I have a lot of kids in my house. Some are young, some older. So, I can’t watch ‘adult’ content on TV or even my computer without having some little eyes and ears snooping around behind me. We watched a German movie last night called Run, Lola, Run and we watched it in German instead of English knowing that we would have to read the subtitles. But, at least our kids wouldn’t hear the bad language.
It is worse than that though. I really, and I mean REALLY, love to watch my favorite shows and actually HEAR what is being said. I’m one of those engineering people who believe that the devil is in the details. I mean, how can you watch an episode of Lost and afford to miss the 15 seconds where they talk about the sky turning purple? So, when people start talking, I pause my movie. But, I can’t pause first-run TV without recording it and coming back to it later.
Ok, so now you know how anal I can be about my TV. It’s the same as reading a book. I don’t skip every 10th page. You would never know who shot Mitch Rapp in a Flynn novel, and you would really be lost in a Stephen King novel like Lisey’s Story where they are jumping between worlds.
So, to make up for the noise, hustle and bustle, and interruptions of our world, we have already sought compromises.
In the beginning, in another galaxy, TV shows came on always at a particular time. You knew when because you looked in the TV Guide. You made yourself an appointment to sit down, be quiet and relish this hour of your favorite show. This is the traditional appointment, broadcast model. As far as content delivery is concerned, it is a continuous stream model: shows are delivered at set times, people show up and watch.
The PPV, DVR and digital download models allow consumers to shift the appointment, but it is still restrictive and doesn’t fit the new Millennial generation’s habits. The Millennials run around zipping from one thing to the next, texting this, IMing that, sharing content and blogging away. These are the young people, born after 1978. They shift from one device to another as they Twitter here and show their Facebook there. The current appointment model, even with the shifted stream of DVRs, have forced them to watch a 3 minute, compressed, Cliff Note version of their favorite shows.
The problem is that the delivery models have not shifted to match the shifts that have occurred and are still occurring within our lives. If you asked me when my favorite show Lost is on, I would have to plead ignorance. I now wait for the full season to come out on DVD, buy it and watch at my leisure. Kind of like how I read a book. I carry the book with me wherever I go, read a couple pages, put it away. If I don’t like it, I recommend it to a friend and give it to him. If I like it, I eventually finish it.
Soon, content delivery will shift into this ‘book-reading’. It will be more like what I call a ‘staggered stream delivery’. We should be able to go to a database of movies or other content and add them to our viewing library. We should be able to watch anything in our library on any device we have - be it a TV, a computer, a phone or a player in the car. And, if we don’t like it, we shouldn’t have to pay full price for it; we should be billed for the amount of content we absorb, not the fact that it is hanging around waiting for us to view it.
This type of delivery model has many advantages for service providers. The first is bandwidth management. Since content is not being bulk downloaded, the Internet won’t be buried at night when everyone downloads and steals movies and songs.
Second, controlling Digital Rights is significantly easier. Since content is being delivered in pieces to specific devices with JAVA applets managing the presentation, it is much harder for someone to steal first-run content. We can get back to studios, actors and distributors actually getting paid for all the views of their content.
Third, and most important, is the vast amounts of money to be made by service providers! Service Providers could offer first-run content initially free with an ‘amount used’ fee. So, I could put Run, Lola, Run in my online video library for free. But, there is a catch. In exchange for getting free access to it, I have to allow commercials/ads to wrap the presentation.
If you think about it for just a few minutes, you will start to do the math of how many times the staggered stream model gives a service provider the power of ads. Instead of a single commercial as is tacked on the front of many online viewings, the SP could push as many commercials as I have viewing sessions. If I watch Run, Lola, Run over a four day period with 10 different sessions on multiple devices, then there are at least 10 opportunities to wrap my session with ads.
And tailoring the ads is now totally flexible. If I am viewing content on my phone, then wrap an ad related to a store near my current physical location. If I am watching on my notebook, then dig into my most recent search terms and pop up ads relative to those. If I am watching on my TV, then show ads that fit the time of day like food at dinner time or infomercials for late night.
The consumer wins too! No disks to lose or break. No excess fees if I don’t like it. The right to watch it again for reduced or no fee. The ability to view it wherever I am on any device.
The potential is staggering! (Get it…”staggered stream”) But, it will only be possible for service providers that have the flexibility in their converged networks to manage, maintain, sell and deliver content across multiple devices.
David Croslin
InnovateTheFuture.com
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