Enhanced TV was the theme of the second day of a conference in London, following a full day on interactive advertising.
As Professor Duane Varan observed in his introduction, the UK is the world’s interactive television laboratory, but “You don’t necessarily enhance a programme by adding interactivity.
Enhancing is about adding value, either in the viewing experience or in the business model.”
Enhanced TV was the theme of the second day of a conference in London, following a full day on interactive advertising.
As Professor Duane Varan observed in his introduction, the UK is the world’s interactive television laboratory, but “You don’t necessarily enhance a programme by adding interactivity. Enhancing is about adding value, either in the viewing experience or in the business model.”
Pressing the right buttons
Emma Somerville kicked off the session with a key note presentation entitled ‘Press the right button’, maintaining the theme that interactivity must add value. Delivering public value is a key theme for the BBC at present, and the measures of success include reach and range, universality, distinctiveness, innovation and contribution to the industry. The BBC is still the only broadcaster providing interactivity on all three platforms: satellite, terrestrial and cable.
“A key part of our strategy has been to try and understand the real value of interactivity,” she said.
Experience to date suggests that everyone will interact, across all demographic groups, but interactive audiences tend to skew towards any bias of the programme that is being enhanced.
Audiences are driven to interact by the programme and the peak of usage is generally at the end of the linear show. Gaining the buy-in of on-screen talent is vital for credible in-programme mentions, as demonstrated by an example in which a presenter was asked in an ad-lib about his own use of the ‘red button’ and revealed “it never works for me”. Simplicity is key. Calls to action need to encapsulate the core proposition of the service, such as choosing a court at Wimbledon or choosing a sport at the Olympics.
Richard Adams of YooMedia noted that DVD’s have been influential in creating an expectation of interaction while peer-to-peer models such as text messaging have led the drive for user generated contributions. Drawing on theories about games and conversations, he argued that interaction has rules or maxims and echoed the warning that enhanced television should not be used for the sake of it, as a substitute for content, or where it does not offer anything that extends the experience.
Television executives tend not to dwell on their mistakes, so it was refreshing that Ian McCelland of Turner entertainingly shared the learning from his own experiences, showing iterative improvements from early ambitious and expensive experiments to more flexible, ‘re-skinnable’ applications.
Paul Thornton Jones of Discovery identified many commercial objectives for enhancing television, including adding value to the experience, adding value for sponsors and advertisers, and seeking to innovate and remain distinctive, but he singled out the primary goal of improving viewer loyalty and creating stickiness to the schedule. In addition, enhanced services extended the potential offering for sponsorship and advertising opportunities and contributed to the perceived value of a channel to operators.
Cross-platform delivery
Given the challenges inherent in cross-platform delivery identified by William Cooper of informitv, two potential approaches were outlined by Chello Media and ICTV. The Chello Mistral solution aims to offer an end-to-end solution across multiple middleware with an innovative approach to synchronisation. The approach adopted by ICVT Headendware is to render the application at the server and deliver it as a standard audio-video stream, with a minimal player application returning remote control commands. NDS demonstrated a similar approach, whereby simple games graphics are laid over synchronous video to create the impression of arcade action.
Talking telephone numbers
Peter Cowley of Endemol is well-placed to judge the uptake of enhanced television, with reality shows that have done much to define the modern vote format genre. Interestingly he suggested that “enhanced television and reality television will not change significantly over the coming years,” adding that “I suspect that mobile will win” over red button interactivity. “In the US and Europe it’s all about mobile.”
For Peter Birch of ITV, the main interest of enhanced television appears to lie in offering advertisers and sponsors branding opportunities associated with programmes to create “a real connection with the show”.
Mark Rowland, the chief executive of Red Fig, said: “The telephone is going to be everyone’s favourite remote”.
Although voting through the remote control is important, the real returns are currently provided by premium rate telephony.
The numbers involved can be significant. The live final of the last series of I’m a Celebrity produced more than three million votes, half of which were in the last seven minutes. Clearly this can deliver substantial revenues, although these are less than might be expected once all the interested parties have taken their share. There was a note of caution from Red Fig for those with big plans for this new premium revenue, that “at least one major telco is already planning for a future on a model when they will not be able to charge for any calls”.
Anders Hackfelt of Mindmatics gave an insight into one of the oldest and largest voting shows, the Eurovision Song Contest and the unprecedented challenges involved in processing SMS votes across 24 countries in a ten minute slot, handling up to 4,500 telephony and text votes a second.
According to Robert Fahle of RTL Newmedia, there is an argument that significant volumes of votes in a show can boost the value of commercial slots because the audience is highly engaged. However, he also cautioned that “broadcasters should not get on their audience’s nerves” by introducing too much interactivity.
While many interesting insights were offered, there did not appear to be a consensus as to the strategic value of enhanced television. While it is relatively clear for public service television, opinions were varied on whether enhancement should serve to promote programme and channel loyalty, provide additional advertising or sponsorship opportunities, or drive direct revenue.
The Enhanced TV conference was organised by Junction and held at the CBI Conference Centre in London on 29 September 2004.