2012 is set to be a challenging year for broadcasters in developed markets as the sector faces both cyclical macro-economic disruption and growing technology-led change. Macro-economic uncertainty is likely to negatively impact demand for broadcast ad spot markets and there will be some downward pressure on production technology and broadcast IT budgets.
Conversely, the growing use of companion devices during TV viewing, the role of “social” as both a component of the broadcast experience and a competitor for ad budget, and competition for non- live rights and pay-TV subscription revenues from cloud TV models such as Netflix will drive greater pressure to invest in improved multi-screen service delivery platforms and the capability to directly harvest audience data.
The objective for the media CIO and CEO as they move into their 2012 and 2013 planning cycles must be to equip their organizations for realtime operations while both retaining the workflow efficiency and enabling experimentation with new second-screen companion and on-demand service models that extend their audience reach beyond the traditional TV viewing window.
The Media & Broadcast Technology research stream looks at the industry trends and drivers that influence the IT, production, and distribution technology strategies of the media enterprise:
Multi-screen viewing behavior is a rapidly developing consumer trend in otherwise conservative television audiences. This creates attentional challenges for the advertiser and the advertising- dependent broadcaster, but it also creates opportunities to engage users with personalized, immersive, branded environments across multiple devices. Smart approaches to master data management, analytics, and identity and authentication challenges will do much to determine the extent to which they are able to turn this behavioral shift to their advantage, as well as defend against disruptive market entry from the multi-platform web majors.
For an industry structured around mature, decades-old ratings currencies for media buying and rights acquisition, the successful exploitation of set-top box and web platform data available in near- realtime is a commercial, cultural, operational, and technical challenge. In 2012 Ovum will look at the how ratings agencies, media buyers, platform operators, and broadcasters are meeting the transformation challenge.
Systems and processes for trading rights for all but the largest content studios remain locked into spreadsheet and filing-cabinet- based models. Along with incentives to perpetuate supply chain inefficiency, this is limiting the opportunity for media service providers and retailers to move to realtime trading models. Ovum will be assessing the evolution of rights, royalties, and traffic systems, new metadata standards, and internal and external challenges to successful implementation of such initiatives.
New technical distribution channels for live and on-demand premium content are also creating the opportunity for realtime, on- screen personalized content and service merchandizing. For pay-TV operators the challenge becomes the secure integration of customer data, identity management, and third-party sources of preference data such as that derived from social platforms. For B2B players such as channel programmers looking at direct-to- consumer, web-based distribution, the challenge is to develop transaction gateway services and scalable CRM platforms that can support a range of subscription and micropayment models, while delivering elastic capacity and cost structures. In a market with so many moving components, flexibility is the key to successful business model transformation. Ovum will also be revisiting our work in the publishing industry to assess the success and failure of pay-wall, application and multi-platform commercial, operational, and IT strategies.
2011 has seen the online video platform market mature, segment, and consolidate. This presents opportunities for the media service provider to address the on-screen opportunity, as well as market access opportunities for the SI and for network infrastructure vendors, subject to their target market strategy. Ovum will also be identifying key trends in the development of hybrid broadcast standards and proprietary platforms, as well as the development of hybrid browser-based technologies and the impact of HTML5.
