49 ROUND TABLE Linear Playout
an invasion of privacy. But treating it as a ‘focus group’ where feedback matters and people are rewarded for getting involved could open up doors to more and better audience data. The collection of audience data on non-OTT linear channels is likely to be perennially challenging and unsatisfactory. People give their personal data when they get something in return. An OTT viewing experience can provide this. STEVE REYNOLDS: The reality is, if a consumer has a device, that device is the point at which the audience data gets collected. In a cable or satellite system, it is a set-top box. In an Apple TV or Smart TV environment, it is the consumer device. There are operators that are using data every day to measure, to predict, to monetise. I don’t think it is as much a technical challenge as it is a business challenge. Certainly the ratings agencies around the world don’t like the idea that the operators have better audience data than they do. But that is just the way the technology has evolved.
FEED: WHAT ARE THE OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES FOR COLLECTING AUDIENCE DATA ON A LINEAR CHANNEL?
ERIC BOLTEN: Collecting data on a linear channel has been as much art as science. Audience measurement rating systems like Nielsen allow us to make assumptions and extrapolate those assumptions at scale, but this model is becoming archaic. With so many disparate entertainment platforms in use today, it is hard to know what people are really up to when they are supposedly watching. Did they walk out of the room for a minute? Are they fully engaged, or splitting their time talking, or reading? But with a linear channel in the data-driven world, you can really see engagement. You can know if ads are seen or skipped, and you can get more granular with raw numbers and actually measure users, witness their behaviour, and not just guess at impressions. Now linear signals don’t just go to a single stationary TV set sitting in a room, they can go to a multiplicity of devices so
that a single set of programming can now literally follow you from your TV set to your tablet, to your phone. That provides viewing data, geography, motion, telemetry data and all kinds of insights. In the future you’re going to see correlations between ads – where you are, who you are – and service providers are going to be able to monetise and target ads based on this data. PAUL MARTIN: To fully understand the audience of linear content, the channel should go OTT and enable viewers to register in order to watch content. This would enable accurate collection of data and give a holistic view of the consumer ’s content consumption. It could even be possible to encourage people to register information about their household if multiple people are gathered around a single TV. The challenge is whether people want to share this or will see it as
FEED: ARE THERE MORE INNOVATIVE WAYS OF DOING PLAYOUT IN LINEAR TV?
ERIC BOLTEN: In live linear, you have the ability to manage continuous streams in conjunction with the segmented world of HLS file-based programming, meaning you can source and pick playout from a
variety of sources. Zixi provides universal origination where we take playout or signal from an encoded system and transmit it across the cloud to CDN or MSO and IRD. In the future, you’ll be able to source from live files as VOD and go Live-to-Live, Live- to-VOD, VOD-to-Live, and VOD-to-VOD. We foresee a world where you can go from universal origination to universal source and that will have a big impact on how you conduct playout on linear TV. PAUL MARTIN: There certainly are! Moving linear TV onto OTT platforms, and perhaps doing this exclusively, will drive audiences to the OTT platform. Once there, it’s easier to do a wide number of new things that offer innovative, on- demand viewing experiences. For example, offering multiple camera angles and customer-driven viewing options, multiple commentary options, tailored advertising and product placements, and stats about the content. Linear TV can provide a host of interconnected content when it’s in the right interactive platform. This is how linear TV could become an all-encompassing
experience that is bigger than just the programme being watched.
STEVE REYNOLDS: One area of innovation will be making the creation of multiplatform content more automatic. There is still a silo problem. Some of that we can overcome with better tools in automation, and some of that will require a change in business model and in thinking. The other piece of innovation, even around linear playout, is going to happen around monetisation. As the linear distribution infrastructure adopts manifest manipulation, dynamic ad insertion (DAI), intelligent ad routers – all of that technology, which has been proven out in the VOD world, needs to be scaled up to work in linear. The need to scale is orders of magnitude more important than it is in VOD. Having the Super Bowl distributed on OTT was a good proof point of what scaling means. Having some of the bigger FIFA matches and some of the Olympic final events, or the Masters golf, carried on OTT pushes us in the direction to be able to scale to what is required for a broadcast-type audience.
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