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We are storytellers. It’s our living history. Our myths. Our legends. Our warnings. The threads that connect us through time. The way we share our inner discoveries with others.
We’ve told stories as far back as we’ve been human and shaped and reshaped in every telling. Through words and images, we left our mark and our lessons. Our stories shaped our present and modelled our future.
The ability to tell stories has evolved over time. The perspectives we tell it from.The character dimensions and depth. The narrative sand obstacles to overcome modernized with our world. Think about the best parts of Traditional Television. In terms of user experience, we often hark back to halcyon days where the whole family gathered around the TV set for an appointment to view a special event. Be that a weekly episode of a serial television show, a weekly Saturday night quiz or entertainment programme, a world-changing TV event like landing on the moon, Who Whot JR, the OJ Bronco chase, or the Challenger disaster.
These programs, sports in particular, are often seen as the linchpins for linear broadcasting today - this is where the money is. This is where traditional delivery platforms can offer viewers something that Video On Demand cannot. At Vimond, where the core team has been working in the VOD space for 20 years, we strongly believe that what we are missing is serendipity - an opportunity to see something that you would not naturally choose to watch. How many people have found themselves watching half or part of every episode of entire seasons from channel hopping? Or found yourself watching an engaging and insightful documentary that followed on from the program you originally tuned in for
Linear TV gives users something to watch at any time
Traditional Linear Television was a unique way to keep eyeballs on the screen between content providing an audience for advertisers and thus generate revenue for the delivery platform. A very successful business model for a long time. Now you could, of course, argue it had few challengers, but its dominance for 60 years as the premium form of entertainment globally wasn't just because of its unique place in the market; successful television channels were successful thanks to the skill of the Broadcasters from production through to planning, post and playout.
One thing traditional linear TV did very well was allow for serendipitous discovery
You fumble up and down the clicker until something familiar or interesting catches your eye. Maybe a sound bite caught your ear, too. Something appeared in your mind long enough to stop. To see a little more. Perhaps that’s all you end up watching, though, a quick glance before you move on, surfing away. It’s a viewing method that's easy to discover. It might be a mindless moment where plot or beginning doesn't matter, but sometimes you stumble into something good. A show you didn’t know about, and you’re hooked.
Traditional TV died the moment Netflix arrived. While other streaming services had been in the market before Netflix, Netflix was the moment—the start of an inevitable shift.
We’ve all seen this coming. The overall changes in the industry. The mergers. The launching of competitive products. We’ve been talking to our customers for years about their strategies. How they’ll adapt and change. What they need to do so. A key concern arising from increased competition and choice is how OTT platforms can become more immersive for their consumers. How do they turn their content investments into viewership? Experiencing. Coming back. Often enough that it becomes a go-to destination.
The Abundance of Choice
We all have been there. The viewing hole. Stuck between a series and the next. Starting movies, you quickly stop. Searching for something that catches your eye. Drilling down into genres. Leaving that app for another. Wasting time. Frustrating yourself when you had planned to spend some quiet time escaping reality. Which we all need these days.
Today’s OTT market offers choice, perhaps too much choice. Users obviously think they want it - look at conversion rates from linear- but it is not always desired in the end. The appeal of watching what you want, when you want, is great, but it can be tiring. It’s not just the fact that the viewer must always decide what to watch, it’s the sheer volume of content available. And from many services.
A study conducted by the University of Leicester found that it would’ve taken 237 days to watch all of the movies and documentaries added to Netflix in the UK in 2017.
Programming TV is an art. Sure, there are data metrics and analysis that go on. Even more so today than ever. I’m not an expert in programming but like any viewer I can feel the thought process behind it. When done well a knowledge of human psychology, behavior, attention span, etc., is clearly evident and has been since the power of programming humans with TV long ago became evident. That’s what you do, generally less sinisterly worded and applied. More macro, a single show or movie does the same. Plays and tug emotions to tell a story.
VOD, in its variants (SVOD, AVOD, TVOD, PVOD, whatever), completely changes that viewing paradigm. Accidental discovery becomes more challenging.
Netflix noted in a 2016 paper that the average subscriber spends 60 to 90 seconds scanning movies and TV shows on the platform before giving up. In that time, the subscriber will roughly 10 to 20 titles— about three in detail—on one or two screens. If a viewer is splitting time between 3 different video services, there may only be 20 to 30 seconds of browse time per catalogue, making first-time-right playlists and recommendations more critical than ever.
Netflix is now trialing their “Watch Now” feature which is intended to bring viewers directly into watching Netflix rather than just navigating around the app.“Upon selecting the “WatchNow” button, Netflix starts streaming the next episode of a show a user is currently watching, something from their personal list, or a title that Netflix’s algorithms have selected. Viewers get a brief explanation of why the title was chosen, which could be because it is similar to a title they have watched before.
The service is also adding a new “Play Something Else ”button to the video player itself, giving viewers a chance to try a few of Netflix’s recommendations without having to browse the service’s app. However, at least during this test, the “Play SomethingElse” button is displayed only to users who started their viewing session with “Watch Now.”
In the Frost & Sullivan’s‘ Global Online Video Platforms Market, Forecast to 2023’ personalization is highlighted as a growth area for the industry.
Building content personalization, localization,targeted advertising, and recommendation capabilities natively or through a partner ecosystem will be central to helping M&E customers drive engagement and arrest churn.
Netflix announced earlier this summer that they’d be rolling out human curated playlists. To date, Netflix has relied on a categorisation system which offers top-level genres in addition to subcategorisations that allow more targeted recommendations to users based on interests. The new human-curated playlist testing is known as Collections. These collections are curated by the Netflix editorial team and look to thematically group content by traits like genre, tone, storyline, characters, etc. Hulu has made its own steps into personalisation, recently announcing a few new features. Core to that are like and dislike buttons, similar to what Netflix has to get explicit feedback from end users on content preferences
Depending on what you like or dislike, you’ll be recommended new titles more geared to you with less sorting through content you won’t. It’s not new, but it’s a step towards a more personal and tailored experience.
The Vimond Path to Personalisation: Reuters
In 2016, Vimond partnered with Reuters to build a VOD to Linear service, taking individual VOD assets and stitching them together to create a new VOD asset, with transitions, graphics and voice-overs.
It looks like a traditional news item that can be consumed but maintains the navigation options (skip, like, don’t like, etc) that users have become accustomed to with VOD.
It was ahead of its time, and it still is unique today. For Vimond, it was an important first step; it showed us there was a market and taught us lessons on what we needed to do as a backend platform for OVPs to enable our customers to create these services.
Reuters wanted a new Manifest based on VOD assets with idents for transitions, graphics, voice overs generated automatically based on the content. This would produce two types of “programmes”- Daily News Bulletins and Features (collections of stories, similar to stories, for example, Climate, Politics, Tech)
This was a technical challenge but to add to this they also wanted end users in the US to signup and receive a personalised experience. This would allow them to choose their news. In 2016, this was seen as essential, but perhaps not with today’s reservations about the “echo chamber”.
Finally, they wanted the platform to offer live feeds because they needed to maintain something they built a reputation on - being the first to report.
This not only presents LiveStreams in the same UI as the VOD Playlists but also indicates to us that they would need to update the new bulletins throughout the day as quickly as possible to keep up with the day’s events.
Video Personalisation
In our CMS - Vimond VIA, we have a module for curating lists that display content on websites and applications, such as “best of,” “because you watched …,” “TV Shows,” “Movies,” and so on. This builds lists from existing VOD content. The truth is, we have already proven that it can be used to create new VOD Manifest files and have working POCs. With some development, this could be used to create a production-ready product for constructing VOD Playlists.
The curation module already includes plugins for powerful recommendation engines. Providers such as VionLabs, MediaLens and Amazon Personalise, all available for general release today, offer recommendations and user personalisation that can analyse viewing history and build dynamic lists based on AI and Machine Learning, beyond just the metadata tags of content in the viewing history list. This is possible today on the Vimond platform using our Smart List functionality. Add to that the ability to provide scheduling teams behind the curation, and you can provide serendipity.
With these tools, we could see a model where our Customers can offer their own personal Channels to their customers.
Virtual Linear Channels -The ability to stitch VOD assets together to recreate a traditional linear television channel without using legacy broadcast signal distribution and play-out infrastructure.
This doesn’t really bring anything new to OTT, but there is a market out there. The BBC moved BBC 3 to an OTT-only service in 2016. RTE has an RTE News Now as an OTT-only channel, and the Olympic Channel has been an OTT-only service since launch.
The VLC must, at a minimum, provide all the features of a modern DVR set-top box. Set reminders and receive notifications, record content using PVR technology or offer the VOD version, start from the beginning, and, of course, pause. But the cost of creating these channels would be much lower if done correctly, and interstitial ads would be seen by viewers as intrusive because they would mimic the linear experience we have today.
VOD Playlists would build upon the work done with Reuters TV- take a curated list of content and offer that to viewers as a single asset. If done correctly, this is a programmatic stitching service that can also show advertisements between programme content. Updating the new VOD Manifest file would be as simple as updating the playlist and publishing it.
We would also look to the music industry for inspiration, often ahead of the video industry. Where certain music services will move a listener into a dynamic playlist without them ever knowing. If you start playing one song, it no longer stops when the song finishes; it generates a playlist and flows from one to the next.
Then back to a playlist tailored to keep viewers happy, reduce churn, and convert those viewers into live event attendees.
Joint playlists, what if we could have a shared playlist where you can add programs for others to watch and see who has seen them, “no more ‘have you seen GoT yet’?” or Spoiler Alert!
Keep the eyeballs on the screen, keep the viewers happy, keep the advertising revenue.
The Value of Video Recommendations
There’s an opportunity for the brand owner to become the trusted source of recommendations for consumers. A trusted brand in traditional terms. In that they develop an intimate relationship with their consumers and become a destination again. That place you know will steer your viewing eye well. This has value.
The Future of TV Market Demand November 2019 by the Australia-based agency Quantum Market Research showed that 96 per cent of viewers would use a personalised channel if offered by television broadcasters.
Survey respondents were also willing to pay an extra UK£14.30 (US$18.56) per month for the channel on top of their existing TV subscription.
There’s data out there to back up that done right personalisation should increase viewing. Decrease churn. Vionlabs, a strong player in the space, states when driving playlists from machine learned emotional fingerprinting that “The engagement on SVOD was similar, where the viewers with the emotional fingerprints added 3 times more content to their watch list and raised the amount of started streams by 25% monthly. Test also done over 6 months in 2018 on Web browsers on over 1,100,000 viewers.”
Today, we predominantly have three business models: TVOD, SVOD and AVOD.
There is a lot of pushback on mixing these. We see a paradox where people no longer expect to see advertisements between programming when they are already paying a subscription, even though this has always been true in Broadcasting. People who pay Canal Digital or Sky £40 or £100 a month and then tune into Sky 1 never moan about advertising - even though the only way to see the channel was to have a Sky subscription. But try putting ads on an SVOD service, and those same people will be up in arms, threatening to cancel their £ 10-per-month subscription.
Some platforms such as TV 2 play can offer premium content with their subscriptions, but in exchange for that (unless watching the linear channels on Sumo) - viewers might find advertisements on VOD content unacceptable. However, if they decide to watch the main TV 2 service as a livestream, then seeing adverts is not acceptable. So if it is okay on linear ”live”, then perhaps that is one way to reintroduce advertising to OTT.