Sony Xperia XZ Premium: the extreme slo-mo cellphone

RedShark News

Early star of this year’s Mobile World Congress was Sony’s Xperia XZ Premium, which delivers both 4K HDR and a fairly astonishing 960fps in slo-motion mode.
http://www.redsharknews.com/technology/item/4386-sony-xperia-xz-premium-the-extreme-slo-mo-cellphone

Sony’s new flagship smart phone has managed to rise above trade show hysteria with a number of eye-catching specs not least of which is the ability to shoot slo-motion four times faster than anything else on the market.
The Xperia XZ Premium trumps Apple and Samsung units with a camera capable of 960 frames per second. Most other phones top out at 240fps.
It also has a 5.5-inch display with a 4K resolution for a pixel density of 801ppi, and for added bonus the screen will render High Dynamic Range (HDR). Models from other manufacturers have carried HDR before – but not paired it with a 4K resolution.
Critics will continue to suggest that 4K resolution is redundant for viewing movies on a small mobile screen (even if this phone falls into the phablet category) but 4K is considered a fairly essential upgrade for any Virtual Reality experience.
Sony says it will make Amazon Prime (4K HDR) content available for users to download.
The slo-mo is HD and if we were to nit-pick we’d suggest that at 720p the performance may not be quite as exceptional in low light or artificial light conditions.
Some early reviewers have also pointed out that the camera is fairly zoomed in, so you’ll only really be able to capture long shots.
The handset runs on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 chip, coupled with 4GB of RAM and a base storage of 64GB with microSD on board for storage expansion.
The camera itself makes use of a new Sony sensor with 19-megapixels via a new G lens to the rear and a 13-megapixel lens on the front.
Since Sony has made more business licensing its sensors to third parties in recent times the technology can be expected to pop-up in models from Apple, Samsung or LG down the line.
Sony has also not pinned a price on it yet, with estimates ranging from £400 to £600 ($1000). You could buy a Canon EOS 100D for £450 new, though it’s not as good as making calls.
Announcing the XZ Premium at Mobile World Congress, Sony director Hideyuki Furumi said: "We've continued to evolve and transform our smartphone portfolio, with an unwavering focus on delivering the most advanced technology in elegantly designed products.
"Whether it's a memory-stacked camera system capable of super slow motion capture or the world's first 4K HDR smartphone display, we're delivering experiences that connect with users in emotional and meaningful ways like never before.”
As well as announcing the Xperia XZ Premium, Sony unveiled two mid-range smartphones at MWC. The Xperia XA1 and larger screen XA1 Ultra will both come with 23 megapixel rear cameras and high-end 16 megapixel front-facing cameras.
The tech giant also revealed an interactive projector, Xperia Touch, which can turn any flat horizontal or vertical surface into a HD touchscreen for playing games or watching movies. The device, which can connect with Android smartphones and tablets, is priced at €1,499 and will go on sale this spring.

The State of Live Video 2017

StreamingMedia

Sport leads the way as live video continues to grow. Will this be the year it overcomes problems delivering quality results at scale, conquering latency, and securing monetization?
http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=116581&PageNum=2

Over-the-top (OTT) video was an unstoppable force in 2016, and it’s on par to continue a strong growth trajectory. Juniper Research projects a fourfold market increase to $32 billion by 2019, highlighting how improvements in user interface and bandwidth infrastructure flexibility have encouraged consumers to steer away from traditional digital television content delivery.
The demand for live video content over multiple devices has grown as well, and the social media giants have been swift to feed this hunger. With Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram growing in popularity as live streaming end points, it is important for content players to syndicate to them in order to extend their consumer reach. This will be particularly applicable for sports content in the next few years, as 63 percent of sports fans have expressed their willingness to pay for an OTT subscription to watch their favorite teams and players, according to Statistica.
“Live continues to provide the ‘power of now,’ that sense of immediacy that engages your audience and that can create a sense of pressure to participate,” says Chris Knowlton, VP and streaming industry evangelist at Wowza Media Systems. “On the business side, such an opt-in audience is more likely to be engaged, especially when live viewing is merged with shared social experiences.” The result is that viewers are paying attention to the live stream, and they will watch it up to 10 times longer than on-demand content, according to a report from Ooyala.
In 2016, nonbroadcast companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter truly entered the live OTT scene, with Twitter combining social and live NFL games.
“Live will continue to grow faster than VOD in OTT,” says Per Lindgren, SVP of live OTT for Net Insight Net. “We will start seeing more 360° and some initial VR initiatives. Players like Facebook and Google will continue to drive innovation, but larger content owners will also bring innovative solutions and viewing experiences to the market.”
Key trends include the growth in audience size for live online events and sports, as well as increases in video resolution and length of view time.

Is OTT Now Simply the Best?

While the TV remains the preferred viewing screen, the content is increasingly being delivered OTT, causing some to question the longevity of the prevailing playout and distribution model.

“In Europe, we’re at a point with video quality that it’s better than what’s on cable and on satellite,” says NeuLion EVP and co-founder Chris Wagner. “Video quality on the old distribution platforms is falling behind. IP-based delivered-video quality is just stunning now, plus you have the move to 4K.”
Rory McVicar, project manager of CDN EMEA for Level 3 Communications, points to advancements in multiroom streaming set-top boxes (STBs) that have reinforced the belief that audiences want content on their owns terms.
“The idea of sitting down with your family in front of the television to watch a major sporting event is by no means dead, but already feels like a nostalgic representation of old viewing habits,” he says.
While live OTT offers advantages—such as an interactivity and portability that TV can’t match—the broader consensus is that for the time being, online delivery will work alongside other technologies as a key part of the technology mix.
“New technologies available for OTT distributors, such as accelerated delivery and prepositioning, address buffering and startup challenges, but they do require a more strategic integration with CDN providers,” says Ian Munford, EMEA director of product enablement and marketing, media services for Akamai.
“In many cases, satellite and broadband complement each other,” says Jonathan Berman, CBO, Video Solutions, MX1 (which is the media services company created in September by satellite provider SES from its acquisition of fiber and internet services company RR Sat). “Satellite is still the dominant way to serve quality content. As infrastructure improves we will see more and more OTT, with flavors of linear components.”
Knowlton’s view is nuanced. Many people have live viewing experiences that are nearly as good and predictable via OTT as from traditional television service providers, he says. “Yet there’s still a very large population of people for whom network bandwidth and quality are insufficient to support streaming services reliably. For most of those, standard TV offerings may provide a better experience—for now. As more content providers go direct to viewers, the lines between OTT and pay TV services will continue to blur, and we’ll need new ways to differentiate them.”
Lindgren highlights the need to overcome scalability issues and to solve the delay and sync problems in OTT which he says is hindering the monetization of new live content.
“Virtualized cloud adoption, business models to leverage personalized TV models, and the potential to add data and statistics for an enhanced live OTT viewing experience are all converging,” he says.
Consumption of live content is evolving due to the very nature of the OTT market, which, compared with linear content delivery, has a low cost-of-entry and offers a rapid time to market. As a result, more niche content providers and broadcasters can enter the market using the cloud without the large-scale, high-cost overheads and infrastructure typically incurred with traditional linear content delivery.
“The relationship between viewer and broadcaster will also become more intimate,” says Dan Finch, commercial director at Simplestream and TVPlayer. “As the financial cost and turnaround time in delivering content reduces, more specialized and niche broadcasters can harness the means to effectively engage with their audiences.”
Monetization, however, remains a crucial piece of the puzzle. “With platforms like Facebook Live generating and delivering live content to a plethora of socially syndicated devices, the need to ensure effective delivery to drive monetization efforts is important—especially to mobile,” stresses Finch. A recent report from Ooyala found that 51 percent of video is now viewed over mobile devices, illustrating a clear need for effective multiplatform content delivery.
“After all the hubbub about OTT live latency (e.g., Twitter streaming of NFL games), expect to see a strong focus on scalable low-latency streaming in 2017,” says Knowlton. “Look for the overlap of AR [augmented reality] and low-latency live streaming to create interactive and highly engaging experiences that could capture strong consumer interest through innovative applications.”

Rio Breaks OTT Records

The Rio 2016 Olympics in August was predictable in terms of setting new streaming records around the globe. Host broadcaster Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) churned out more than 7,100 hours of coverage from Rio to reach an estimated all-time high television audience of 5 billion.
However, the volume of coverage available online nearly doubled that of traditional TV, with live streams available from every session of the 28 sports comprising 218,000 hours versus the 81,500 hours attained in London 2012, “marking a milestone in Olympic broadcasting history” according to OBS.
What was less anticipated was the large dip in broadcast television viewing, at least in the U.S. “Were fewer people watching in 2016, or was it that many younger watchers were engaging this year via streaming and social media clips?” asks Knowlton.
Overall, more than 9 million hours of content were streamed globally through Olympic Video Player platforms powered at their core by Wowza Streaming Engine software. NBCUniversal alone streamed 2.71 billion minutes of live coverage—more than a billion more minutes than the live totals of all the previous Olympics combined.
This may have saved NBCU’s bacon, since views to its linear coverage were 10 percent to 15 percent down on its expectations (it was forced to open up more online ad inventory as a result). Viewing for the Opening Ceremony, for example, showed a 28 percent decline from London 2012. Viewing to its digital service was also down around 9 percent, yet 10 percent of the network’s entire ad revenue for Rio came from digital. Variety, which sourced these figures, suggests that the Peacock needs to get smarter at marketing the games across all its platforms for more than just 2 weeks every 4 years.
Microsoft Azure provided the cloud platform for NBCUniversal’s Rio service, Akamai provided its content delivery network (CDN) and quality of experience (QoE) monitoring, and Adobe Primetime was deployed for playback, ad insertion, and authentication services to NBC’s Olympics app.
The games were nonetheless a record breaker for Akamai and the BBC. The CDN drove 100 times more live streaming than 2012 at twice the speed and three times the traffic peaks. Traffic peaked at 4.53Tbps, with audience sizes of 1.54 million at an average bitrate of 2.75Mbps.
BBC Sport's online coverage reached 68.3 million devices in the U.K. and 102.3 million globally, both records for the broadcaster. In addition, 30.2 million U.K. browsers streamed the action on BBC iPlayer and BBC Sport.
“Unique browsers” is calculated by the number of devices being used to view online coverage, which is why it was possible for the U.K. digital audience to total 68.3 million, even though that is greater than the country’s population.
The year’s other major sports event in Europe was the UEFA European Championship, which also saw record views over OTT platforms. England’s 2–1 win over Wales attracted 2.3 million viewers to the BBC Sport website, more than doubling the broadcaster’s previous highest live OTT viewing figure.
“This change in the way people watch their favorite sports will ultimately help open up the market to increased diversification, allowing more niche markets to develop more readily—think skateboarding, surfing, and darts as promising examples,” observes Finch.

Facebook Live Offers Global Reach

Arguably the biggest streaming technology news in 2016 was Facebook Live’s April arrival for the masses. While many people tried live streaming apps (e.g., Periscope, Meerkat, and Wowza GoCoder) in 2015, Facebook Live was the first one that almost everybody with a smartphone already had in their pockets.
“Having a subscriber base of 1.8 billion active monthly users gives Facebook a unique platform to socialize and promote new technology concepts at a scale of which most content companies could only dream,” says McVicar. “Products like Periscope have generated a lot of interest but have not managed to achieve true mass adoption. Facebook Live has the potential to build live streaming experiences into the daily web interaction habits of large swathes of society, spanning age groups and cultural backgrounds.”
Wowza’s Knowlton describes Facebook Live as “arguably the most disruptive product in streaming media today” by making possible one-to-many live stream creation and consumption to almost anyone. “Consumers have become accustomed to using the closest device to them to watch almost any content on demand,” he says.
Viewer hunger for live streaming content is abundant beyond sports. GlobalWebIndex found that live funny/entertaining videos rank the highest in viewer popularity (53 percent), followed by breaking news stories (41 percent), music/concerts (38 percent), educational talks (29 percent), brands/commercial videos (26 percent), celebrity videos (22 percent), and vlogging (19 percent).
“As live OTT video continues to expand into more of these areas, the need for these content players to optimize with a unified workflow that reduces costs and increases the quality of live content delivery is more crucial than ever,” stresses Finch.
Perhaps most dramatically, the expectation for live is feeding user-generated content via social media platforms. Social networking is forecast by Ericsson to be the second biggest data traffic type on mobile after video, growing by 39 percent annually. For Wowza, the evidence lies in the number of sites from which users can watch such live streams, and the number of Wowza customers using its software and services as part of their workflows to deliver those experiences.
“Consumers want a live option for anything that falls into that category of ‘appointment to view,’” says Berman. “People are viewing live streaming as an opportunity to promote their brand and make money through their personality and interests,” observes McVicar. “As part of this, vloggers have increasingly become part of the cultural mainstream due to the relative ease with which they can use simple technology to reach mass audiences.”
Facebook Live’s launch prompted rivals to up their game. “YouTube has invested more into the live environment and made discovery very much easier (though not as good as Facebook),” says Gareth Capon, chief executive at Grabyo. “With Periscope Producer, Twitter offers content owners the ability to stream higher quality content to audiences, while Twitter Live is focused on the top tier of the market acting more like a traditional broadcaster by paying for rights to distribute across the platform.”
When Facebook unveiled its live streaming API in April, one of the first media partner solutions to board was Grabyo’s online video production and distribution software.
Soccer club Real Madrid immediately used Grabyo to push content from its club TV channel to Facebook Live, subsequently generating more than 110 million views. The success not only highlights the way in which social offers greater reach than traditional channels but also the threat that OTT is set to pose to those same channels.

Social Drives Live Sport

As sports rights holders (like the NBA and NHL) begin to take live games to social media, the monolithic TV model looks to be in the first stages of fragmentation.
Those with a deep fan base realize they can directly monetize consumers with subscriptions and bypass the middle man. Meanwhile, many traditional broadcasters cannot afford not to be on every platform. This is not just about bringing live streaming to other devices that have not been part of the normal distribution; it is fundamental to TV Everywhere.
Even rights holders of niche sports, like World Surf League, are able to do this increasingly as the cost of production and distribution continues to reduce while video quality continues to rise.
“The major change has been around live with regards to social distribution,” says Capon. “Three years ago, I don’t think we’d find a major sports property streamed live to Facebook without a direct commercial model being associated with it. Fundamentally, streaming live on social platforms delivers reach and engagement for sports.”
Other examples include the French Football Federation broadcast of 400 third division and grassroots matches on Dailymotion, along with the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) October launch of digital and social content division WTA Networks and the November launch of Dugout, a social media network backed by Europe’s top-tier soccer clubs including Real Madrid, Chelsea, and Bayern Munich (though live video is not part of Dugout’s initial plans).
“The driver has been enormous growth of video consumption through social platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat, all happening primarily on mobile,” Capon suggests.
It’s telling that one of the biggest rights deals of the last few months was struck by Chinese video streaming service PPTV, which spent £560 million (about $706 million) on English Premier League rights over 3 years.
“You are seeing rights owners like Formula E make distribution deals with Facebook in every market where they don’t have TV deals, using social platforms systematically to reach a new audience,” says Capon. “The NFL’s deal to distribute live games on Twitter is a chance for it to play around with social and start to understand consumption patterns and the market for streaming to mobile devices.”
Proving return on investment is an obstacle because of inconsistent cross-platform measurement. “While sports generates a lot of consumption on social platforms, the challenge is to merge the ratings around traditional TV with a complete multiplatform framework,” adds Capon.

OTT and TV in Sync

The inherent problems with respect to delays and sync with today’s live OTT solutions became evident to the public, boosted by several articles in both trade and daily press.
Time lag can be up to a minute over OTT, which matters when sports like Formula One or athletics count victories by 1/100th of a second. One of the breakthrough technologies in 2016, set to make a big impact in 2017 and the winner of Streaming Media Europe’s Readers’ Choice Award in the multiscreen solution category, is Net Insight's Sye.
“With VoD and recorded content becoming a commodity, live content constitutes an increasingly important part for both content owners and broadcasters,” says Net Insight’s Lindgren. “Around live, it is possible to create an increasing amount of extra content, but the actual live moment is what engages viewers and fans globally and locally. There will also be an increased focus on low delay and sync to enable such new viewing experiences, and this will in turn open up new business models where OTT will not just be a cheaper or more agile way of broadcasting live content, but will change the way people experience and interact with live content.”
Sye claims it can frame-accurately marry the OTT stream to the TV network-delivered broadcast, making it ideal for second-screen viewing. It has been in commercial tests with Tata Communications, the firm that provides connectivity solutions to Formula One. The software runs over Tata’s network, effectively converting it into a virtual CDN to deliver synchronized broadcast and streamed content to all end points.
“We’re not trying to be real time, but to harmonize with existing satellite distribution,” Lindgren explains. “The aim with satellite is to deliver within 8 to 12 seconds and with the delay resulting from video contribution and other upstream processes being typically around 5 seconds, we still have 3 to 7 seconds to play with for synchronization.”
Another Scandinavian company also claims to have cracked mobile/broadcast sync. Oslo-based The Future Group is developing the game show Lost in Time with X Factor producer Fremantle, which transmits a live studio production created in Unreal Engine synchronous with a game also created in Unreal to a mobile app.

Discovery and Disney Play for “Sports Netflix”

Perhaps the most significant mergers of traditional with what used to be called “new media” were the deals struck in July by Walt Disney Co. and in August by Discovery Communications with BAMTech, a spinoff from Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM).
Discovery and Disney are using BAMTech’s backend streaming optimization services to power multisport direct to consumer products. In Discovery’s case, this is the Eurosport Player, which the operator’s CEO David Zaslav has dubbed the “sports Netflix.”
Discovery owns pan-European sports channel Eurosport and used it as a vehicle to acquire, for $1.2 billion, the pan-European TV rights to the Olympics from 2018 to 2024.
The goal is to help Discovery amass 1 million subscription video on demand (SVOD) subscribers globally this year, a figure forecast by the operator to rake in $100 million in extra revenue.
Discovery will do this by curating services around the sports properties it holds, including the Olympics, the Tour de France, and Wimbledon. That task falls to Ralph Rivera, formerly the BBC’s digital director, who has led Eurosport’s digital operation since September.
BAMTech, meanwhile, gets its first major foothold in Europe and strikes at the heart of the live and on-demand streaming business that Italian-based specialist Deltatre has built up with clients like UEFA, ATP Tennis, and HBS, the host broadcaster for FIFA.
Meanwhile, Disney is launching an ESPN-branded online proposition. “It will not, however, include any current ESPN channels or its content,” says Daniel Gadher, analyst at Ampere Analysis. “This cautious approach is perhaps due to a fear of cannibalizing its audience. ESPN’s new service will exploit rights held by BAMTech, MLB, and NHL.”
The runaway success of MLB.tv and its mobile app At Bat—which helped propel the MLB to $10 billion in revenue in 2016—attracted Disney’s investment in BAMTech, which valued the firm at $3 billion. The deal gives Disney an option to buy BAMTech outright, potentially extending the organization's reach into Europe via Eurosport.
A smaller but equally smart sports rights aggregator may beat them to the punch. The Perform Group launched DAZN in August, which according to CEO Simon Denyer is “the first time anyone has launched a pure multisport OTT platform.”
“By going direct to individual consumers, we will build a record of viewing history, and we will be able to automatically recommend and serve content relevant to each viewer,” he says.
Perform paid $2 billion for rights to Japanese soccer’s J-League starting in 2017—the largest commercial deal in the history of Japanese sports. Other rights in select territories include the German soccer league Bundesliga.
Using cloud-based production and facilities located in every continent, Perform aims to take DAZN global. It takes the international host-produced signal of live events and customizes it for audiences with commentary and stats compiled from the data specialists Opta and Goal.com it owns.
“We have researched 30 territories and prioritized those we think have good fan bases for sport, a good broadband infrastructure and 4G network,” Denyer says.
One thing is clear: the consumer appetite for live content shows no signs of lessening, nor does publishers’ and technology vendors’ desire to deliver that content in new and innovative ways.
This article was published in the Spring 2017 European edition of Streaming Media magazine.

Mobile World Congress expects the Fourth Industrial Revolution

RedShark News

The 5G future will take shape in Barcelona next week as MWC sees a show that was once dedicated to the humble mobile phone expand its remit to cover the IoT, virtual reality, autonomous vehicles and pretty much anything else that you can imagine coming down the pipe in the next decade.
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One of the defining images of last year was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance at a Samsung press event strolling past ranks of journalists with heads encased in VR head gear looking for the all the world like he owns it (and us).
While this says quite a bit about The Matrix-style rabbit hole we are in danger of going down (and which Steven Spielberg’s 2017 movie adaptation of Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One will fuel), it also put Mobile World Congress on the global stage as a venue which forecasts the future.
MWC used to mean smartphones. Now it’s more a European version of CES where wearable sensors, smart watches, virtual reality and the wider Internet of Things (IoT) - encompassing everything from home lighting control to automated cars and robotics - cohabit the same space as the humble pocket phone.
Underpinning all this, and arguably the unifying topic in Barcelona next week, is the highly anticipated fifth generation communications network, now officially and unsurprisingly dubbed 5G.

The 5G shape of things to come

There is, however, no official definition yet of what makes 5G, but it is taking shape. The ITU will ratify the standard in 2020, with a lot of pre-standard trials and momentum in place as telcos and handset operators jostle for positioning. Chinese handset maker Huawei has already promised its first phase of 5G commercial products will be available in 2018 to support the first operator deployments. Nokia and Ericsson count more than 75 5G projects between them alone. 
Cisco’s latest Mobile Visual Networking Index forecasts that by 2021, 5G will account for 0.2% of connections (25 million), but 1.5% of total traffic. Cisco estimates that by 2021 a 5G connection will generate nearly 30GB per month, which is 4.7 times more traffic than the average 4G connection and 10.7 times more traffic than the average 3G connection. At the same time, industrial, healthcare and transportation sectors are especially on 5G’s opportunity radar. According to Ericsson, 94% of executives from eight major industries rate next generation mobile networks as a top strategic priority.
The industry is trying to put in place the technology that can handle this exponential traffic growth that will only increase with the IoT and other applications, such as AR/VR.
Ericsson, for example, is introducing a 5G platform for first movers into 5G. The platform comprises the 5G core, radio and transport portfolios, together with digital support systems, transformation services and security. This is ahead of what Ericsson expects to be a $582 billion global market opportunity, “as telecom operators leverage 5G technology for industry digitalisation”. 
Nokia is among those aiming to commercialise 5G during the next year though the business case is hard to pin down – 5G could mean everything to anybody so some compromise will surely have to be reached.
Telcos, like BT for example, are looking seriously at using fixed 5G wireless technology to support pay-TV services, according to a recent report from Strategy Analytics, especially to broadband starved rural areas.
While extreme low latency and larger bandwidth make instant 4K video broadcasts possible, other companies like Huawei are positioning 5G as a way to connect a whole manner of sensors and gadgets in and around the home with superfast broadband.
Strategy Analytics director of service provider analytics, Sue Rudd is dismissive: “Everyone is looking for a business case for 5G. It’s not the Internet of Things and it’s not connected cars.”
One of the talking points will be a roll back on what seems like a neat jump from 4G straight to 5G. Instead it will be argued that 5G and 4G and its upgraded variant 4G LTE are designed to co-exist. Selling a 4.5G upgrade to customers may prove a sticking point.
Mobile data traffic is set to grow 15x by the end of 2017 alone with video the main culprit. Looking ahead to high-profile events such as the 2018 Football World Cup in Russia, operators need to be able to meet customer expectations, profitably. The latest techniques in optimisation and compression and technologies like UHD and LTE Broadcast are discussed off the showfloor by Eric Black, CTO Digital, NBC Sports and Matt Stagg, EE’s Head of Mobile Video & Content.
An issue for which 5G is again the saviour is getting enough capacity in the network in order to effectively process and deliver VR content. On hand to explore the issues are experts from Google’s VR operation, VR developer and producer Jaunt and LucasFilm’s sound division THX.

Phones for you

There will be actual mobile phone launches in town too. Many of these are expected to feature 4K resolution screens which are a necessary piece in the jigsaw required to build a high quality virtual reality experience for consumers. Among them are likely to be new versions of Sony’s Xperia line and the latest LG handset called G6.
After all the issues with its fire prone Note 7, Samsung is expected to focus on the new Galaxy Tab S3 tablet at MWC, though it may also debut a foldable phone, a technology which it trailed last year.
As has been widely flagged, its back to the future for Nokia. With the brand’s phone division now in the hands of HMD Global, there are strong hints it will revive the iconic 3310. Released in 2000, the original 3310 was sold 126 million times worldwide, making it the world's best-selling mobile phone. It’s small, tough, has long battery life and you’re in no danger of smashing its screen – unlike many of the issues which bug today’s mega phones.

Mobile disruptors

While the heads of mobile and traditional media networks - AT&T, Verizon, Orange, Telefonica, Liberty Global, Discovery, Vivendi - are present as expected, what’s more notable are the keynotes from content disruptors. They include Netflix chief Reed Hastings who never minces his words, the founder of youth media brand Vice, Shane Smith – also someone never shy of sticking it to old media – and Alejandro Agag the CEO of electric and social media- powered Formula E.
Perhaps most intriguingly is John Hanke, the CEO of Niantic.  Never heard of them? Niantic developed and released the global AR gaming phenomenon Pokemon GO and while the frenzy around it may have subsided, Hanke will surely have ideas as to where the next AR, VR or Mixed Reality entertainment format will come from.
Nokia says it will unveil its vision of the global nervous system – which it describes as “a seamless web of interconnected intelligence that underpins our digital lives”. This “Future X network” underpins Nokia’s idea for the Internet of Things, Cloud, Ultra-broadband, and immersive technologies.
According to one conference session description we are at the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that will “fundamentally alter the way we interact with each other, our working environment, companies, brands and governments. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unprecedented.”
Mobile has connected nearly 5 billion people with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, but for many companies at MWC this is just the start. Usable big data, artificial intelligence, robotics, the IoT, autonomous vehicles, and even quantum computing will all be on the agenda this year.
It’s going to be one to watch.

The State of Video Advertising 2017

StreamingMedia

Video advertising revenues are on the rise, along with AI, even as industry players argue over metrics. The current buzzwords are mobile, viewability, and programmatic.
http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=116547&PageNum=1

People have been consuming media and communicating on mobile for years, and 2016 was the year that ad dollars finally followed suit. Digital advertising revenues were up across the piece, and mobile was the engine of growth.
Media buying agency Zenith forecast that 75 percent of global internet use will be mobile in 2017, with 60 percent of global digital ad dollars pouring into mobile advertising by 2018. Mobile ad expenditure in 2018 will total $134 billion it predicted, “which is more than will be spent on newspaper, magazine, cinema, and outdoor advertising put together.”
This trend was clear in the U.S., where mobile advertising surpassed desktop search as the largest online ad format, making 47 percent of digital revenue in the first half of 2016, according to the IAB/Price Waterhouse Cooper (PwC) Internet Advertising Revenue Report and equally apparent in the U.K., where budgets invested in mobile outstripped those on desktop PCs for the first time.
“It’s a significant moment, as mobile now overtakes desktop,” declared Tim Elkington, IAB chief strategy officer, reporting the figures in October. “Marketers devote more ad spend to mobile as they increasingly cotton on to the fact that people essentially carry an ad platform with them wherever they are.”
The study, commissioned by the IAB and conducted by PwC, showed the amount spent on mobile display ads (£802 million) overtook that of PC and tablet display (£762 million) for the first time during the first 6 months of 2016.
Total U.K. ad spend grew at its highest rate since 2010 in 2015, increasing by 7.5 percent to £20.1 billion, according to the Advertising Association/Warc Expenditure Report vouched for by IAB U.K.
Internet ad spend increased 17.3 percent to £8.6 billion, with mobile accounting for 78 percent of that growth, increasing 61.1 percent for a total of £2.6 billion.
Paid-for search is still the dominant medium, totaling £2.49 billion, or 53 percent of digital spend, with mobile accounting for much of this growth, according to IAB U.K.
Smartphones and tablets now generate more than half of all online transactions, according to the data. On its current trajectory, mobile advertising could overtake spend on broadcast TV ads in 2017.
The study underlined that video, social, and native are the fastest-growing ad formats. Spend on video ads overall grew 67 percent to hit £474 million during the first half of 2016, with video now accounting for 30 percent of all display ad spend and 37 percent of all mobile display.
Ad spend on social media sites rose 43 percent to £745 million, and social media spend on mobile alone grew 64 percent. Mobile now accounts for 80 percent of spend allocated to social, according to the IAB/PwC study.
As social media consumption becomes increasingly animated on platforms such as Facebook and Snapchat, the majority of media professionals expect video to overtake static ads in media spend within the next 5 years.
Media buyers and sellers predict the growth in video ad spend is likely to come from new formats such as 360° video and VR according to the UK Mobile & Video Advertising Truthsstudy published in September by RubiconProject and conducted by Exchange Wire.
The latest Warc numbers also show that the internet now accounts for more than half of U.K. advertising excluding direct mail, making the U.K. the first major Western economy to reach this milestone.
All of this means the U.K. remains “comfortably the largest internet advertising market in Europe and third globally, behind the U.S. and China,” claims the Advertising Association. It forecast U.K. ad spend to post 4.2 percent growth in 2016 and 3.8 percent growth in 2017. While economic uncertainty surrounding the U.K.’s vote to leave the EU is a factor, internet spend forecasts were actually revised upward to 12.3 percent in 2016, with mobile advertising predicted to increase 39.3 percent in the same period.
“Investment in U.K. advertising remains strong this year, and the trend towards digital and mobile continues—but the medium term is more complex,” says Tim Lefroy, former chief executive at the Advertising Association.

Work Continues on Reassuring Brands

Viewability—especially of online video content—was one of the key stories in online advertising in 2016. This has been driven in large part by GroupM, which took the “100 percent viewable” requirement it announced in 2015 and put it into effect in many additional countries outside of the U.S. in 2016.
“While spend on video ads has risen, advertisers are still looking to understand if and how their video advertising efforts have positively shifted brand opinions,” says Videology EMEA managing director Jana Eisenstein. “In 2017, more agencies will be demanding a reliable, quantifiable way to show their clients how effective video is in driving results.
“As the programmatic market matures, substantial progress continues in real-time measurement, tracking, and ad-decisioning to improve brand safety, viewability, and combat nonhuman traffic,” she continues. “This must continue if the industry is to continue to operate effectively to scale and reassure its key clients, the advertisers.”
Brightcove has been at the forefront of a number of other solutions for viewability including a partnership with Moat analytics, HTML5 VPAID, and even viewability reported successfully with server-side ad insertion.
“With Flash VPAID (one of the primary ways that companies have tackled viewability to date) going away with the evolution of browsers, publishers and advertisers are now talking about viewability all of the time,” observes Mike Green vice president of marketing and business development, media for Brightcove.
Facebook’s admission that it greatly overstated how long users were viewing its videos has also made an impact, causing a renewed focus on video and advertising analytics.
Eisenstein calls this “indicative” of the need to create a universal metric and “universal measurement standards that everyone can trust.”
“There will be more use of multiple data sources in 2017 as more companies try to mesh fragmented data sources into a unified view across devices,” she says. “Those who are successful will be able to use sources such as TV measurement, broadcasters login data, operators subscriber data, advertisers customer data, and third parties with all sorts of behavioral, purchase, and geolocation-derived data to create a more powerful understanding of their target consumer.”
While acknowledging the essential place of Facebook and Google on media plans, Eisenstein contends that advertisers will increasingly argue that they are subject to “the same third-party measurement as legacy media brands to provide holistic and comparable campaign reporting.”
There is no question that as measurement improves on mobile devices, more premium broadcast/network content will be made available there, and it will be accompanied by the ad loads that that content warrants.
“Additionally, as screen sizes, mobile data caps, and Wi-Fi offload all continue to grow, so too will the volume of viewing, driving mobile video ad inventory up further,” says Green.
Ad products are evolving to bridge online and TV. Working groups like the NAB Ad Tech Committee are trying to pull together the players in the digital and broadcast sides of the premium video ecosystem.
“It’s not surprising that a broadcast ad trafficking company, SintecMedia, acquired leading digital trafficking company Operative to help streamline these disparate processes,” notes Green.

Programmatic Gains Ground

According to eMarketer, programmatic spending on TV ads will more than double to $2.16 billion (£1.48 billion) in 2017. The research firm also predicts that the amount will continue to increase to nearly $4.4 billion (£3 billion) by 2018 and account for 6 percent of total TV ad spending.
“The biggest hurdle to programmatic adoption is the unification and sharing of data to let buyers get scale,” says Green. “In this regard, at least in the U.S. there is very big scale available from network groups like NBCU and Turner, and the MVPDs like Comcast. Different pockets of the ecosystem are also finding a way to offer data-targeted inventory—like the broadcasters who are moving to ATSC 3.0.”
Videology’s 2016 UK Video Market At-A-Glance identified the continued convergence of TV and video buying with 9 out of 10 advertisers continuing to buy video ads in the same guaranteed manner as they do TV spots.
“The importance of guaranteed upfront buying and private marketplaces will continue,” predicts Eisenstein. “TV buying models will continue to be the basis of trade but will leverage the benefits of technology to manage an increasingly complex and fragmented buying portfolio.”
Videology believes we’re seeing a step change in the role of ad tech in TV. “We will see a dramatic rise in the deployment in ad-tech across all media channels, with a particularly speedy activation in TV,” says Eisenstein. “In the U.K., 2017 will be seminal in the development of programmatic TV as Sky, Virgin, and BT all line up progressive ad-products using first-party data and set-top-box technology. These platforms will open up full, addressable TV, with cross-device measurement that is as effective on the main TV screen as it is across its digital cousins.”

Ad Tech Consolidation

The M&A deals that took place in the ad tech space in 2016 are a continuation of a trend that’s been in train for many years.
“This year, we have seen fewer buyers, fewer ad tech startups with desirable scale, and larger exits,” says Green. “We’ve seen more M&A deals done with data in mind—rather than the nuts and bolts of ad infrastructure and delivery.”
Verizon’s $4.8 billion bid for Yahoo (which itself bought BrightRoll in 2014) to merge with its multibillion dollar acquisition of AOL is the major play. Others include IBM’s late-2015 purchase of the Weather Channel and Adobe’s acquisition of TubeMogul for $540 million in November.
“These demonstrate that some very large players with adjacent assets (mobile networks and subscribers, big data/marketing cloud systems) are now dialed into the advertising and digital marketing opportunity,” suggests Green. “Next, they are looking to transform the industry. In this sense, Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn in 2016 could be a harbinger of many more things to come.”
Increased consolidation means brand advertisers and marketers don’t have to look for multiple technology providers to solve their needs. With its move, Adobe enters the programmatic ad buying space giving customers a chance to spread their video ad bets across desktop, mobile, and TV.
“Publishers and broadcasters are growing leery of handing too much of their content, ad business, and audience to external platforms,” says Jonathan Wilner, Ooyala’s vice president of products and strategy. “Content providers are recognizing that having hybrid approaches, blending owned and operated with third-party strategies, is the best course of action. In doing so, an agnostic ad partner without conflicting publishing businesses, and who’s focused on driving value for them—and them alone—is critical. We’re certainly seeing that with our own customers, and it is certainly core to the Adobe and TubeMogul acquisition.”
The acquisition also drew attention to the blurring lines between ad tech and marketing tech (martech). “Quality SaaS software makes it simple for the two to integrate, supplying greater value to customers— especially when it’s a part of a larger solution set that addresses multiple needs in the market,” says Wilner.

Cognitive Intelligence Unlocks Insight

One of the prominent trends driving video ad tech M&A is the need for large amounts of consumer insight and video quality that drives programmatic personalization, engagement, and increased CPM or more video ad views. IBM and Brightcove call this “cognitive,” though it also goes by the terms “machine learning” or “artificial intelligence.”
Equity funding of AI-focused startups reached an all-time high in Q2 2016 of more than $1 billion, according to researcher CB Insights.
“We are at a seminal moment in computing. We are evolving from a mobile-first to an AI-first world,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai pronounced in October.
Iddo Shai, director of product marketing, video publishers and OTT TV for Kaltura, points to the $700 million acquisition in October of data management platform Krux by CRM giant Salesforce (a potential suitor for Twitter). “That’s a very strong combination that marketers can use to gather more data about audiences,” he says. “This year has been about marketing tech rather than ad tech.”
Salesforce uses an AI-dubbed Einstein to power marketing and sales services. It is not shy of saying that just like the arrival of the PC, cloud computing, and the mobile smartphone, “AI is going to fundamentally change the way things work, forever. AI is not killer robots. It’s killer technology.”
Capturing and managing TV/video platform data so it can be exploited by advanced predictive algorithms is becoming a key focus area for the media industry. Kudelski Group’s digital TV branch, for example, is developing algorithms to help operators understand the behavior of their subscribers, predict churn, and optimize their catalogue.
Twitter’s $150 million acquisition of London startup Magic Pony Technology in June 2016 is another indicator of AI’s growing media application. Magic Pony Technology assembled a team of experts in advanced neural networks and addressed the problem of reconstructing HD video from a compressed stream.
“The TV ad industry is rapidly evolving to become a data-driven business where cognitive science will be key to ensure proper personalization and monetization,” says Simon Trudelle, senior director of product marketing at NAGRA. “From the operation side, let’s not forget OTT delivery can also benefit from smarter algorithms to improve streaming performance, reliability, and overall QoE. And many more micro-services will tap AI for additional smarts and improvements.”

TV Still Dominates

In a global first, the Netherlands’ TV industry body Stichting KijkOnderzoek (SKO) began reporting online TV ratings data in June.
Developed in partnership with Kantar Media, the move will allow advertisers, agencies, and broadcasters to monetize beyond the main TV set and analyze viewing across smartphones, tablets, and PCs for the first time—something BARB, the U.K.’s TV industry body, has been working toward.
“Hybrid approaches to measurement are fast becoming the chosen route in many of the markets we operate,” says Andy Brown, Kantar Media’s CEO and chairman. “Our blueprint for audience measurement firmly places high quality data integration and high quality panels at the center to deliver total video.”
BARB published the second of two beta TV Player Reports in June as part of a longer-term plan called Dovetail to merge online and traditional panel viewing data. The report incorporates figures from TV player apps including All4, BBC iPlayer, and Sky Go; iOS; Android; and games consoles both live and on-demand.
Results of the reports revealed online views totaling 1.18 billion minutes a week, a figure dwarfed by the 90 billion minutes of TV/STB consumption, with Sky Sports channels dominating ranking for most live-streamed (accounting for over 10 percent of total player viewing).
“BARB is the U.K.’s only joint-industry, audited measure of viewing to online TV—you can’t get that from the IAB,” asserts Justin Sampson, BARB’s CEO. “The TVPR showed that the total amount of views on TV player apps—those by the major broadcasters who have chosen to put themselves under scrutiny of our standards—is 1.18 billion. Of that, about 15 percent is on a smartphone and 45 percent on a tablet.
“It’s not like smartphone viewing is growing really quickly and all others are subsiding. Certainly there’s a growth in viewing to mobile which we are tracking, but I might be more cautious than those with a vested interest in adding video to their mobile products when it comes to behavioural change. When it comes to watching quality content people will head toward the biggest screen they can get their hands on. The overall volume of viewing on mobile devices is 1.5 percent, and it’s not growing at such a rate that it will suddenly be 5 percent next year. We are a long way off from online dominating viewing habits.”
Ahead of Dovetail’s next stage, BARB is evaluating two data sets (from Kantar and Nielsen), with a view to implementing one of them in a future standard. “We may publish some of this data in advance of fuller merged data for which the target is January 2018,” says Samson.

Thinkbox Fights YouTube Claims

Thinkbox, a trade body backed by the U.K.’s commercial broadcasters, felt the need to counter what it called “unhelpful, misleading research trying to undermine TV” sponsored by Google.
It referred to YouTube’s claim that it reaches more 18–34-year-olds on mobile than any U.K. commercial broadcaster.
This was like “comparing a meter of gold chain with a cubed yard of solid gold,” says chief executive Lindsey Clay on Thinkbox’s website. “It ignores the fact that they spend vast amounts more time watching TV, and are so deeply engaged with TV they talk and tweet about it. It also ignores the fact that TV advertisers plan and buy across all TV, not just one specific channel.”
Thinkbox responded that 0.6 percent of video advertising is seen on YouTube; 94 percent is seen on TV, in full and with sound. For 16–24-year-olds, that rises to 1.4 percent versus TV’s 87.6 percent.
“YouTube could deliver more advertising if it monetized its long tail or stopped offering TrueView skippable ads,” says Clay. “The fact that 80 percent of YouTube’s viewing is done by 20 percent of viewers also hampers their reach potential for advertisers.”

Virtual voice assistants are set to disrupt the TV value chain

StreamingMedia

Netgem launches SoundBox with Alexa for telco operators as the battle to control the end user's smart home takes off. It's not just about the TV.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Virtual-Voice-Assistants-Are-Set-to-Disrupt-the-TV-Value-Chain-116546.aspx
Virtual assistants that use cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) to provide a voice-based interface are proving disruptive to the existing TV value chain. Consumer electronics manufacturers and software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology providers are jockeying to position themselves on the right side of history.
Sony, for example, plans to introduce Google Assistant to its latest line of smart TVs. According to Joel Espelien, senior advisor for analysts at The Diffusion Group (TDG), Sony knows only too well that in the long term this may be “a deal with the devil.” Nevertheless, Sony’s business model, along with its competitive vulnerability in the TV market, leaves it little choice.
Content recommendation engines need to work hand-in-hand with pay TV operators or risk being usurped by larger data aggregators, content providers, and AI controllers like Amazon. ContentWise, for example, has hooked its recommendation service to Alexa for DirecTV where Alexa provides the consumer UI but ContentWise still powers search and discovery to DirecTV’s library.
Amazon just added Alexa to its Fire TV stick in the U.K., and while Amazon content is displayed prominently following a search, it has promised that iPlayer, ITV Hub, All 4, My5, and other third-party content providers can provide direct recommendations to users.
Sky in the U.K. has voice search inked in for its Sky Q box later this year. Meanwhile, Ericsson, TiVo, Rwuido and Netgem are among technology providers experimenting with adding virtual assistants.
Espelien suggests TV makers coalesce around Google as the de facto default search engine, the benefit being that it creates a level playing field for search. However, such a move is unlikely given it would “essentially hand Google the keys to the $70 billion U.S. TV advertising market.”
Since bespoke voice UIs are destined to fail against the might of the big four virtual assistants—Alexa, Cortana (Windows), Siri (iOS), and Google—a more likely option is for existing vendors to team with one of them.
That's what Netgem has done in devising SoundBox, a new product aimed to give telcos a heads-up in the smart home.
“2017 is the year of the voice assistant,” declares managing director Sylvain Thevenot. “After the remote control, the interactive menu, and the smartphone we think it’s time to move to the next level with voice.”
Netgem has partnered with Amazon to create an environment where telco pay TV services connect to Alexa with three layers of interaction. Thevenot describes the first layer as “replacing what you do with a remote by voice commands.” In fairness, he says, “This is not much smarter than having a remote on your mobile phone.”
The second layer adds more value by performing improved search and recommendation in the cloud via the Netgem Home Platform.
In the third layer, the combination of voice control and AI goes to places not possible before.
An example: When a user sees an actor in a film but can’t quite place their name, the voice UI is able to call on face recognition linked to the cloud to deliver the answer. “You could do it today with a manual internet search, but it takes time,” Thevenot says. “Using a virtual assistant is much easier and one of a range of possibilities the industry has barely begun to explore for voice UI.”
Netgem’s proposition is for another a piece of black box hardware in the living room. Whether consumers will take to that we shall see, but the concept is logical and aims to give Netgem’s telco customers first-mover status. The battle to own the end-user in the connected home is heating up but what stakeholders will agree is that consumers won’t suffer ten different AIs listening and talking to them. 
The product is designed to help operators deliver all a customer’s music and video, with the Amazon Alexa voice assistant accessible either by speaking to a SoundBox smartphone app or to an Amazon Echo or Dot. Consider this a stalking horse for future, wider telco control of smart home services such as lighting and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), and home security. It could even expand to remote health and home ageing.
“Mobile network operators aren’t naturally associated with delivering smart home solutions,” Thevenot says. “SoundBox will enable them to change that perception for the first time by giving them an opportunity to redefine the way they approach family bundles.”
Netgem backs up its plan with a quote from analyst Nigel Walley of Decipher Media. “The combination of video and music has huge potential for connected entertainment and telecom service providers,” he says.  “The SoundBox is a big step to unifying the entertainment experience in the smart home.”
The natural advantage pay TV operators have over the big four virtual assistant controllers is simple: If something goes wrong with your Echo Dot or Google Home—who you gonna call? Lacking call centers and the decades long legacy of physically entering customer homes to install product means Amazon will want to partner with telcos and build out the connected home together.
The convenience of controlling all of a home's connected devices with a single assistant is compelling. It simplifies TV access and search, since the user doesn't have to click a Search button or navigate an EPG.
But, on closer inspection, if the only way to control all devices is voice it is unlikely to be successful on the long-term, argues Ruwido CEO Ferdinand Maier. “The user must not be forced to talk, if they do not want to, or if they just cannot talk in a certain situation, but be provided with a combination of interaction modalities.
“Some critical aspects for virtual assistants are their ability to take decisions and act by themselves. They are able to run the IoT environment independently of the user: The key will be to allow the user to still feel in control and to understand why the virtual assistant is doing what it’s doing. Research has shown that people sometimes simply do not trust the system in its choice of activities—and once the trust is gone, acceptance of the system is limited.”
Maier favors the concept of continuous recognition. Based on the device used (e.g. the remote control) the system will be able to identify the user without requiring speaking or signing in. It will be done the moment the user holds the remote or starts interacting with the system.
Ruwido focuses on the overall context (what has been said previously, what is on screen when the user is talking, where the user is situated, the time of day) to make voice interaction more than a one-way communication, and to establish a dialogue that supports the user experience.
“From a technical viewpoint, AI platforms need to evolve to be able to support as much input data as possible,” Maier says. “Beyond today’s standard information like text or voice, we need to incorporate electrical signals or more complex patterns like gestures, that can be handled within milliseconds and do not require computation in the cloud. So, the next tendency in terms of technology will be decentralization and computation on small devices that are connected via the Internet of Things.”

What do you really know about millennial viewing habits?

KNect365 for TV Connect

Millennials are without doubt one of the most disruptive forces discussed by content owners, broadcasters and platform owners, but just how influential are they?

https://knect365.com/media-networks/article/2f8a78db-1af7-4e3e-859d-0c76009f6227/what-do-you-really-know-about-millennial-viewing-habits
With viewing habits so clearly disruptive to convention, millennials have become the most high-profile and arguably critical target for content owners, pay TV broadcasters and platform owners. Yet if business strategies are to be based on reaching them, a deeper understanding of consumption patterns is surely essential.
“The way we think about consumption is not just based on demographics but on behaviour,” says Gareth Capon, CEO at real-time video platform Grabyo. “It’s not good enough to consider millennials as, on average, watching less linear and more time-shifted. Many older people broadly exhibit that behaviour, perhaps because they are travelling longer to work, while within the millennial category itself there are behavioural segments.”
There’s no strict definition of a millennial although most analysis places their birthdate in the mid-1980s aged under 35. They are also known as Generation Y, with those born from the mid-nineties as Gen Z, the first digital native cohort arriving into a world with internet connectivity and smart devices.
Linear viewing is believed to have decreased from Gen X (over 35s) down, and few would contend Capon’s observation of a “measurable relationship between decreased TV viewing and the younger age group over the past three to four years.” Ironically, Gen Alpha (today’s pre-schoolers), while very young, are more likely to watch linear programming, because they don’t have device control.
Regular viewers of online video are “considerably more likely” to be millennials and much less likely than the average online video viewer to be over 35, according to analyst Ampere.
Ampere’s research shows that 70% of younger millennials (18- to 24-year-olds) are watching online video daily and more than 60% of older millennials do the same.
By contrast, daily engagement with digital native content (made for a distribution platform other than traditional TV) drops off sharply for Gen X “and by the time we get to the Baby Boomers, less than 30% watch online video daily,” says Ampere research director Guy Bisson. “Remember that even 30% is still a significant potential market.”
The overall viewing mix among daily online video viewers is also skewed away from more traditional linear engagement, suggests Ampere. “Part of this is explained by the age balance of daily online video viewers,” says Bisson. “But it’s also clear that a fundamental behavioural shift is contributing, as daily online video viewers watch more non-linear content across all platforms, including traditional pay TV. There’s also a massive skew to the very youngest viewer for viewing on a mobile device (tablet or smartphone).”
If the trend toward digital is accepted, the argument that millennials spend all their time online, or that mobile is the most effective device, is not case closed.
Lobbying body Thinkbox spent a great deal of energy last year fighting Google’s claim that YouTube reaches more 18- to 34-year-olds on mobile than any UK commercial broadcaster. It countered that 94% of video advertising is seen on TV, “in full and with sound” compared to 0.6% on YouTube, a figure rising to just 1.4% among 16- to 24-year-olds.
“Google ignores the fact that 18 to 34s spend vast amounts more time watching TV, and are so deeply engaged with TV they talk and tweet about it,” responded Thinkbox chief executive Lindsey Clay.
BARB supported the view in its TV Player Report, which is part of the ratings agency’s plan to merge online and traditional panel viewing data. Results of the latest TVPR last June pinned weekly online views at 1.18bn minutes, a figure dwarfed by 90 billion minutes of TV consumption.
“Certainly, there’s a growth in viewing to mobile but the overall volume of viewing on mobile is 1.5% and it’s not growing at such a rate that it will suddenly be 5% this year,” asserts CEO Justin Sampson. “We are a long way off from online dominating viewing habits.”
“In terms of time spent, linear is still crucial regardless of age group,” agrees Bisson. “The lion’s share of revenue, power, market share and influence will remain with linear for the foreseeable future but to say there’s no change is to bury one’s head in the sand. When you examine subgroups, particularly younger millennials and younger Gen Zs, the behaviour change is much starker. It doesn’t mean younger viewers are not watching linear. The point is that this group are also able to be reached on digital platforms which target them in a more refined way.”
Matt Rennie, managing director at Channel 4/ Bauer Media’s music property The Box Plus Network, is at the sharp end of the business, putting into effect decisions based on feedback from its own user group research.
“Our target audience are 16 to 24s who enjoy good content, are mobile first but who are also ambivalent about the screen they watch on. One striking thing that emerged was how context plays an important role in the type of content they watch. If waiting for a bus they will be snacking on content and using social feeds, whereas if they’re on board for a half hour they will consume longer form content.”
Even among digital native platforms there are nuances. In Ampere’s view, the youngest viewers “skew heavily” to Snapchat and Instagram, while slightly older millennials and Gen X favour Facebook Video. “YouTube, by virtue of its very heavy use and reach, as well as the fact that it is already the ‘old man’ of digital native distribution, has a much more even spread across age bands,” reports Bisson.
The implication is that a one-size-fits-all video strategy is not sufficient. That’s because, compared with just two years ago when Youtube was the only online video platform of note, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter now have a strategy for video, whether surfacing video on Snapchat’s Discovery channel or building video into Instagram stories.
“Social media platforms are fulfilling a dual role as a recommendation engine and as a video destination in their own right,” says Rennie.
Of all types of content, live is least impacted and still largely consumed in a scheduled way, partly because of the high value of live, especially sports, properties.
Even here, however, there’s evidence to suggest that linear viewing levels of the Premier League and NFL are declining among millennials.
Simulcast consumption of live sport is, according to Capon, not being tracked properly in figures from Sky, BT or Facebook which “doesn’t always deliver pure demographic viewing numbers”.
Nevertheless, instead of deserting sports, he feels a portion of the youth prefers to engage with instant clips of sport or short highlights.
“Even that debate is too narrow,” he says. “Instead we should be asking how sport competes for attention with the huge array of choice available online. The debate is not whether streaming is cannibalising viewers from broadcast, but whether the likes of the Premier League can command greater attention than someone wearing a Chewbacca mask.”
As an example, new tennis format Tie Break Tens launched online in October, amassing 850,000 viewers on Facebook Live from a starting point of just 2,000 Facebook likes using the social following of Andy Murray and tennis brand Head.
“You couldn’t launch a TV channel from a virtually zero starting position without paid promotion and get 800,000 watching but social gives content owners a new mechanism for viral discovery and person to person discovery,” explains Capon.
Social media has been dubbed the electronic programme guide to the millennial generation. It’s how they find and navigate content which can be linear or on demand, long or short form.
“As broadcasters and content owners launch more on demand and catch up content over IP, the line between linear and nonlinear, streaming and pay TV is increasingly blurred,” says Rennie.
New TV sets unveiled by Samsung and others at CES in January featured smart interfaces allowing viewers to watch video from a wide variety of sources. Hisense’s new range includes an integrated web browser.
“There’s a generation of people who are growing up without this idea of appointment to view and who simply expect to have a different experience with media than the generation before,” says Capon. “They expect every platform to be on demand platform, to click and play and not have to wait and to interact with it.”
Ultimately, though, digital native content is still about embracing the audience.
“Traditional TV has evolved over many decades around people consuming it from a stationary box in a living room,” says Tom Hoffman, global VP of digital & social at Fremantle Media, quoted in Ampere’s research. “The misconception is that we create content for the box, but that is only half the equation. We create content for the behaviour of the box watchers, and there are a lot more boxes, and a lot more behaviours.”