49 CONTENT FOCUS Pop-up Channels
Starting a TV channel is as easy as building a website – or easier. Welcome to the world of pay-as-you-go broadcasting POP-UP STARS Words by Elsie Crampton nyone with a smartphone knows
pop-ups let rights holders analyse their content for opportunities, then choose how it might be creatively packaged and distributed. For most of TV history, distribution was the big barrier for anyone wanting to start a TV channel. A huge expenditure in hardware, infrastructure, facilities and distribution fees was required to get up and running. The content was the easy part. Now the situation is (almost) reversed – spinning up and distributing a channel is easy, the expense is in creating top-notch content. Pop-up channels delivered over the internet can allow A/B testing of different content configurations. If a content owner spins up a channel around a niche sport, it can test a heavy commentary version against one showing only the raw feed and compare them. Or trial multiple versions with different language commentaries to see which gets the most traction.
how easy it is to broadcast. A couple of taps and you’re influencing millions via your favourite social media site(s). But now, using tools entirely in the cloud, launching an entire TV channel is almost as easy. Pop-up channels are built around an event, a topic, a new audience, a brand, a content library – anything and everything is fodder. They are a great way to experiment with different types of content or to take advantage of a trend or audience without a long-term commitment or big upfront costs. There are an increasing array of tools for building pop-up channels, from complete services with all the bells and whistles to preconfigured set-ups that publish to social media. The pop-up channel model invites us to think differently about how we do content. Rather than building a single platform for pushing all our content to,
A SIDE BENEFIT OF USING YOUTUBE AS YOUR DELIVERY MECHANISM IS IT GIVES YOU THE ABILITY TO STORE IT BUILDING THE POP-UP “We’ve seen interest in pop-up channels for a number of different applications in the market,” says Carl Furgusson, vice- president of portfolio strategy at immersive media tech company, MediaKind. “Sometimes it’s corporate and enterprise video. Rather than building it yourself,
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