Behind the Mobile DTV Scenes
At the HPA Tech Retreat, I had breakfast–a roundtable organized by Azcar CTO Karl Paulsen and Eric H. Friedman, post 
producer, with a few high-level broadcast and cable executives, who talked about TV spectrum, mobile, the wireless industry and other hot button topics. As the proverbial fly on the wall, I was there with the understanding that I would not reveal anyone’s identity or refer to them in any resulting article.
I’m bringing you the salient points of the conversation, with these Mystery Men the hope that the conversation–albeit anonymous–is enlightening.
Broadcaster X: Analytics for mobile won’t be an individual broadcast station activity. I think there will also be a lot of pooling of bandwidth, so it’ll be like a mini wireless cable network. There will be local services, guides, mushed into one bouquet of services, relevant to each town. There are a lot of huge details needed to make it work, but I think that’s the direction it’s going.
Moderator: Is there a sense that the current group of station owners are financially set to invest in this area? There are technical issues, contractual issues, there is some money required to invest and no one is sure of the business model. It seems like a lot of station groups are financially struggling anyway.
Broadcaster X: Getting into the business–just the transmission side–is pretty cheap relative to capital budgets. The cost of getting into it is really inexpensive compared to putting up cell towers. It’s relatively trivial.
[He predicted that 100 stations across the U.S. would be up and running with a mobile service by the end of 2010.]
The signal channel repeater isn’t a slam-dunk. It’s a tremendous engineering problem; you’re essentially interfering with yourself.
Cablecaster Y: There can also be copyright issues.
Moderator: How are you going to monetize mobile? Advertising revenue means you have to measure who’s watching it. The second is subscription services. You can mix and match it. There can be all kinds of models.
Given the transition, how do you think the broadcast model will change based on the technology. How will that affect content? If the broadcasters find going forward that the data subscription model is more robust than they knew, how could that change content? It’s almost a rhetorical question but would you become datacasters?
Broadcaster X: Sure, anything to make money. You can do both. You can do multiple things simultaneously.
Moderator: How about more local content? Could that move from Internet to a broadcast model? Like high school football games, could they be datacast instead of broadcast, as in pushed content?
Broadcaster X: Sure, why not? Stations produce 40 to 50 hours of local programming per week as it is. It could also be non-real time. While the smartphone is on the dresser charging overnight, it could be downloading.
Manufacturer: But there are serious limitations on the handsets. We’re a very live TV oriented company. People don’t want to talk about it. They say–look at FLO -TV. They don’t want to have the conversation about linear TV and think anyone 35 and younger won’t do it. I think it’s the backbone. They want to talk about all VOD (video on demand). These are studios, and so on that have broadcast capabilities who say, We may do a live channel, but it’s about promotional content or on-demand content. That’s how people will consume. We had to get away from our push for live channels.
I think that when the local channels get together en masse to deliver content over-the-air–which is one thing necessary to make it ubiquitous–it’ll be a huge benefit to the industry. But what drives consuming is VOD: the ability to receive on demand. You see all the micro-environments. No reason you can’t VOD every game on the phone if it’s on the cloud and on-demand. The cloud can be a myriad of things. I’m not preaching a delivery mechanism but it has to be out there, and it delivers it to you.
Cablecaster Y: FLO TV is a good case study for broadcasters to watch. They hear the drumbeat of [broadcasters] coming up behind them.
Participant: People take a leap. How did Sony know the Walkman would be big? They took a leap. I’m a big believer that the ATSC model will change everything. There are limited locales but it could be very very interesting. Once those perceptions change.
Cablecaster Y: Can broadcast fight back for viewership via mobile viewership including winning metrics.?Is that a reasonable question to discuss?
Broadcaster X: I don’t get the notion of fighting back. Having FLO and [other mobile channels] could be compelemntary– the bouquet of services, like I said.
Moderator: Last question, regarding carriers. What metrics will they support? What metrics might they share? What types of deals are being made right now?
Broadcaster X: There’s a lot of activity going on in this area. Business deals are business deals. I can’t say anything further.
Participant: Carriers in the US don’t want to be considered dumb pipes.
Manufacturer: Carriers in other parts of the world have embraced that. Carriers in the U.S. are proud of their revenue share…in other parts of the world, they’ve come to grips with it. They get what they can. What part of cannibalization will go on?
Broadcaster X: There are a couple of things in play. Carriers are not monolithic. There are a lot of second tier carriers who are very interested. Sprint is a huge player in the Washington trial for ATSC. Carriers have a selfish interest as a way to bypass the clogged up pipes into their devices. This [Mobile DTV] is a way to offload video in a way that will cost them nothing, and carriers clearly recognize this. If everyone wanted to watch Obama’s inauguration, the carriers couldn’t handle that. But they can with ATSC, and they recognize that.
Tags: analytics, ATSC, broadcast executives, carriers, FLO TV, HPA Tech Retreat, local programming, metrics, mobile business model, Mobile DTV, Monetizing Mobile, smartphone, TV spectrum, VOD, wireless industry
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 8:30 am and is filed under Advertising/Marketing, Content, Devices, Home Feature, Monetizing Mobile.
