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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— April – May 2013
I
S this the future of television of which Eamon
de Valera expressed himself ‘somewhat
afraid’ during his live inaugural address
on the first night of broadcast by Teilifís
Éireann in ? Probably not, the fear currently
felt by the operators of conventional broadcast
TV has little to do with ‘Communications impe-
rialism’ or ‘Americanisation’ or even the threat
posed to ‘Sound radio’ and ‘Living theatre.’
Faster broadband and better compression are
in the process of making dithering pixellated
live online delivery of TV programming a thing
of the past. These and other developments are
already giving us online delivery of audio-vis-
ual content which is indistinguishable from that
delivered by cable or satellite. What this means
for the TV industry’s traditional standard-bear-
ers and their role is currently the subject of much
fevered debate.
Convergence - meaning TV and internet sec-
tors becoming parts of a single bigger beast - has
been a central tenet of the conventional wis-
dom in both industries for some time. But more
recently the digital cash-rich new kids on the
block have started to flex their muscles. In one
incidence, by generating premium content and
taking it directly to the consumer they managed
for the first time to cut the broadcast networks
completely out of the loop.
House of Cards is a drama series in which
Kevin Spacey plays an unscrupulous Washington
political insider. But what has grabbed the
headlines is less the medieval machinations of
its characters than the fact that the one-hun-
dred-thousand-dollar production was entirely
financed by and released exclusively on its own
platform by online video rental giant, Netflix.
So until very recently all the players in the
industry knew who the competition were and
roughly where each of them came in the peck-
ing order. The major networks were undisputed
kings of television with a stranglehold over dis-
tribution through conventional broadcasting
channels and an unassailable position in con-
tent generation. Today new players with digitally
deep pockets are shaking up an industry which
was already struggling with how to meet the
challenge of new content delivery platforms,
dwindling advertising performance and mas-
sively changing consumer habits.
These changes have cast all sectors of the
industry into uncharted waters. Cinema, Gaming,
D, HD, Ultra HD, Laser, Smart, Multi-screen are
just some of technical advancements currently
being pitched or touted for the near future to
a globally declining market for televisions by
manufacturers.
Also with the industry in such a state of flux it
was inevitable that some manufacturers would
seek to hedge their bets. So Panasonic intro-
duced their ‘Smart’ TVs which can download
third-party apps in an attempt to allay customer
fears about an expensive gizmo being rendered
obsolete by content-delivery developments.
Similarly, Samsung developed their ‘Evolution
Kit’ which is envisaged as being an upgrading
kit for your TV.
Rumours abound about Apple launching an iTV.
Analysts are of one mind that if such a product
is launched it will need to be much more than a
beautifully-designed piece of kit for receiving TV
programmes. The kind of returns Apple expects
from new product launches will not be availa-
ble for just another TV if Sony’s recent balance
sheets are any indication. So much was made of
recently-revealed high-level talks between sen-
ior people at Apple and their counterparts in the
cable companies but nobody has said whether
Apple are looking at more than the content tie-
ins with the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Hulu
which the four million buyers of the Apple TV
device currently enjoy. But with so many big
beasts already at that this watering hole it is very
unlikely that Apple will - even with their robust
negotiating tactics - manage to achieve anything
like the kind of market dominant position they
managed to establish for themselves in the music
industry with itunes.
But the real battleground has moved on from
the competing technologies of the televisions
themselves. With the abandonment of D, the
physical technology has for the moment almost
certainly reached a plateau. Apart from anything
else it is now a struggle to find enough content of
sufficiently high production quality that it does
not visibly creak when viewed on an ultra HD
inch screen from across the width of a sub-
urban living room.
Web-connected smart TVs are now
media
richard callanan
The future of
television (login
required)
We’re still watching it, but everything else has
changed
The increasingly blurred
distinction between the
delivery systems is going to
give rise to more so-called
cord- cutters who abandon
their subscriptions
commonplace offering access to streaming
services like Netflix or Hulu, web browsing,
video chat, downloadable apps and games. But
the real challenge is the creation of a seamless
interface to help viewers find what they want to
watch, when they want to watch it. It is arguable
that during this period of rapid transition that
there is no one size fits all solution.
The high-performance digitally connected
end of the market while growing rapidly is still
dwarfed by the traditional traditional TV con-
sumer. According to TAM Ireland % of the
average twenty-five hours per week of TV watched
by Irish viewers is live - that is watched as broad-
cast on the schedule. The balance of just % is
either via personal video recording(PVR) devices
or on connected devices via online players.
So according to TAM the outlook is bounti-
ful for our conventional TV broadcasters with
the amount of TV being watched by Irish viewers
increasing by an average of eight minutes per day
between and . But valid questions
are being asked elsewhere about the Nielsen
Television Audience Measurement system
which measures % of the world’s TV viewing
behaviour across five continents and has been
providing the ratings measurement service in
Ireland since .
Nielsen ratings are based on a sampling
method developed in the s which relies in
Ireland on monitoring the TV viewing habits of
, households with a device called the peo-
ple meter installed in each home on the viewing
panel. Each people meter is connected by tel-
ephone and is auto-dialled by Nielsen central
each morning to access the record of the previ-
ous evening’s viewing. But it is not just that the
people meter sounds like a dated sci-fi piece of
kit. In the US Nielsen’s recent decision to add
homes to the , Nielsen TV monitored
households – from which to measure Internet-
delivered content but not before next September
has been widely derided as too little too late.
When Nielsen reported that President Barack
Obama’s State of the Union address had
the smallest TV audience for the annual speech
since , it was the Nielsen report and its
lack of credibility which became the news story.
Google and Facebook analytics are now providing
advertisers with far more accurate and detailed
feedback on campaign reach and performance
than can be gleaned from the audience figures
generated by the Nielsen sampling method.
But Nielsen is fighting back with tie-ins with
twitter to get a measure of social network activ-
ity surrounding a programme and the purchase
of a company called SocialGuide which professes
to analyse “the social impact of linear televi-
sion”. We will see by the end of their current
Irish contract in whether TAM Nielsen
can rediscover the kind of market-relevance and
credibility which will take them back from the
brink of extinction.
There is one issue about which Nielsen is abso-
lutely correct – our love of TV is as strong as it
ever has been. In Ireland we are watching almost
four hours of it a day. But every aspect of how we
are watching it is changing.
As we watch TV over half of us are now also
using a laptop, smart phone or other connected
device to engage with each other and even with
the programme makers. A full percent of
Twitter’s traffic during peak usage is about televi-
sion. The - demographic ratings for a show
more than doubles when viewership during the
week following the show’s scheduled broadcast
are included. We are increasingly choosing not
just what to watch but where and when to watch
it with little regard to to broadcast schedules.
It’s also where we get our TV. Cable TV and
the internet are already travelling over the same
pipes. The increasingly blurred distinction
between the delivery systems is going to give rise
to more so-called cord- cutters who abandon
their subscriptions to cable or satellite to access
TV directly and exclusively over the internet.
With the advent of fully-functioning online
delivery of TV the regulatory walls built by
national broadcasting legislators are no longer
an effective bar to new entrants into the TV busi-
ness. Similarly, national broadcast regulatory
authorities such as our own Comreg are going to
become increasingly irrelevant sideshows.
With BBC television centre about to become
a hotel and apartment complex and our own
Montrose increasingly taking on the appear-
ance of a semi-abandoned car-park it can safely
be said that all the comfortable old certainties of
the television industry are well and truly gone.
But change will come slowly.
The half a million people who watch the Late
Late Show live on the TV in the corner of their liv-
ing room at half nine every Friday night are not
going anywhere in a hurry but they are indisput-
ably a dying breed.
With the abandonment of
3D, the physical technology
has for the moment almost
certainly reached a plateau
