DigitalMedia Conference and Audience Poll Shocker!
Colin Dixon, Senior Partner, Advisory
June 25, 2010
Kelly Day, EVP & GM, Digital Media at Discovery, gave the keynote this morning and gave a fascinating insight into the role of brand in the online world. She told the story of how Discovery purchased HowStuffWorks.com. HowStuffWorks had a robust section devoted to recipes which Discovery repurposed under the TLC brand. They brought in video featuring Buddy Valastro as “The Sauce Boss”, and Hunts as the sponsor for the site. Within a month the company saw 42% increase in uniques growing to 100% within 3 months. Search referrals went up 34% and engagement rocketed 100%.
Kelly also made the point that Google search does not work well for video. Discovery has found that the combination of good text articles driving search and video driving engagement is a winning combination.
I moderated a panel entitled “TV Anywhere, Anytime, On Any Device”. The panelists were Paul Levine, EVP Interactive Media at National Geographic, Beth Laurence, EVP Ad Sales & Media Solutions at The Weather Channel, Bob Minai, Senior Director of Interactive at PBS and Padmashree Koneti, Manager Product Management at Cisco. Bob Minai revealed that PBS is seeing average viewing times of online video at their site of 22 minutes. According to Comscore, the current average viewing time for online video is just 4 minutes. Clearly, PBS viewers are finding some very engaging content at the PBS site. Padmashree described how the network was a better place to do services like PVR allowing the STB to be very simple and letting the network do the work. As well, she made the point that doing things in the network makes it much easier to deliver that content multi-screen.
Beth told us that Weather Channel is already providing services to three screens. I have to admit I’m a little frustrated with weather. I have AccuWeather on my phone, Weather Channel on my TV and use Yahoo and Google on the PC. None of these services are integrated with each other. The applications on my phone and PC don’t take advantage of other data, like my calendar schedule, to tell me what the weather will be like in places I’m about to visit.
I asked all the panelists if they thought that delivering Internet video to the TV through services like Google TV posed much of the threat to existing broadcasters. Paul didn’t think this posed much of a threat to the existing cable model. I mentioned that some of the applications shown by companies liked Wired magazine looked like entertainment to me. However, the panelists didn’t think this was something the viewers would be very engaged with on TV.
I’ve been speaking a lot lately and have taken the opportunity to do a couple of audience polls. I asked a meeting of CTAM and the audience at OTTcon East the following 4 questions:
Two things were pretty shocking: to my eye there wasn’t a lot of difference between the number of people with OnDemand and Netflix. Also, far more of the Netflix subscribers were streaming (70-75%) than cable customers were watching OnDemand (40-50%.) I know the audience was comprised of industry insiders but even CTAM members were choosing to watch Netflix over OnDemand.
ShareThis