Why "Cord Nevers" Don't Worry Me

The latest study to put the television business in a tizzy is a study from TDG that shows the number of “Pay TV refugees” -- users who have broadband but not TV-- growing from 9.5% to 12.5% over the past 2 years. Particular attention is being paid to “cord nevers” -- people (usually in their 20s) who have never had a cable subscription.

The easy conclusion is that because this generation grew up with a wide array of online video options, they are going to abandon TV en masse and that it’s just a matter of time until pay TV dies.

Not so fast...

The problem with making sweeping generalizations about generations and their behavior is that the generalizers forget that the behavior often has more to do with life stage than with birth year. Millennials switch jobs and careers a lot because they’re in their 20s and people in their 20s have always switched jobs and careers a lot: they’re unburdened by families and mortgages and society has deemed it acceptable to spend the post-collegiate years making these types of choices. (Let’s not even get started on the NASCAR Blindness of focusing on “post-collegiate years” which only takes in the experience of the most affluent third of the millennial generation.)

But back to TV: I suspect the reason for the increase in “TV Nevers” is mostly due to the fact that single 20somethings have active social lives and don’t spend a lot of time watching TV and so don’t really miss it, along with a push from a poor economy and the hassle associated with installing a pay-TV setup.

The availability of services like Hulu and Netflix no doubt serves to lessen the pressure for those who are avoiding TV simply because they don’t have time to watch a whole lot of it. But that's the key: it's a great panacea for someone who only watches a couple of hours a month. But if you're a heavy user, there's not enough content available to scratch your itch, and pretty soon you are bound to come up against bandwidth caps that make your decision more about principle and less about actually saving money.

That's why I suspect a whole lot of these “TV Nevers” will be coming back to pay TV as they move on to the next phase of life, the one where they settle down and have kids. Especially now that OTT services like Netflix are going to be integrated into the EPG, making consumption via the pay TV provider an even more seamless experience (Google is already providing OTT integration in its Google Fiber TV -- other MVPDs are not far behind.)

Chillax Chicken Little. The sky is not falling.

Still Not My Friend

I was at a conference the other day and much to my dismay, I heard an entire panel of what seemed to be reasonably smart people repeating the old canard about location based advertising and how great the world will be once it’s up and running.

Not at all.

I remember reading a piece by Robert Scoble about 4 or 5 years ago where he waxed enthusiastically about a scenario where he’s walking down the street in his hometown of Half Moon Bay at lunchtime, receiving text messages with offers from every restaurant serving lunch. And all I could think was “this is the seventh level of hell.”

Users, guys. Users.

So easy to forget, yet so critical to the success of whatever it is you want to do.

So, to use an example from someone on stage at this panel: I am walking down the street and pass a pub where I have had dinner before. The pub texts me with an offer for a free drink if I come inside.

My reaction? Best case is that I’m a little flattered the first time it happens and give the pub some props for being proactive. Second time, I’m starting to get a little creeped out. Third time it’s feeling a littler stalkerish.

Then every restaurant and retail store I’ve ever shopped at and every TV show I’ve ever watched starts texting me as I walk down the street. And I’m back in Scoble’s Seventh Ring of Hell.

Brands and marketers can only insert themselves in people’s lives so much before cool turns into creepy. What’s unique and sort of cool when one brand does it turns into a whole lot of noise when every brand does it.

The lesson here isn’t that proactive marketing is bad, but rather that it’s not the panacea it’s being made out to be. Everything in moderation. It’s one thing to get a text telling me there’s a new episode of my favorite show waiting on my watch list. Quite another to get one telling me that you’ve noticed I’ve got the TV on and did I want to tune into that show since there’s a new episode waiting.

One is possibly helpful (possibly, because if I’m a fan of the show and am aware of its schedule, I might find the text to be annoying. The other is just creepy and Big Brotherish.

It all goes back to something I wrote about six years ago: Your Brand Is Not My Friend™  Which is why you need to stop following me when I walk down Main Street.

Apple's iTunes Problem

Apple does a lot of things right, but iTunes video isn’t one of them. I’ve rarely had a smooth experience with the service, and my recent experience shows they’ve not gotten any better.

With Hurricane Sandy approaching, I decided to rent Casablanca after my kids noted they hadn’t seen it.

So I downloaded it to my laptop, as I’m able to plug that directly into my FIOS router and get a faster connection.

All good... until I decided I wanted to watch it on my iPad.

I plugged the iPad into the laptop, opened up iTunes and dragged the unwatched movie into the iPad line-up. It showed up on iTunes, but when I unplugged the iPad, the movie did not show up.

Thinking there might be some kind of WiFi connection needed to make the transfer, I logged both the iPad and the laptop onto my iPhone’s hotspot (we had no power and thus no wi-fi at that point.)

Success (I thought) - the movie showed up on the iPad and I started to play it. In order to save the remaining charge on my iPhone, I turned off the personal hotspot on my iPhone... and the movie quit... at which point a message popped up telling me that “the rental period for Casablanca has ended.”

And that was that. No way to get the movie back. No way to watch it on the iPad other than re-renting it.

I get that the iTunes systems works off of a shared WiFi signal and that’s how it transfers files from one device to another. I get that transferring files from one device to another is not a given.

But... it should be. Apple's current system is not a very consumer-friendly way to provide on demand video. Moving files from device to device should be seamless. Not only should users be able to port the movie from device to device, but they should be able pick up watching right where they left off.

That’s just 101 and it’s amazing that Apple still gets it wrong.

If they’re going to be the system of the future, they’ve got to get simple stuff like that right and work out the whole seamless thing. (The Apple TV doesn’t do a great job with video either  - there are too many times where I can’t play something from the iPad on TV because of nebulous “rights issues.”

Ditto movie rentals: why can't users renew their about-to-expire rentals the way they do a library book? Especially given that the window is only 48 hours.

Apple is in a great position. Steve Job’s willpower created a company where users immediately assume that any problem with the product is a result of their own failure, not Apple’s (“I shouldn’t have had so many apps open... then the battery wouldn’t drain so fast.”

But if they want to take the lead in TV interfaces, they need to rethink the experience they offer.

7 Things You Need To Know About Second Screen Interactions

Originally delivered in London at Screen Digests's Future of Digital Media event, this is my latest salvo in the crusade to introduce common sense to the discussion around second screen.

7 Things You Should Know About 2nd Screen Interaction from Alan Wolk

Breaking Through

As anyone who has ever turned on a television lately can attest, the main pain point in the viewing experience is navigating the increasingly Kafka-esque series of screens that pop up to prevent you from finding whatever it is you are looking for.

So it’s baffling that so many in the adtech industry seem to think that the amorphous entity known as “social TV” is the savior we’ve all been waiting for, the One True Path to improving the viewing experience. (To their credit, those actually in the TV industry seem less easily duped.)

As a founding member of the 2nd Screen Society who spends most of his days studying the industry and applying that knowledge to (shameless plug) KIT’s award-winning Social Program Guide product, here’s my somewhat educated take on what’s going on right now.

Discovery Is The Key Use Case For Any “Social” Data:  Let’s start with the fairly safe assumption that the average TV viewer’s initial concern is finding something to watch. That means the typical “social” scenario is going to go something like this: "Oh look, 10 of my friends are watching Revolution, I guess I'll watch too."

And for most viewers, that is going to be the only reason they care what their social graph is up to.

So What Viewers Need Is An App That Lets Them Change The Channel: This is the alpha and the omega of any TV-related app. Because putting down the iPad, searching for the remote, and then rechecking the iPad to see what channel number you want to go to is just not a viable option.

“Social Data” Is A Pretty Fungible Term: As our friends at Zeebox figured out, the data you get from your social graph often isn’t deep enough to make a decision. That’s when you want to see things like what most people in your zip code or age demographic are watching, along with some input from critics to help you make your decision.

Our Social Graphs Are Random And Rarely Consist Of People Whose Opinions We Care About: The average viewer only has a handful of friends whose opinions they care about period, let alone whose opinions on TV shows they trust. And it is just way too much hassle to go through 100+ friends and start ranking them. That's why knowing what your neighbors or age cohort or even fellow football fans are watching will often the most useful data point in deciding what to watch.

Twitter Is An Odd Duck: Twitter, the usual source for “social media data” has an unusual audience that rarely reflects the demographics of the show (or anything, for that matter.) In the real world, the one where everyone's Grandma is on Facebook, nobody's Grandma is on Twitter. And unlike Facebook, Twitter's got a whole lot of hardcore haters, people who actively dislike the platform and all it stands for. It's a highly inaccurate gauge of just about anything, though the ease with which its API is accessed makes it an easy cheat.

Facebook Is A More Accurate Gauge:  Unfortunately, it’s rarely used for any sort of real-time interaction: Facebook chats are private and the nature of the platform makes its public postings more about check-ins and reviews than about real-time commentary.

Timeshifting Kills Chatter: The more we watch shows on our own schedule, the less likely it is that anyone we know is watching at the same time. The KIT Social Program Guide app has the ability to capture your friends tweets/posts/comments and display them in real time as you watch, but my suspicion is that outside of sporting and other special events, that functionality will be of limited appeal. And as discussed at length in this piece from 2011, social activity is highly dependent on the type of content being watched and rarely reflects all segments of a show’s fan base.

It’s The Data, Not the Chatter: Social chatter, regardless of the platform, is of little use to anyone. The real value is in the data that MVPDs will be able to collect from users who will have individual second screen accounts. That allows for a scenario where the entire family is watching the same show on the big screen while having individual experiences - uniquely tailored content and advertising - on the second screen. The data around who is watching what (and when) will provide better experiences for everyone from broadcasters to advertisers to viewers. It’s just a matter of who is going to take the lead in implementing a system that allows for those experiences.

Timeshifting Makes User Input More Important: When the answer to "what's on now?" becomes "everything," the most useful interface is one that helps us make decisions. This means bringing the user into the equation.

Current Discovery Models Call To Mind TiVo, Circa 2001. Remember the early days of TiVo when that service used predictive technology to proactively record shows it thought the viewer might want to watch?  It was hardly ever right and caused more amusement than anything. Yet we have not really progressed. Just last week I was reading about DirectTV's new Genie DVR whose main selling point seems to be that it will record shows for you based on what it thought you might want to watch.

Just Ask: Forgetting to involve the viewer is the fatal flaw for most all these solutions. Because no app can correctly guess what you are feeling at a particular moment based on your prior behavior. Imagine, if you will, an app that chooses your dinner for you based on your prior eating behavior and what your Facebook friends had recently eaten as well. The app would have no way of knowing what you were in the mood for on any particular night. But say it asked you for some input, like what kind of food you were in the mood for. If you said “Italian” it could spit back a half dozen viable options and even help you narrow that list down further.

Predictive Technology Without User Input Becomes Just Another Parlor Trick: Get it right and it seems like a lucky guess. Get it wrong, and clearly the app doesn’t work. But bring the user into the equation and they take part of the credit. Or the blame. It’s why magicians like to involve audience members.

It’s All About The Interface: A second screen app is going to have to primarily function as a program guide for the MVPD that releases it. (Independent second screen apps are a tough sell if what you mostly want to do is change the channel.) That interface is where the challenge is. Right now we have a system that was designed for 6 channels pressed into use for 600. We also have an industry in stasis, where no one is moving because no one has to: everyone else is all about preserving the status quo, so why take a risk and rock the boat.

The Dinosaurs Meteor Shower: Remember how the iPhone shook up the cell phone industry? That was another industry where innovation was possible but never pursued because no one could see a valid business reason for innovating. Then the iPhone came along and changed everything and everyone else was left playing catch-up. (They still are.) The same thing is going to happen in the TV industry.  Someone (and it might well be Apple) is going to come in and shake up the way we interact with our TVs, which will shake up everyone in the industry, the MVPDs in particular, and all of a sudden innovation will matter again.

Will you be ready for it?

Apples To Oranges

As someone who is frequently driving to unfamiliar locations and who relies on an iPhone based GPS to get himself there, I have to say that the new Apple maps program is quite an improvement, particularly in terms of the graphics, which make navigating while driving a lot simpler.

The problem, for Apple, is that the program it's quite an improvement on isn't Google Maps, which it replaced, but rather TomTom USA, which is the company the app is based on.

While Google maps on iOS is a wonderful thing, it didn't work like a GPS. If you wanted step-by-step directions, you needed a co-pilot: you had to both read and advance the app yourself.

That's why so many iPhone users went out and bought GPS apps like Tom Tom and Wayz: they allowed you to use your phone instead of a unique GPS device to access a program where a robotic voice read you directions as you drove.

That was the hole Apple was likely trying to plug. What they seem to have overlooked was that lots of people used Google Maps for things other than driving directions. Like walking directions. Biking directions. Or just browsing their current location to figure out what was close by.

In other words, from a user standpoint, the new Apple Maps was a GPS replacement app. Not a Google Maps replacement app. Hence the angst over Google Maps disappearance.

It's not that Apple Maps is a bad app. It's got great features like Siri and search integration. It's just that it doesn't do what GoogleApps did.

Not even almost.

Video Interviews From IBC: The Next Web and Beet.TV

I was interviewed on camera twice last week during IBC - you can see the results below.

The first is a conversation with Beet.TV's Andy Plesser about the KIT Social Program Guide, which won the CSI (Cable and Satellite International) Award for Best Social TV App, beating out never.no and three other competitors. We also touch on the Second Screen Society, a very worthwhile organization KIT has played a lead role in helping to get off the ground.

The second interview, with TheNextWeb's Martin Bryant, takes a deeper dive into the current and future state of television and where we see the industry headed next.

(And yes, I need to learn to look directly at camera.)

Enjoy.

IBC 2012

IBC 2012 is on this weekend in Amsterdam and I will be there representing KIT at two different sessions.

On Saturday night, I'll be delivering the keynote at the 2nd Screen Summit Amsterdam with the first live version of the viral "10 Things You Need To Know About The Future of Television" (I'll be providing a more Eurocentric spin for the IBC audience.) There are a lot of really big name speakers as 2nd Screen, so if you are in Amsterdam for IBC,  please check it out.

Then, on Sunday, I will be on stage at the IBC Rising Stars event, along with Naomi Climer from Sony Entertainment and Tony Churnside from the BBC. We'll be discussing what our paths were into the industry and how it's changed over the years. I've pointed out to my kids (several times) that the program refers to me as an "inspirational industry figure" but they seem rather nonplussed.

Check me out on Twitter for updates and other news from the show.