Insights into innovation in social TV

Facebook targets TV ad budgets

 

Job description for Facebook sales exec reveals direct competition with commercial broadcasters over television advertising

 

Facebook - partner or competitor for commercial broadcasters?

The face that Facebook prefers to present to the television industry is as an innovative social media partner. It regularly dispatches executives to major TV business conferences, such as MIPTV in Cannes, to make high-profile speeches.

These speeches promote solutions such as Facebook Places, for viewers to tell friends what they are watching and encourage them to view the same programming, or Facebook Credits, for viewers to pay to vote in top-rated shows such as The X Factor.

But this is far from the whole story.

Futurescape continuously researches all aspects of Facebook’s relationship with the TV business for our strategy reports on the future of television.

The latest title is Social TV, which analyses how Facebook and Twitter are power brokers for the global television industry.

Our research has unearthed a highly revealing recruitment advertisement for the Facebook sales team which shows Facebook’s other face. (NB Link is erratic - see below for screenshot of the ad.)

Facebook is a direct competitor for broadcasters’ advertising revenues.

 

Wanted - sales executive to take budgets from TV

The advert's list of candidate requirements explicitly includes:

• "Ability to convert clients national TV budgets spends into Facebook marketing relationships."
• "Prospect and penetrate large organizations to obtain branded advertising."
• "Relationships with top marketing decision makers at traditional companies and media agencies."

 

In other words, the ideal Facebook ad sales executive can persuade major brands (and their media planning / buying agencies) to swap their advertising spends out of television and into Facebook.

 

And the TV ad budgets that Facebook is targeting are in the millions.

The sales exec should have a:

• "Demonstrated track record of structuring and managing complex negotiations to successful closure and delivery (at a 7-figure level)."

 

Facebook - friend or foe for broadcasters?

The questions that many in TV and digital media would like answered include:

What is Facebook’s real agenda for broadcasters – being a helpful social media partner or an advertising competitor?

Can Facebook - which now has TV-scale user numbers in many countries - succeed in tapping broadcasters’ revenues?

Will Facebook competition significantly erode broadcasters’ revenues?

Is Facebook now pursuing a long-term video advertising strategy, delivering TV-style commercials or sponsored video content via PCs, tablets, smartphones and Internet-connected TVs, and with social targeting?

What are the implications for a Facebook IPO?

 

For more on the complex and fast-changing commercial relationships between Facebook, Twitter and television, see the Futurescape strategy report, Social TV.

 

Screenshot of the original Facebook recruitment ad

 

Key findings from Futurescape’s Social TV report, second edition

Facebook and Twitter are TV’s new power brokers,
shaping the future of television

The second edition of Futurescape's Social TV report launches today. The key findings are that Facebook and Twitter are now power brokers in global TV and their power over the TV business will increase. Facebook and Twitter are now power brokers in global TV, through creating new business opportunities for the television industry. Their ability to create new business opportunities and engage viewers, boosting advertising and pay-TV revenue, gives them a significant and increasing influence over all aspects of television. Shows such as The X Factor will use the Facebook Credits digital currency so that viewers can readily pay to vote. Pay-TV electronic programme guides (EPGs) are incorporating Facebook and Twitter: this lets viewers instantly recommend shows to friends and followers, encouraging them to subscribe to pay-TV channels for particular programmes. More than 30 startup companies are launching innovative forms of social TV to entertain viewers and provide value for broadcasters and advertisers: most have deep integration with Facebook and Twitter. The social networks’ power over the TV business will increase, because the future of television is social. Many viewers already communicate via Twitter and Facebook on mobiles and laptops while watching TV. This trend can only grow: consumers are buying Internet TV sets with Facebook and Twitter apps pre-installed and also entertainment tablets, such as the iPad. Viewers commenting during programming, particularly live event shows such as the Oscars, is likely to boost viewing and raise advertising revenue for broadcasters. Connected TV sets with Twitter and Facebook apps mean that television programming will co-exist with social media on the same screen. Television shows will be viewed with an on-screen, social context. Download Social TV table of contents and sample pages PDF Go to the Social TV report page

New Report: Social TV (second edition)

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A Social Future for Television - our new article in IPTV magazine

Futurescape’s take on A Social Future for Television has just been published in the July issue of IPTV magazine.

Based on the findings of our new Social TV report, it addresses key issues for the IPTV industry around social television, such as:

How can IPTV provide the optimum social apps experience for viewers to see and send Facebook status updates and tweet about what they are watching? What relationships will they have with the social networks, either directly or via middleware providers? Can they pioneer innovative services using social data that consolidate or improve their competitive stance? Are there ways to integrate and leverage their own data, such as family and friends calling plans, with data from the social networks?

Read the full article at the IPTV magazine site.

What does Twitter's Tweet Media video service mean for social TV?

Twitter is testing out embedding videos and photos in the Twitter stream.

As reported in Mashable, the Tweet Media feature will let users see multimedia from accounts they follow and opt to see them from everyone.

This has profound implications for social TV.

Futurescape’s Social TV report revealed how Facebook and Twitter are already battling for key roles in the TV industry, via connected, social TV.

Tweet Media can significantly strengthen Twitter’s position by transforming it from text messaging into a connected TV video service.

For connected TV manufacturers, a Twitter app with video is an ideal showcase for the power of TV apps. It will let their customers watch videos from their favourite Twitter celebrities, TV shows and even brands right on the big screen.

Platform operators will need to decide how this fits into their apps strategy. Should they also enable Twitter apps with video?

Advertisers will be able to incorporate video into the viral Promoted Tweets and @Earlybird services and use Tweet Media as an entirely new form of TV advertising.

Although broadcasters could promote their own shows, they face the even more radical challenge of Tweet Media competing with TV commercials by socially targeting brand advertising to viewers on the connected TV set.

For further in-depth analysis on the future of social media and the TV industry, see Futurescape’s Social TV report.

Six reasons why The Economist isn’t radical enough about the future of TV

There’s an excellent overview in this week’s Economist about the future of the EPG.

The article – Struggling for control – is absolutely right about one effect of connecting TVs to the Internet.

It leads to massively increased choice which requires next-generation EPGs to help viewers navigate the wealth of content.

One popular solution is to develop social EPGs that let friends recommend TV shows and videos to each other, via social networks or via systems using data from social networks.

Yet there are six reasons why the implications of connected TV are even more radical than The Economist suggests.

Futurescape.TV recently researched this nascent social TV sector for its new report, Social TV: How Facebook, Twitter and connected television transform global TV advertising, pay-TV, EPGs and broadcasting.

We concluded that Facebook and Twitter are already battling for key roles in the TV industry as Internet-connected televisions transform TV into a social medium.

The two social networks have an actual or potential commercial role across the entire TV value chain.

1) Global pay-TV, estimated at $250bn in 2014, needs social recommendation and discovery services because these encourage viewers to subscribe to more expensive packages and buy more video-on-demand – Facebook and Twitter are both major providers of social data.

Facebook in particular has a highly developed social graph of people’s relationship with entertainment content, from the ubiquitous Like button, integrated into many broadcasters’ Web sites.

Both it and Twitter own considerable, detailed data about people’s behaviour, such as discussing TV shows and sharing links to videos.

2) Set-top box middleware and EPG providers similarly need social network data for recommendation and discovery – and the European EPG market alone will be worth $555m by 2014.

3) TV manufacturers’ strategy to provide video-on-demand direct to viewers also requires social recommendation, while their connected TV apps enable viewers to interact with Facebook and Twitter on home TV sets.

4) Facebook aims to tap the $180bn worldwide TV ad market, competing with broadcasters for brand advertising – Google TV and similar Web-on-TV systems will put Facebook and Twitter targeted ads on TV screens.

5) Facebook and Twitter buzz affects TV ratings, while broadcasters that use the social networks for viewer engagement are effectively sharing their audiences with them.

6) The social networks know in real time how people react to TV programming – this is an essential supplement to Nielsen-type viewing data.

Integrating social networks with EPGs is only one manifestation of a profound and permanent change in the television industry.

It’s a change through which Facebook and Twitter are positioning themselves as major TV industry players.

Innovative digital narrative projects at BBC Children’s Interactive

In this Futurescape.TV guest blog post, producer Tom Kenyon reveals the thinking behind the latest digital projects spanning online and television at BBC Children’s Interactive.

If you’d like to contribute a post on an innovative digital project, contact us at editor@futurescape.tv

Interactive Narrative and Children

I’m a senior development producer for BBC Children’s Interactive.  It’s a busy time for at CBBC.  We have just launched two major interactive stories that combine video, games and narrative in innovative and interesting ways and have a third on the way in May.

BBC Children’s isn’t the noisiest player in the online drama space, but we do have form. Last year our collaboration with Xenophile Media to create an ARG for MI High won the Rose D’or and the Horrible Histories web site builds on Littleloud’s excellent work on Bow Street Runners.

In this post I want to write about how we think when developing online stories for children and to introduce our latest projects.

The first and most important point is children’s audiences are different.

For a child all narrative is interactive: a story doesn’t stop because the book, film, TV show or comic has ended.  They will take the characters and locations found in toys or engaging linear stories and expand them through play, using whatever means are at their disposal – be that a games console, a web site, a doll, a costume or even a broomstick and a cardboard box.

Children don’t discriminate between platforms. They expect to find brands they love on all the screens in their life.  In fact, the more pervasive a brand is, the higher its perceived quality.

Part of Disney’s success comes through omnipresence.  If I like High School Musical I can watch the show, I can play the game, I can wear the bag, hang the curtains, wear the pyjamas – I can define myself through merchandise as someone who likes HSM, all the while imagining that I’m part of Zac’s beautiful gang.

In his excellent games presentation, Jesse Schell points out that the success of Moshi Monsters lay in realising that the pleasure of a soft toy isn’t in the object itself, but in its imagined life and narratives and the game you play together.

The Moshi Monsters online game visualised that relationship. To a certain degree this is what we aim to do with our online narratives: put the child into the stories they’ve seen on TV and create a strong relationship with the characters they love through play.

The depth of the user’s relationship with the characters on screen is particularly important as we are currently unable to make more ‘social’ experiences.  Safety concerns and BBC policy prevent us from allowing post-moderated chat or linking to popular social networks. Instead we focus on personalisation, trying to ensure that the user’s efforts are lauded within the narrative as opposed to on comment threads.

My Almost Famous Family

MAFF (as it has become affectionately known) on TV is a Partridge Family-esque musical comedy about a family who are the house band on a talk show.  The premise of the online narrative is that the children of the group want to break away from their parents to create their own band for a radio competition.  Unfortunately they don’t have the discipline or organisation to see it through.

That’s where you come in. The player is quickly recruited as a band manager and through a series of creative games helps the band find their sound, practice their instruments, mix a song and make a video.

The experience mixes documentary-style footage of the band’s progress, ‘live’ webcam direct address to the player and sophisticated games.  There’s over an hour and a half of specially shot video within the experience that gives the player a real insight into the characters and feel like they are truly part of the band.

Mission 2110

A common model for broadcast interactive is for an online game to accompany a TV drama. Mission 2110 turns that on its head.  The TV show is the game and the drama plays out online.  On TV it’s a high-concept gameshow set in a post-apocalyptic future ruled by robots (Terminators in all but name) and hosted by a lone freedom fighter, Caleb.  Online we find out how this future came to pass and the backstory of the host in unlockable episodes.

It’s quality stuff, too.  The story is written by Phil Ford (who has written episodes for Dr Who) and the main character is played by Lindsay Duncan.  Each episode sets up a mini-game puzzle (linked to the games in the TV show) but the main aim is to complete a timeline of events that reveal the true identity of the show’s enigmatic host.  Again this gives players the feeling of a personal relationship with Caleb and a deep understanding of his world.

The Skyship

Skyship uses an adventure narrative to introduce children to natural history footage in a new way. You take on the role of a maverick courier (cooler than it sounds) in charge of a steampunk blimp that you use to navigate the globe.

Players take on treasure-hunt style missions to unlock nature footage from our extensive archive.  The mix of games and story will draw in a new audience to this factual content that traditionally doesn’t perform as well online for our target audience.

Each of these projects is highly ambitious. They were developed by producers working closely with the TV productions, managing independent games developers and swimming in postcards with plot points and character details.

Each project has its flaws – really, we’re all still experimenting in this space. However it’s great to see younger audiences introduced to these kinds of online stories.

Hopefully, they will help to grow a new audience (and an audience expectation) for a mode of storytelling that puts the user at the heart of the narrative and encourages them to play with characters they love.

Digital Economy Bill says Channel 4 must support innovative content

The UK’s Digital Economy Bill, passed yesterday, includes a specific provision to support cutting-edge digital productions.

Clause 22 says that the remit for broadcaster Channel 4 now extends to supporting people "making innovative content" and producing news and content for children and teens.

This could be very good news for independent producers pitching multiplatform, transmedia and Web TV productions and fill the gap left when social networks such as Bebo and MySpace stopped commissioning Web series for teens and young adults.

As we observed in UK Web Shows Now, Channel 4 has previously backed the Ford-sponsored trendspotting show Bite, and also some public service multiplatform or online productions, such as the pioneering interactive series Dubplate Drama (above) and teen advice show Year Dot.

Now that a remit to innovate is actually legislated, this can give Channel 4 the impetus and focus to deliver an exciting new generation of British digital content.

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Are Bebo’s Web shows doomed to disappear forever?

Social networking site Bebo was a considerable innovator in Web TV shows from 2007-2009.

And all that innovation is likely to vanish as Bebo now faces being closed down.

- There were real-life games and interactivity in Lonelygirl15 spin-off KateModern (above).

- The Gap Year pioneered a travel show being produced globally virtually in real time.

- Teen drama Sofia’s Diary ran for three seasons, a transmedia production which was also the first Web show to transfer to UK broadcast television.

Then the commissioning slowly dried up, as advertising-funded branded entertainment productions became harder to launch with the onset of the recession.

It also seems that Bebo’s new owner, AOL, didn’t know how to run its acquisition, leading to the widely expected news today that Bebo is to be sold or even just closed down.

Our question: what will become of some of the UK’s earliest and most inventive Web shows?

One possibility is that the rights may revert to the independent production companies who made them.

Another is the actual footage and/or the shows’ formats may be sold to a TV distributor that would in turn aim to sell them into the international TV market at MIPTV. But it wouldn’t be surprising if AOL is simply to busy or indifferent to complete such a deal.

Alternatively, if Bebo is sold as a going concern, the shows should survive, at least in the short term. If it’s closed (and apparently there are potential US corporate tax advantages in just shutting it down outright), then the shows will disappear from the Internet completely.

What’s important here is not just the video footage being lost, but all the surrounding content (the Web sites that contain the shows), together with the totality of the Bebo members’ interactions – all those comments and Web cam contest entries.

A remote chance of saving this might be with an institution such as the BFI or the British Library stepping in to copy all the content over to another server.

But right now, if you want to view and interact with some essential media innovation, hurry over to Bebo and catch the shows while you still can:

Kate Modern

Sofia’s Diary

The Gap Year

The Secret World of Sam King

b-box

Beat

The Closet

Once the shows are gone, the only place you’ll be able to find a comprehensive creative and commercial account of them will be in our report UK Web Shows Now – see a free case study of The Secret World of Sam King.