers and allows you to share contextual information about what you’re watching – but then it’s simple things which often catch on.  Most of us have done the conference circuit and heard talk after talk about all the amazing possiblities of the second screen syncing to TV (from interactive ads to transmedia TV formats, shopping to new forms of content discovery), but now someone’s actually done something about it, and you’ve gotta at least respect that.

So here’s what I like:

1. Simple, intuitive and clean UI: It’s a really sleek design on iPad.  I love the forwards/backwards EPG (albeit limited to now, next and the previous show).  Clearly Anthony Rose has taken one of the better ideas from youview and run with it, although it would obviously be very exciting if/when it integrates with catch-up services.  I also like the simple ways of organising content by channel, popularity, friends and genres… if I had more than one friend on Zeebox I’m sure the ‘friends’ view would be quite compelling, which takes me on to…

2. Social features: It’s nice I can see what my friends are watching (although maybe my friends don’t appreciate me knowing they’re watching ‘Boob Envy’ on PickTV).  I like the prospect of inviting friends to view with me (again, when I have more friends on the app).  It’s a great bit of foresight to automatically add the show hashtag when I go to tweet.  And the fact my login to the app is via Facebook Connect makes life easy too.

3. Zeetags: Sure some of these aren’t quite right – but they’re pretty spot on!  While everyone else seems to be talking up investing shed loads of money into audio stream technologies Anthony Rose has taken the simpler and cheaper approach of generating tags from subtitles.  Ok – so it’s not that exciting that zeetags only lead to wikipedia and news – but there is HUGE commercial and creative potential here for both broadcasters, content owners and third parties – zeetags could be like a google adwords (or promoted tweets) for TV.

4. Controls your TV: I love the fact it can switch between channels on my TV – that makes it worth it alone.  Of course it’s pretty limited right now and doesn’t really address the issue that I tend to flick between Freeview HD and Sky – but again there’s a lot of potential as Zeebox is cutting out the remote and the traditional EPG – again a clever move with big implications (how long until a service like YouTube or Netflix buys a placement in the Zeebox EPG?).

5. Fast: It goes without saying but to keep my attention the app needs to download images/metadata quickly and be traction free – and it is pretty good in this regard.

There’s a few other bits in Zeebox that I’ve not tried or don’t really pay attention to (shopping, audience popularity, twitter feed (but that’s because I have my tweets open in tweetdeck on my third screen)), but then I’m sure others do use them.

The big thing for me is this has the potential to be disruptive.  So no one’s heard of ‘Zeebox’ as a brand yet, but how far behind are the broadcasters with their own version of this kind of thing?  If youview try to do something then are we to wait another year?  In that time zeebox (which will be on iPhone and android too I’d guess) may be a destination in its own right.  I was running a brainstorm called ‘Death of the Remote Control’ at Mindshare last Thursday and I was taken aback when I showed them Zeebox and they got very excited at how they could promote brands through zeetags… there are serious dollars which might leak to this kind of third party app.

So what are broadcasters to do?  They can get on board and make Zeebox an even more compelling proposition by giving it access to advertising timelines, additional content, interactive features, on-demand, and maybe in return share that potential revenue and get some valuable data?  Or they can try to kill it – create technical standards that make integration complex, deny it access to on-demand content, or try to create something better (and stay better).

It’s an exciting (and shrewd) move on the part of Anthony Rose.  To deliver something like this in under 9 months is pretty impressive, and the broadcasters are going to struggle to move at that pace themselves. I look forward to seeing what Zeebox, broadcasters and advertisers do next.

Zeebox Video Tutorial

Apologies that it’s been so long since my last blog – things have been busy with a rather exciting development project we’ve secured with a broadcaster.  I’m sworn to silence on that for now, but I can talk about this…

Yesterday the good and the great of the digital world came together at Horseferry Road to hear Channel 4’s vision for creating a new type of relationship with the viewer, and a new relationship with new suppliers.

The changing viewer relationship is about the shift to personalisation – from a homogenised mass audience all seeing the same ads or being offered the same catch-up content when they logon to 4oD for example, to a bespoke and immersive experience with the Channel 4 network – what they call ‘4D’: feeling part of television.

This data-driven vision will be realised by the creation of a universal registration system across Channel 4’s assets, plus the creation of new truly-2-way multiplatform television formats that both capture data and enhance the viewer experience (or should I say ‘fan’/’customer’ experience).

Truly interactive, immersive and personalised formats are a key plank in that virtuous circle that satisfies the fans, delivers value to advertisers, and ultimately delivers investment back into the creative sector.

So who is the creative sector that Channel 4 is looking to engage?  It’s been pretty widely recognised that the network has had a dependence on the super-indie suppliers, but now there are signs that’s changing.  We’ve heard it before for sure, but they’ve actually put money down to spend on this cause – in the convergence fund and for the smallest and newest suppliers: the Alpha Fund.  On forging new supplier relationships and boosting the supply of ideas head of online Richard Davidson-Houston said:

“We don’t believe in a hierarchy of TV and other platforms – a multiplatform TV format can come from a digital company… we are looking for new ways to tell stories… and we want ideas and stories from new sources”.

This was backed up by commissioning editor for convergent formats Anna Cronin and multiplatform commissioning lead Louise Brown who reiterated good ideas can come from anywhere, and they see a big part of their remit as partnering the people who think up great ideas with the people that are great at building stuff.  Collaboration is the future of new formats – it’s a good challenge to the big proprietary super-indie business model of recent years.

So, what ideas do they want?

Well often they know it when they see it but the headlines for me were that for convergent formats there’s an urgent call for ideas now… the thing that differentiates a convergent format from a multiplatform commission is that these are future formats that can’t be delivered right now – because the technology isn’t there yet for example.  It’s about the next evolution of the TV format, pure experimentation, and something that if it went further down the line wouldn’t be realised on screen until at least 2013.

Multiplatform commissioning needs on the other hand are more immediate – with development funds available this year leading to commissions throughout 2012.  Key bullet points are: ambitious, simple and clear, audience behaviour driven, entertaining, risky, bringing in great talent from UX people to games developers.  Key genre needs are new access and formats for features, funny games/quizzes for entertainment, ideas to get the public excited and engaged with Channel 4′s paralympics coverage in 2012, and in news something defining to set the pace.

Get pitching!

In the light of declining readership and advertising revenues there’s probably not many instances where you’d hail newspapers as a good example to broadcasters – but there is one thing they do particularly well… and that’s the relationship with their audience.

As things stand TV broadcasters rely on BARB to tell them who’s watching – they have an idea of their demographic profile for sure – supplemented with the odd bit of commissioned audience research and then often a lot of tittle-tattle opinion about why something did or didn’t work (more often than not based on the opinions of a circle of elite media buddies).

But newspapers, particularly the broadsheets, are much more sophisticated.  Take The Telegraph – over half of their readers are loyal subscribers – they know how long they’ve been subscribing for, who they are, where they live, what they enjoy, and they reward their loyalty (through their ‘Privilege’ discount card) and learn from them: everyone in the Telegraph business regularly meets their readers – from running special days where subscribers can phone in to speak to the management from the chief exec down, to giving their readers tours of the newsroom and regularly sending out surveys on even the smallest planned editorial tweaks.  Then look at their journalists; they’re always speaking to readers, on twitter, face to face, on the phone, on message-boards, their job more often than not is directly tied to their popularity with the audience.  I saw this ‘closeness’ first hand last year when I ran a number of concept development sessions around the vision for their latest iPad edition, where as well as bringing commercial and editorial teams together, we brought the audience in – not just in the form of spreadsheets or behaviour statistics, but by actually speaking to them – hundreds of them face to face, thousands via email.  It’s not just The Telegraph who’ve built a strong direct relationship with their readers – for years The Times built audience loyalty through it’s Times+ scheme rewarding subscribers with all kinds of ancillary benefits, and The Guardian has been investing heavily in CRM.  Ok, when it comes to raw data newspapers are nowhere as sophisticated as Apple with iTunes or Google with gmail, and there’s a lot more newspapers could do to monitise the relationship with the customer, but compared to free-to-air TV they’re miles ahead…

… so David Abraham’s recent RTS speech was really interesting, firing the starting gun for broadcasters (well, commercial terrestrials at least) to start building that direct and transactional relationship with customers.  Powered by the convergence of TV and the web, he wants to ‘make viewers a bigger part of the conversation than ever before’ (although maybe ‘viewers’ is not quite the right word for this future audience).  He suggests that by 2020 two-thirds of TV audiovisual content viewing time across devices will be tracked intelligently – powering more personal experiences, giving deeper understanding of how to improve the Channel 4 content offering, and also to allowing them to create a new kind of television ad model powered by the kind of metrics delivered by google, facebook, and others.  This kind of CRM is key to all of us working in television, because the happier advertisers are and the more they pay the more money gets reinvested in original content.  To sell those high-value ads Abrahams says Channel 4 needs that customer relationship to be direct, just as it is with the newspapers, and not mediated by a third-party – so that’s Facebook told then!

What’s reassuring about the speech is that Channel 4 have recognised a key thing when it comes to soliciting this data: rather than punishing people for not sharing their details by taking stuff away from them, they’ve recognised people will volunteer their information if you give them something rewarding – that could be something new, or a better and more personalised experience.  Judging by the fact that they’ve already achieved over a quarter of a million downloads of the 4oD iPad app in 3 weeks and a ‘significant proportion’ of downloaders volunteered their personal information, this backs up their approach (of course, with information comes great responsibility – see my post on the PS3 data leak).

So good on Channel 4 for setting out a new vision, and most of all making that vision about a direct and unmediated conversation with the audience – done the right way it will be the audience that benefit as much as our industry.

David Abraham, Channel 4 chief exec

5 years ago many media commentators were predicting the end of the linear TV and the death of the television schedule as people migrated to on-demand internet delivered TV, or simply moved their attention to other types of online content.  The reality is that linear viewing has held strong- in both number of hours (over 4 hours per day and growing) and the proportion of viewing (95% of TV content is still viewed live).  The prediction that the web would cannibalise television was too simplistic; in many cases it has provided a new platform for existing viewers to interact with shows on the second screen, thereby deepening their engagement, and the web has even driven new audiences to TV and cemented live viewing as people discuss and share shows on facebook, twitter, and many of the new generation of social TV apps… the ‘watercooler moment’ has become realtime!

This is all great news surely?  Well yes and no – because this 4^th dimension of television, the social layer, has implications for the type of content that UK broadcasters want.

The shows that generate buzz are typically ‘live’ or ‘event’ TV… X-Factor, Million Pound Drop, The Apprentice, live sports – television that demands linear viewing because if you don’t watch live you’ll either miss out on the water cooler conversation (which can often be as much fun as the actual show), or in the case of most reality shows you’ll miss the result and therefore lose out on the entertainment of guessing the outcome… I’m sure it’s not just me that’s had my catch-up viewing plans ruined by finding out who got fired on The Apprentice on the twitter stream?

The economics of production (particularly the relatively lower cost of reality over drama), the economics of broadcasting (the need to capture large simultaneous audiences to satisfy advertisers), combined with the social layer as a driver to live TV and a new form of audience insight will increasingly drive commissioners and schedulers to live and event telly, but what does this mean for other genres?

Many of us appreciated critically acclaimed dramas like ‘Any Human Heart’ or ‘Red Riding’ on TV, but the truth is they didn’t rate, these kinds of dramas rarely rate, and they’re expensive to make – commercially most of them don’t make sense for TV broadcasters.  I’m not saying drama never works in terms of ratings or buzz – look at Downtown Abbey, Doctor Who, The Inbetweeners – just that in the pursuit of maintaining audience sizes and share broadcasters will increasingly have to rely on live, event and participative content that creates and feeds off the buzz online. Furthermore I’m not saying drama can’t be commercially successful, many dramas make lots of money from international sales, downloads, DVDs, but most of that cash goes back to the producer/distributor, not the broadcaster.  For now viewers and UK producers are in a somewhat fortunate position to have two PSB broadcasters in the BBC and Channel 4 who are obliged to produce types of content like drama (and documentary) that don’t typically demand live viewing from the audience, but there’s no guarantee in the long-term that this commitment will stay.

So the importance of social network activity may not be good for all genres and all viewers in the UK, but the resulting glut of reality and live TV may ultimately not be good for the growth of on-demand services – because if all the content we’re watching (or at least the content that gets decent levels of investment) is live and only relevant to that point in time then who’s going to watch it further down the line?  I certainly wouldn’t watch last years Strictly Come Dancing again, but I might watch a great original British drama a year later, 10 years later, and further down the line.

So what’s the solution?  I’m no drama expert but I’d suggest three things.  First UK drama producers need to re-examine the terms of trade -  if they want broadcasters to pay for a large chunk of their glossy high-price-tag drama they need to accept that broadcasters should get a longer window for offering this content on-demand, or otherwise the economics don’t make sense… and UK drama will ultimately lose out to both US drama and other cheaper programme genres.  Second producers need to innovate – they need look at interesting ways of engaging audiences to create a buzz that doesn’t ruin the linear experience – and a great example would be in shows like Misfits or Skins who build an active fanbase pre-broadcast, drip feed content between episodes and constantly reward their fans. There are lots of other examples too, from Hollyoaks asking the public to be a virtual jury of a rape trial in the drama, to shows like Dexter in the US that created an animated series to run online between series.  Finally, dare I say it (I know this is an easy thing to say but less easy to do): broadacasters, producers and distributors need to invest more in UK drama – to make what the UK does do stand its own against US imports – to create fewer but bigger longer-running drama brands that attract international attention, international investment, and a broader and bigger noise on social networks… shows like Torchwood have started making these steps with international production, lots of interesting participative elements, but there’s a long way to go.

Another great session at South by Southwest this year was by Dan Shust at Resource Interactive, looking at some of the big trends for 2011.  Here’s a quick summary:

Social: The integration of Facebook across platforms via Facebook Connect continues at a relentless pace.  Another major innovation has been the ‘like’ button which only appeared 11 months ago but has already been pressed over a billion times.

Location: SXSW 2010 was all about the battle between Foursquare and Gowalla, but since then Facebook, Google and even Twitter have switched on location features.  There’s an issue though and that is check-in fatigue.  In 2011 expect to see the rise of passive check-in services – things like ShopKick which uses high-frequency sound emitters (mosquito style) in stores like BestBuy and SportsAuthority to check you in.

Audio: which brings us neatly onto the increasing role of audio prompting action in your mobile device.  Just as ShopKick uses sound to determine location, a new generation of Shazaam style services are emerging – like IntoNow and Yahoo Broadcaster Interactivity in the TV space.  If 2010 was the year of the QR code to launch services, 2011 is the year of the audio wave.

Entertainment Everywhere: 2010 was the year of talking about entertainment services across platforms – take Sky Player on XBox, or the ubiquity of iPlayer.  2011 is all about Netflix who are everywhere except Android now.

TV: We’ve seen how the conversation around TV has in many ways started to eclipse TV itself – or at the very least become a major part of the viewing experience.  Up to now much of this experience is via a second screen.  Now the rise of connected TV will increasingly see second screen TV experiences complimented by on-TV interactive experiences that blur the lines between television, web and gaming.

Commerce: This year will see the continuing atomisation of commerce into distributed shopping platforms – Facebook, YouTube, etc.

Life as a Game: Gamification was the big buzzword from SXSW 2011.  Last year saw the rise of services like Foursquare and the continued growth of Nike+, but 2011 will see the application of game principles to even more aspects of everyday life.  These game experiences will be richer than ever before – take EpicMix as a great example of where real world gaming is headed – mixing social, points, status and competition in a really neat way.

Augmented Reality – this time last year XBox Kinect was being whispered about under the code name ‘Project Natal’, and now it’s the hottest console gaming accessory in the market.  As processors improve there will be more and more products in this space – take a look at the video for language translation app Word Lens at the bottom of the post.

iPad – and finally the iPad has been out less than a year but we’re already on version 2 with Android and Blackberry already competing for market share.  So maybe it’s not going to be the saviour of the newspaper industry as some overly-optomistic advocates predicted but we’re still in the early adopter phase of growth and expect more and more innovation and competition in this space.

Over the last few months various TV check in apps have come on to the market.  From Miso to GetGlue, TunerFish to PlayPhilo (see this Mashable post), it seems sharing what you’re watching with your friends is the next big thing.  And what’s great in theory is that unlike GPS services like Foursquare that are about checking in at physical places, these services are about checking into media via your armchair – perfect for the lazy…

Except there’s the problem, these services aren’t as lazy-friendly as they could be because you actually need to boot up an app, search a schedule for the show you’re watching, and then click to check in – all pretty time consuming when you’re just looking to kick back and relax.  But today came news of an interesting approach to this problem – the introduction of a sound recognition software.

The latest player in the market, IntoNow, may be late to the party but has one killer accessory in its ‘SoundPrint’ system, automatically checking you in to shows just by analysing the sound waves and patterns from television and movies- think of it as Shazam for video.  It not only works for old shows and movies which are archived (140million minutes of archive and growing), but can even recognise some live television – pretty cool.  (Yahoo Connected TV has also recently started using sound recognition to serve up relevant content, bypassing the need for broadcaster metadata).

As with most these apps once you’ve checked in to your show you can share to your social graph (in app, twitter and Facebook), earn badges and get special offers.  With the public spending on average 62% of their leisure time watching television you can see why media check in is the new gold rush.

While sound recognition makes the user experience simpler there are still a number of hurdles to overcome.  Getting these check in devices onto and operating efficiently on connected TV is an obvious issue, some are attempting it already, but none (to the best of my knowledge) actually offer a broadcast overlay checkin tied into the electronic programme guide.  Switching between broadcast and native TV apps is a big barrier to the market – getting to the point where you click one button on your remote to checkin (or you can select automatic checkins) is the future.  To make this happen the television check in cos are going to have to strike deals with broadcasters and cable cos, which takes me on to the final point…

Patnerships between broadcasters and TV check-in services are key.  If I’m a fan of a show like House I’d really like to be rewarded with relevant content for checking in to House.  As lovely as having a badge is as per Foursquare, I’d rather have an exclusive clip to watch at the end of the show – I’ve shared a bit of data with the app, I want something decent in return, and then I may come back next time.  Partnerships are starting to happen – Miso for example offers its users deals when they check into QVC shows, and GetGlue has done a deal with TimeWarner to provide incentives and rewards for checking in to Time Warner content and channels (which came with a big equity investment too).  Problem is I don’t want to switch between TV check-in apps depending on what channel I’m on to get a good experience – I want something that covers everything with the same simple one-click interface.  With Youview in development in the UK surely this is something BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five could work out together with the right partner- ensuring over 75%+ of British television viewing is covered by a single and seamlessly synced app/broadcast overlay.

Broadcasters, advertisers and TV check in services working together has the potential to be hugely beneficial – providing rich data on users behaviour that trumps BARB and Neilsen, as well as allowing broadcasters and advertisers to target special offers, exclusive content and personalised recommendations.  And for the check-in operators a nice income stream for sharing information and their audience.

The entry of IntoNow is just another example of how hot this space is going to be through 2011.  And don’t assume the big boys aren’t aware of this – Google have provided venture capital to Miso in a tough fought battle with Microsoft, and with Facebook ramping up its rival to Foursquare while snapping up rivals I suspect it won’t be long until it launches its own media check in service.