The NYC Television Week Conference brought together many industry leaders to discuss the future of the TV ecosystem in a two days event broken-down by Content, Multiplatform, Next TV, and Advertising. Some of the key topics discussed at NYC Television Week include the following.
Scalability of live streaming.
“Scale will be the theme in 2015”, Jen Loeffler, Principal Technical Evangelist, Adobe Primetime.
With growing demand during big events like the World Cup, Olympics, and Super Bowl, industry leaders from NBC, Disney (ESPN) and Adobe discussed some of the challenges of scaling live video online. As a result of consumer expectations regarding video quality for sporting events the bandwidth required to deliver them is greater than any other video type (excluding 4K UHD). Also, each viewer gets their own individual video stream so the more people that watch online, the more bandwidth that is consumed. Failure with these high profile events is not an option, yet buffering issues, bandwidth limitations and poor implementation of authentication protocol can leave users frustrated with the experience. While consumers want a higher quality experience, the focus for the industry should be on the technology front, including preparation, scale projection and delivery capacity during major events. This will require all players in the distribution ecosystem to work together to deliver higher levels of scalability.
Digital measurement capabilities need catch up with a fast moving multiplatform TV ecosystem.
“The industry is so far ahead of measurement capabilities”, Jane Clark, Managing Director, Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement
During the research and measurement roundtable, industry leaders from AT&T Ad Works, Rentrak, Katz Media and CIMM discussed the need to move beyond the traditional measurement models (eg: Nielsen) and the need for a more customizable video measurement capabilities. As we continue to see fragmentation of viewership, the challenge is to aggregate the dots, and Nielsen seems to be hearing this message with their recent announcement on adopting new measurement standards to include streaming video on demand numbers and dynamic ads.
Programmatic is an inevitable business change for TV, but still has a lot of work to do on the technology front
“2015 will be a big year for Programmatic”, Robert Dalven, Head of TV Strategy, Videology
“Buyers are willing to pay for premium inventory”, Sean Downey, Director of Media Platform, Google
“We want all screen and household to be addressable”, Keith Kazerman, SVP of National Advertising Sales, DIRECTV
“TV is not dead, TV needs to evolve”-“Addressable television is a complement to linear television and traditional television. It’s not replacing it”, Jamie Power, Sr. Partner of Addressable Television, Modi Media
During the Next TV Summit and Advanced Advertising session, buy-side leaders in the video and TV space discussed the future of advanced advertising and programmatic advertising. While ad dollars continues to move to digital, the buy-side industry leaders agree that TV needs to act more like digital in terms of better targeting, and every pay TV provider seems to be working to build technology to have targeted ads. Despite the continuous talk around this topic, few believed that programmatic will completely disrupt both the supply and demand side of advertising and content inventory businesses. Whether programmatic advertising in the TV space grows will be largely determined by programmers.