eMarketer’s Karin von Abrams recently published some stats on viewing behaviour in the UK. Inspired by what she learned at the DDB conference in London, which took a closer look at the relationship between TV and online viewing, she says that
Broadcasters also feared that people viewing online would spend less time watching television.
This turns out not to be true, as Alan Wurtzel, president of research and media development at NBC Universal, confirms. Some of the conclusions drawn at NBC are quite interesting, such as the following:
Broadcast TV and the online channel can be best buddies. The Web does not replace traditional TV; it complements and extends it.
Not only does one medium never replace another (something us media theorists refer to as Riepl’s Law), additional broadcasting of TV content enables people around the world to watch their favourite channels and shows online as well as offline, when they want, and as often as they like.
It is definitely getting more and more important to think about what users want, because
Consumers expect multiplatform content—though most will not consume it on all devices.
What does this mean to filmmakers, producers and distributors in the UK? They have to read the signs and rethink their strategies as people move on to use a multitude of platforms and devices in the future. That’s also along the lines of NBC’s research:
Mobile TV viewing is coming to the mass market. But not yet.
However, there are already a lot of people using mobile devices in Great Britain, as Comscore quotes:
4.8 million U.K. mobile phone subscribers used their phone to watch any kind of TV or video.
Furthermore, 80,1% of the total U.K. Internet audience viewed online video in January 2009. It also turns out that media outlets such as TV websites and on-demand-services like the BBC iPlayer, which, according to KPMG, carried 44% of all video streams seen on UK PCs in 2008, might profit a lot from Twitter-generated traffic, because
During May 2009 Twitter was the 30th biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK, accounting for 1 in every 350 visits to a typical website. Over half of this traffic (55.9%) is sent to other content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment websites.
All these developments show one trend – audiences are increasingly turning towards online and mobile viewing, and therefore filmmakers have to adapt their concepts and strategies.
