Rare are those TV efforts that intend to start up new traditional television networks these days -- but ABC News and Univision News plan to achieve this with a new English-language news channel targeting bilingual Hispanic-Americans.The two media organizations did not disclose a name for the network or details such as distribution, but did say they plan to launch a Web site, mobile and social media content this summer -- and that the TV channel will debut in 2013.Citing soaring growth among Hispanic-Americans -- now 16% of the U.S. population (50 million) and headed to 30% in 2050 -- the news network will focus on the issues that are most relevant for U.S. Hispanics, including the economy, jobs, health care, immigration, education, politics, entertainment, health and wellness."Our powerful premier news brand, combined with the world’s leading Hispanic media company, will create the nation’s first news and lifestyle channel targeted to this quickly expanding and important community,” said Anne Sweeney, co-chair, Disney Media Networks and president, Disney/ABC Television Group, in a release.Cesar Conde, president, Univision Networks, said: “This alliance combines the expertise and brand strength of Univision News with ABC News’ leadership and is another example of Univision’s commitment to serving and empowering Hispanic America while connecting all audiences to Latino issues.”The ABC/Univision alliance touts a strong business/advertising environment -- that Hispanics have considerable spending power of over $1 trillion, and an increasing impact on social, economic and political trends.ABC and Univision plan to announce a management team this summer. The network will use news-gathering and production resources of ABC News and Univision News.
Subscription TV -- which accounts for 90% of all U.S. TV homes -- will continue to grow in total revenue in the coming years, largely as a result of consumers adding programming and services to their cable, satellite and telco video packages -- not adding more subscribers. The Cambridge, Mass. market researcher Pyramid Research says pay-TV revenue in North America is expected to grow by 25% in five years to $125 billion. The research company says all this comes despite a declining number of cable and other TV distribution pay TV subscribers. Pyramid says the total pay TV market was $99 billion at the end of 2011. Nielsen recently noted there were 103.5 million cable, satellite, and telco subscribers in the U.S. at the end of 2011. At the end of 2010 there were 105 million. This decline was mostly due to a decrease in cable subscribers -– down 5% to 60.5 million. Telco subscribers were up, while satellite subscribers were flat. Recent earning reports from the big cable TV operators -- Comcast, Time Warner, and Cablevision Systems among them -- all continue to tout a higher monthly average price tag per subscriber, a trend that has continued for a number of years. Cablevision Systems, for example, in its most recent earnings report says that its video customers' monthly average price tag grew almost 2% to $152.53 a month. Cable system operators continue to gain revenues with new digital equipment/services and higher-priced add-on pay TV movie and sports networks.
Contenders of all stripes claim dominance. Plots both noble and nefarious are hatched. Alliances are forged and deals are struck. Like “Game of Thrones?” Well, then you’ll love the upfront. Every spring, media’s content kings rally their sales forces to fight for the tens of billions of dollars in ad commitments at stake. One of the earliest turf battles comes as networks schedule their annual upfront presentations -- a dance that has become more and more interesting in recent years. The broadcast networks always lock down dates for their presentations in a single week in mid-May, but Turner wedged its way into broadcast week last year, and USA Network is following suit this year. And more and more cable networks are pushing later into the season, including our own MTV, which moved its presentation this year to late April from its traditional February slot. But a few new players are raising eyebrows as well. Digital media companies entered the field this year -- Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft, among others -- holding their own upfront-like presentations last week in New York that showcased online video content. The presentations have been dubbed the “NewFront.” I read about these presentations while I was, somewhat ironically, on the road visiting ad clients with Erik Flannigan and Dermot McCormack, the digital content chiefs of our entertainment and music groups, respectively. By way of introduction, Erik leads the team that helps bring “The Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” online every day in their entirety; Dermot and his team make MTV the most social brand in television, across Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr and Instagram. Together, Erik and Dermot represent MTV, VH1, CMT, Logo, Comedy Central, Spike and TV Land. We walked advertisers through our connected content strategy -- how our networks tell stories that begin on TV and move across platforms. We talked about how we use social to amplify our content, and connect with audiences in a constant feedback loop that has them more engaged in our brands than ever. It dawned on me that perhaps the message the media industry is sending to the marketplace -- as we jockey for juxtaposition, starting NewFronts to compete with upfronts -- is doing a disservice to the media that we as content creators have at our disposal. Because, for media and marketer alike, it’s not about the NewFront or the upfront -- it’s about being on all fronts. Think about the average day in the life of the young millennial consumer reached by networks like MTV and Comedy Central. They wake up, grab their phones, immediately check texts and social media. Throughout the day -- at work, at home, at school -- they’re watching and sharing video clips across a number of devices, tweeting or posting their favorites. After they get home, they fire up the DVR or VOD and catch up on “Jersey Shore” while checking Facebook. Maybe later on they watch an episode of “Tosh.0,” simultaneously watching a baseball game on a tablet app, or maybe they’re playing Xbox while watching “South Park” on a laptop. As media companies battle to carve out selling season territory, our audiences are experiencing content without borders, 24/7. The idea of a NewFront versus an upfront to a millennial would be, at best, foreign -- and at worst, ridiculous. That’s why we try to create content the way our audiences consume it -- without borders. Sure, everything begins with television for us -- after all, we pump around $3 billion a year into programming and reach 100 million households on television. But we also reach 100 million unique visitors a month and stream more than 776,000 videos a month. Our brands have 190 million Facebook fans and 13 million Twitter followers. We attract 13 million visitors a month to our mobile properties. Within our cross-platform footprint, we’ve developed co-viewing apps like MTV’s WatchWith, online tentpole events like MTV’s O Music Awards, and exclusive digital content for shows like MTV’s “Teen Wolf” and Comedy Central’s “Tosh.0,” even when they’re out of season. All of it draws from and connects back to our on-air programming. According to Nielsen, millennials switch attention between media platforms every two minutes. If you hope to build any kind of engagement with this audience, you’d better be on every single one of those platforms with unique and compelling content. You’d better cultivate a go-to brand that fans seek out on every screen. And as an industry, we’d better be pushing for measurement that effectively captures viewing everywhere. That’s why, in this time of convergence, the “divide and conquer” approach that is pitting online against television this upfront season seems like a step backward. If there’s one idea that everyone has come around to, it’s that content is indeed the killer app. And that great content will remain king -- on all fronts.
The app format allows publishers to rethink how they service consumers in real-time and in real life. But it also allows for new content packaging possibilities. In a novel blend of DVD-like programming and app economics, Monty Python’s Flying Circus Python Bytes app for iOS pulls together 22 of the comedy troupe’s most famous sketches into a single impulse-buy ($2.99) app. Additional packages of similarly priced sketches are coming. The app was developed by Heuristic Media. The 55 minutes of comedy is enhanced with commentary on each sketch or animated interlude by back stories from John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones. The user can create his own playlist or just shake the device to randomly select another sketch. The app is a hefty download for an iPhone at over 600MB, since the experience does not require connectivity once it is installed. The value add of the color commentary from the cast works very well to keep the app from feeling like a mere repackaging effort. It is one of several Python extensions into the mobile world. The excellent companion app to the re-release of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” arrived just months ago. The app suggests some interesting new configurations for TV content. Just as Apple’s iTunes model broke down album and DVD packaging traditions, the app not only deconstructs old notions of reselling TV but it adds new elements. The more flexible interactivity an app allows the user to play with the content in new and fascinating ways. A TV series can be parsed into new and previously unimaginable packages that can be priced at trivial levels, yet can achieve considerable scale if well marketed. As DVD sales wane and much of the back catalog of TV media becomes available on streaming media services, apps provide programmers with something more than another shovelware venue. Fans of great shows often recall moments, not just full episodes. Our way of remembering treasured media seems ready-made for mobile “bytes.”
Unless you don’t believe Nielsen -- and there are people in this camp -- 98% of premium video viewing remained on traditional TV as of the fourth quarter 2011, all after many years of growing digital video platforms. Factor in that 98% number with another interesting number: 90.4% of U.S. TV homes – 103.5 million households -- get their TV via cable, satellite or telco operators, and 11 million over-the-air. By this account, all the efforts to make TV Everywhere are already being paid for upfront. The owners of the TV Everywhere initiatives -- TV content owners and their traditional video distributors -- say all this will come at no cost to the consumer. Still, 11 million or so homes will suffer. Around half of those homes -- 5 million -- have broadband and will continue to scope the still-free areas of Hulu, YouTube and other places for a hodgepodge of premium video from those programmers who don’t want to entirely shut out potentially paying customers down the line. But the big question is: Will this seemingly no-cost TV Everywhere price tag stay the same down the road? My guess: Nope. Once cable companies and others saturate their coffers from digital and voice service revenue in the coming years, they’ll need something else to boost earnings. Cable operators and the rest will tell you TV Everywhere is an enhancement – that they want to give consumers more access to the programming that most are already paying for. That’s very philanthropic of them. Were they holding back stuff in the past? Sure, if you weren’t already a subscriber to HBO or premium sports cable networks, you weren’t expecting to get that programming for free on digital platforms, were you? Shifts in those existing subscription TV services look like this: In 2011, U.S. cable operators slipped 1.5%, going to 60.5 million subscribers; satellite providers were flat at 34.5 million; telecos rose 15%, landing at 8.5 million. Right now, over-the-air TV homes are making some shifts in looking to use broadband as a complement -- but that’s from a small base. Broadcast-only homes with broadband homes grew 14% -- 631,000, to 5.1 million. Still, this isn’t what would be called “scale” -- in other words, anything that would result in big media revenues. For that, focus on two numbers mentioned earlier – 98% and 90.4%. That will tell you much about current business intentions.
As more marketers, businesses and brands convert their existing creative and TV spots to online video, they need to bear in mind several issues that relate to production, ad management and talent rights. Web video is still a relatively new medium so it’s a smart idea to map out potential pitfalls, and solutions for them, before starting. I asked Extreme Reach, an online video ad and distribution firm, for tips on how marketers can make sure they’ve buttoned up rights and quality issues before they go live with a Web video campaign. 1. Manage your TV and online video advertising together “Almost every video ad that runs on the web is the original or a specially edited version of a TV commercial,” said Robert Haskitt, CMO of Extreme Reach. “They are typically created in the same production house, include the same talent and licensed music. By managing both the TV and online video advertising together, marketers can save time and money in areas ranging from production to execution. And the cross-screen campaign can be better synchronized.” 2. Be consistent: quality across screens matters Ideally, agencies working on a campaign want to have access to the creative master copies, Haskitt said. “Often, television and online video campaigns are handled by separate agencies, with the interactive agency the last to gain access to video creative (because it was created by a different agency). This approach is inefficient and interactive groups are often working with a copy of an ad that's been transcoded multiple times, resulting in degradation of the quality of the video they run. This separated approach also limits the creative options available to the interactive firm,” he said. 3. Monitor talent and rights management across all platforms Make sure you know whether a TV ad can run online. “Commercial talent and third-party rights are often restricted on specific ads. Some are not allowed to run on the Web. Some are for Web only. Most ads have rights expiration dates. When an ad runs where or when it is not allowed to, those terms are violated. As a result, agencies and brands can incur significant fines and additional unexpected costs,” he said.