Broadcasters and Streaming: We Get it. Or Do We?

Many broadcasters have gotten religion about ways of streaming their product.  They understand that there are two additional groups of users out there – those who want to watch or listen to programming as it’s broadcast but can’t access a receiver, and those who would prefer to watch or listen to that same content at a later time.

They have that understanding.  Cool.  But it’s how they address it that’s really missing the mark.

Courtesy,
Jay Ward Productions

Sherman, set the WABAC Machine for 1930.  Let’s go visit the Galvin Brothers¹ as they place a radio in a car.  I selected that point because the auto radio presented a special problem…selecting a station while driving.  Tuning up and down the band – such that it was under the Federal Radio Commission – was done with peril.  Dodging ruts and rocks while spinning a dial to find a station wasn’t easy.

So we made it easier.  By then Major Armstrong² had invented the superheterodyne process so listeners didn’t have to tune multiple stages.  That, alone, made radio ready for home.  But for the car:  presets.  Push a button and get to a preset frequency.  One could listen while on the road.  So what’s the big deal?  We made it easier for someone to listen to our product.

Sherman!  Get in the machine.  We’re going back to 2016.  We have AM and FM in cars.  We have Wi-Fi, WiMAX, even Bluetooth to get from our phones to the dash.  And we have buttons…myriad buttons.  We have them at home, too.  I’m convinced that many of them don’t even do anything…they’re just there.

Well with all of that, you’d think the idea would be the same as a paragraph ago…make it easier to listen/watch. Yet broadcasters are missing the boat.  A combination of poor use of technology and overzealous marketing is killing streaming.

Weblands Archive

Do you spend a lot of time listening to broadcast streams online?  I mean, do you spend a lot of time listening – after you join their club, give them a significant amount of information, including your location, then reload the page because after you clicked “Submit” the page hung or you were sent back to the site’s home page.  Or maybe you hit “Back” and got the old “For [browser} to reload this page, it needs to resend information.  Do you want to do that?”  You click “Yes” and you get the page but your info is gone.

More often, you’re faced with a wall trying to keep you out.  Like opening a restaurant and putting an oil drum in front of the door.  Seriously.  You’re asking visitors to come in; use your product.  Sure, if you’re a car dealer and you want them to take your latest SUV for a test drive, demand a driver’s license, thumbprint, picture and saliva sample (I cleaned that one up).  But we want people to come in, like what they see or hear and stick around.  Why the heck put a bar on the door.

On other sites, you get the impression that a wunderkind told management, “If we put the stream behind 5 clicks, think of all the extra impressions we get along the way.”  Really?  That’s good business?  It is if you check your analytics and see that almost all the folks heading for a stream actually make it through all the clicks.  If not, you might as well make your stream the last frame in a Taboola list of 25 celebrities who never learned how to tie their shoes.

Aha!  I got in.  Now we’re cruising.  Well, maybe.  If you limit your streams and people can’t get in, they probably won’t come back, especially if you’re offering syndicated programming.  You have to have a high enough number of concurrent slots available.  I’ve seen it.  You log out and can’t get back in.  I’ve been there – on the wrong end – as prospects called saying they couldn’t get the stream.  Not good PR.

OK.  You got in.  Suddenly there’s the dreaded preroll.  This has gone from :05 to :10 to “I don’t care how long it is, I sold the preroll to 10 advertisers so you run ‘em all.”  A few enlightened streamers offer visitors the ability to skip ads they’re not interested in.  Many broadcasters don’t.  Heck, they’re still scratching their heads of DVR zapping.

Let me reiterate:  you have to make it easy to get to your stream.  Do 2 :05s or a :10 and see how it works.  Look at the numbers.  How many stick around, how many leave.  You can A/B this with two links.  Alternate them so that half the visitors get, say, a :10 a :30 and another :10 preroll.  Then give the other half just a :10.  Then just look at the stats.  The revenue will probably fit along a bell curve – no preroll, no money, little bit of preroll, little bit of money, etc. all the way to lots of preroll, no money. 

Also, think about overlays.  Viewers will tolerate them if they don’t get in the way of important information.  I mean, on broadcast, we’ve already given up the lower third of the screen to promotion.  Sadly, people are used to it…used to a bright animated lower-third wiping its way across the screen during a dark stakeout.

Then, consider the real estate of the entire page.  But do so within the context of all the possible devices you’re serving.  If you’re distributing to multiple platforms, you can deal with each differently.  If you’re not, you may want to consider adding additional formats.

We’re done, right?  Oh, no, no, no, no. How about the stream itself.  Why do broadcasters, of all stream providers, seem to gravitate to lousy standards.  Part of it is cost.  Maybe we/they don’t want to continually upgrade.  Or they don’t want to pay for bandwidth.  Maybe it’s a training issue.  That shouldn’t be the case.

Remember the Adobe Flash wars with Apple and Android?  I will tell you that it made streamers miserable.  It also pushed us toward .mp3, .mp4, even .wmv and .wma.  During the evolution, a lot of prospective viewers and listeners came, saw, and, unfortunately, left.  We’re starting to get them back.  But now we have to keep them.  How?  Quality streams and minimal glitches that are playable on the maximum number of devices possible.  Nirvana.  Utopia.  Impossible.  But that has to be the goal.  We still have to make it work before we can sell it correctly.

Beyond live streaming, what about podcasts.  Well, I’m going to save some of that for the future.  But on a basic level, what are you offering and how do viewers/listeners get there?  Putting up those oil drums again?  Really!  If you promote them on the home page, link right to them.  Yes, have an aggregate page too, where you offer them all.  And you can insert commercials judiciously.

But how do I figure out who’s coming?  There’s an old survey adage – never ask a question in a survey that you can get the answer to elsewhere.  If someone is masking their IP address and you can’t see where they’re coming from, do you think they’re going to tell you on your club page?  You do?  Well, don’t.  There are many ways of finding out where someone is coming from.  Your visitors might not think so but there are. 

So, bottom line, let’s clean up our act.  Get a good compression scheme, pay for enough slots, and get your prospective visitor to the content as quickly as possible, consistent with making a buck, knowing that if in increase the advertising, you may only make half a buck.

¹ If you don’t recognize the name do a little digging.  Won’t take more than a click or two for your eyebrows to go up.  Hint:  Their products are still alive and well.  Uh, sorta well.

² That’s right.  Major Edwin Armstrong, inventor of FM has plenty more creations to his credit.

TV's Back to the Future II

Well, the sequel is never as good as the original.  But, I wrote about Back to the Future before.  There's lots of news.

 

The FCC’s TV auction plan is in place.  If you’re not familiar with it and you’re A) a broadcaster, B) an advertiser, C) an agency person or, D) a viewer who likes HD television, you might want to get familiar with it.

 

Here’s the executive summary:   

·    Over-the-air television takes a lot of the radio frequency spectrum

·    The FCC wants more spectrum allotted to personal communications services like wireless Internet/broadband.  They want to be able to auction off spectrum to increase revenue to the government

·    The FCC has proposed allowing telecasters to combine their services onto a single channel, freeing up spectrum.  For this, each telecaster would receive a payment
 

Hey!  That’s pretty neat.  Let’s get channels 7 & 9 & 13* to combine inside one channel, say, “7”.  They’d keep their own identities, branding and other associated equity – even their number – but they’d all be contained in the channel that was formerly allocated solely to the owners of “7”.

 

That means that the frequencies that “9” and “13” occupied are now vacated and can be reassigned for PCS – through auction.  And, per the commission, the broadcasters so “sacrificing” their spectrum, will be rewarded financially.

 

Still cool?  Do you see everyone as a winner?  As the old army joke goes, “Not so fast, Mullany.”

 

When you put two or three stations inside a single channel, something has to give.  That give is on signal quality.  Without going into detail, it means that HD evaporates.  Under the current – and currently discussed – systems, there’s no not enough room inside 6mHz to cram multiple HD channels.  In fact, you won’t see two 720i signals inside the 6mHz channel without some significant adjustment to coding.

 

Fine, Len.  What does that have to do with me?

 

I guess first, the issue is that over-the-air 1080i and 720p – and maybe 720i may disappear from stations which choose to band together in a single channel.  With 8VSB, we already stuff 10 pounds of, uh, stuff in a 5 pound bag.  So there’s not much room for the higher quality signals.

 

Now that may be ameliorated by the fact that broadcasters could still supply the higher-definition signal to cable system headends, telcos, and to DTH satellite uplinks.  So subscribers to these services could still see HD.  But for the 20 or so percent who view over-the-air, well, thanks for playing.  Your HD set will do its best to upconvert 480.

There is (are) a slew of issues:

 

Is there a conflict of interest on the part of broadcasters which own or are owned by cable systems?  Does Comcast care if over-the-air viewers get 480i?  Heck, that should drive more viewers to cable for the quality.

 

Does anyone really care about over-the-air?  Maybe broadcast television becomes like AM – lower quality, poorer resolution and looking for a niche that draws viewers.

 

Does broadcast turn to the PCS guys to distribute their product on portable devices?  If so, who needs hi-def on a small screen?  But then, as devices grow in size, there’s that need for higher resolution – which 480 won’t be able to deliver.

 

And what about the future.  If you’re new to this issue, you’re probably new to 4K, too, which is Ultra HD.  The concept – which was viewable at 2012 NAB – provides for a standard that is 3840x2160 in resolution, or about 5 times (linear or over 20 times total) the resolution of 480 and twice that of 1080.  Like I said, there’s already 10 pounds of stuff in the bag, so unless the compression scheme includes instructions like, “Imagine a lake with a boat on it…” there’s no way we’ll ever see 4K over the air.  You can read more here.

 

There are plenty more – you can think through them.   They all spin a pretty sad story for a medium.  But do we really need over-the-air distribution?  Is it OK to forsake the 20 percent who view via OTA so that more people can get broadband?

 

Just follow the money.

·    The PCS and cellular lobbies are far stronger than broadcast

·    The NAB is living somewhere in the 1930’s.  I hear they’re considering an award to Vladimir Zworykin

·    Cable and broadcast integration and cross ownership means the broadcasters have less to lose.  In fact, if they take the bait, there may be lots of money for them

·    The demos of those 20 percent, well, pretty low importance
 

In its announcement, the FCC says that it, “…expects a healthy and vibrant broadcasting industry to thrive after the auction…”  which is a lot like telling a patient that, “you’ll be much better without that lousy heart and those kidneys.”

 

They held a workshop – Broadcaster LEARN.  You can check out the video on the NPRM for the auction here.

 

In the meantime, keep in mind that the average viewer has no idea this is happening. No thought that part of the value of HD is being rendered obsolete almost immediately after the FCC – and congress – mandated its implementation in the first place.  And they won’t figure it out until the resolution drops like a rock and they’re told by their local station that they need to subscribe to cable, telco, satellite, some paid service in order to get those lines of resolution.

 

*Note that currently, those channel numbers are carry-overs from analog days.  Your channel “7” may have been on the actual channel 7 (174-180mHz) but moved to another 6mHz block yet through channel virtualization, everyone