The State of Media and Entertainment Streaming Video
But subscriber management company MGt has made no secret of its ambitions to run a payment system on YouView, but if it does so, it will now need to do so through individual contracts.
“We will talk to YouView STB makers and YouView stakeholders and a lot of the smaller broadcasters,” explained Stephen Petheram, MGt’s director of marketing about PayWizard, a prepaid e-wallet that supports micropayment transactions in multiple currencies.
“Traditional broadcasters wanting an easy means to monetise the long tail of archive content will also find a solution in PayWizard.”
BSkyB’s COO Mike Darcey acutely observed that micropayment means microrevenue, but an alliance of micropayments as low as 10 pence would be attractive to content owners alongside subscription.
TV Remains Strong
While on-demand TV services are increasingly available, they are used primarily to keep up with broadcast schedules—sustaining the primacy of the TV schedule in most markets. For example, according to Decipher/Thinkbox, 89% of people in the U.K. watch on-demand TV mainly to keep up with missed broadcast TV.
In the U.K., according to ratings body BARB (Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board), U.K. viewers watched an average of 27 hours, 34 minutes of live, linear TV each week between January 2010 and September 2010—an increase of 1 hour, 50 minutes on the same period last year.
TV ad revenues leapt 19% accordingly to more than £2.8 billion in that period, according to Nielsen, but so too did the online ad spend, which is fast catching up with that of TV.
A report into the 2010 ad spend by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) shows an increase of 10% to almost £2 billion in online advertising spending between January 2010 and June 2010 despite the U.K. recession. One of the main drivers for growth was online video ad spend, which has increased fivefold in the last 2 years from £3.9 million in the first half of 2008 to £20.7 million in the first half of 2010. The rise is attributed to the priority of return on investment in marketing strategies.
Although the U.K. internet advertising sector continues to grow, the industry is clamouring for a universally accepted online TV measurement on which it can build. BARB is the accepted currency for TV, but one that many people with a digital background don’t buy into.
“Our simultaneous need for detailed online audience data coupled with cross-platform contextual insight is highly challenging to the traditional gold standard audience research approach,” states Sue Gray, Channel 4’s head of corporate and commercial research. The terrestrial broadcaster set up its own online viewing panel in December, claiming that comScore, UKOM, and BARB all have limitations and flaws. The panel is seen as an interim measure until there’s an acceptable industry solution.
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