If you’ve been following my “Feudal Media” theory (which I am turning into a full-fledged book, out this September), you know that the fragmentation of the monoculture into thousands of small, disconnected bubbles is at the heart of it. So it should not come as that big a surprise that the fragmentation of media was the number one topic of discussion at StreamTV Europe this week. It dominated every hallway conversation and worked its way into many — if not most — of the conversations on the stage. In this case, “fragmentation” refers to a number of things: the fragmentation of audiences across streaming and linear, the fragmentation of the actual media so that rather than just three broadcasters (all of which may have been state-owned) there are now thousands of streaming services, and about fragmentation among generations, where younger audiences are more focused on YouTube while their parents flit back and forth between linear, streaming and social. In other words, as the Brits would put it, a bloody mess. Why It Matters A continent with 44 countries, only 27 of which are part of the European Union should be used to the concept of fragmentation, but when it comes to media, Europe has traditionally had less choice than the U.S., and so, in many ways, fragmentation hits harder. Suddenly the audiences that were so easy to find and reach feel like they are hidden among the stars. It was a feeling we tried to address with our “SHIFT HAPPENS” TVREV programming, which kicked off the show on the first day. One of the things I learned early on in my career is that conference programming works best when there is a theme and you can take the audience through it with each speaker or panel so that at the end they come away with clear learnings. I opened the show with a keynote on The Death of the Monoculture and The Rise Of Feudal Media, which lays out the premise of fragmentation and how we got there: streaming removed the constraints of time, which meant people were no longer all watching at the same time, while the rise of social video meant that the traditional gatekeepers were no longer in charge. To keep the positive momentum, Andy Waltenspiel then ran a panel about how fragmentation was impacting European telco operators called “What Now? How Telcos Are Winning In A Fragmented Streaming World.” Daniel Bravo from Deutsche Telekom, Joao Ferreira from NOS Inovação and Pedro Duarte from Vodafone Group represented the operators. For those of you unfamiliar with the European market, the telcos are also the main MVPDs in the region and play a much more important role in the lives of both consumers and content owners than the MVPDs do in the U.S. (If nothing else, there are far fewer of them per country so they have more impact.) The key takeaway was that operators needed to embrace today’s fragmented landscape by innovating and offering consumers what they want — not digging their heels in. That means bundling streaming services together with linear, relying more heavily on data, and understanding that the landscape is not black and white: companies can be collaborators in one instance and frenemies in another. From there, we turned to “The Last Gatekeepers: The Looming Importance of the TV OS” where I moderated a panel of industry heavyweights: Guy Edri from V (formerly Vidaa), Jack Gao from Whale TV, Geir Skadden from Xperi and Tom Price from Roku. The panel focused on how the OS determines the terms of engagement with the TV itself: what viewers encounter first, how content is organized and what ultimately gets discovered. All four offered reasons why the key to success was better engagement, And all four agreed that the only way to ensure that happened was to always place the consumer’s needs ahead of those of advertisers, content owners or the OEM. Edri pointed out too that the distinction between “TV” and “CTV” was one the people at the conference were keen on making, but also one the consumer rarely, if ever made. “TV is TV” he noted, something I firmly agree with and have said in various forms in years past. Veed Analytics’ Bernd Riefler was up next with a panel on “How To Reach A Mass Audience When There Is No More Mass Market,” which focused on the ways advertisers are cobbling together the mass audiences they once easily reached on prime time. He was joined by Wurl’s Dave Bernath, Stingray’s David Purdy, S3S’s Tomasz Dzikowski and DMC Production’s Holger Enßlin. Conversation here ranged from how genres like sports and music can help bridge the Feudal Media bubbles, live events in particular to how new arenas, like in-car video can help brands reach the consumer at various points throughout their day, recreating some sense of old school ubiquity. All was not roses and rainbows however, as there seemed to be a general consensus that while mass reach was achievable, getting there was going to require more than a bit of both flexibility and legwork to get there. Having gone through how operators, operating systems and advertisers were adapting to fragmentation, we gave the audience a way to dive deeper and have some fun with a round of “Analyst Improv” where I was joined by Omdia’s Maria Rua Aguete, Plum Research’s Jonathan Broughton and the aforementioned Andy Waltenspiel from Waltenspiel/Connecting The Dots. The format was simple. I told the audience to shout out one-word suggestions to prompts like “Name a streaming service” and we would all respond with our thoughts on the service, “yes anding” each other to paint a complete picture. First up was Disney and we riffed on their overreliance on superheroes, recent experiment with Sora and position in a post-Paramount/HBO world. It was a great way to tie things up and props to the audience for hanging in there despite the clanking of lunchtime plates and silverware just outside the door. Other highlights of the show were a panel I did with Titan OS around the value of the home screen and, more importantly, home screen ads, a topic I touched on the next day in a fireside with TiVo’s Geir Skadden, that also addressed the power of data to understand Feudal Media audiences. Two other valuable sessions I was not a part of were Evan Shapīro’s thoughtful keynote that contrasted the ways Fox and Paramount were looking towards the future and where he might have mentioned that YouTube was TV. The other was Maria Rua Aguete’s keynote where she unveiled two surprising pieces of data: Hisense’s V was poised to overtake LG’s TVOS in Europe and Walmart/VIZIO’s SmartCast was poised to overtake Roku in the U.S. Neither is a great shock to anyone following the industry —low-priced Chinese manufacturers are on the rise and no one expected Walmart to not use its retail prowess to boost VIZIO. Still, it was interesting to see it all on paper. What You Need To Do About It If you are in the industry and worried about fragmentation, you should be, but you should also remember that in every rapid transformation there is opportunity. Meaning you need to try and figure out what is happening next and to stay on top of all the changes. And there’s no better way than by subscribing to TVREV and reading our free Special Reports. I am also turning The Collapse of the Monoculture and The Rise of Feudal Media into a book, due out this fall, so keep an eye on it. If you are in Europe or your company does a lot of business in Europe and you did not attend the StreamTV Show this year… don’t make the same mistake twice and make sure you show up next year. And if you are not in Europe and are feeling major FOMO, you can get your tickets for the OG StreamTV Show in Denver, which starts Tuesday, June 16 with three hours of TVREV sessions. And there will be puppies. |
