Webinar: Is the Future of TV Solitary? Or Social?
If you missed our recent webinar hosted by Minerva Networks and Ring Digital, you’re in luck. Below is a summary sharing some of the best takes from the session.
The stars of the show were Matt Cuson, VP of Product & Marketing for Minerva, Fabrizio Capobianco, Chief Innovation Officer of Minerva, as well as our special guest Claudio Marcus, VP of Strategy at Comcast Advertising. Moderator Brian Ring brought the questions and a fresh consumer survey on video viewing behavior; the full free report is here – Survey: 39% of Live Sports viewers have interest in virtual Watch Parties
Claudio Marcus started off the discussion reflecting on a different study – this one done by Hulu – called Generation Stream. The report outlines streaming behaviors in four quadrants: Social vs. Solitary; and Lean-forward vs. Lean-back. “Perhaps most interesting is the lean back number,” said Claudio. “If you take the two buckets on that side, that’s 66% of the total — so two-thirds of the audience essentially still sort of prefers a lean back experience.”
The four quadrants also set the stage Minerva’s most complex challenge: Not only to create the best place for the best content for a single use case or quadrant – but for all of them. As Cuson commented: “The game of changed for operators in pay TV. From a product POV, it used to be a one to many for operators. It’s pretty clear that model isn’t going to work anymore. Operators have to be sensitive to all different types of users and to be able to innovate for each group.”
The discussion segued to “Watch Together,” a powerful platform Minerva has integrated from its Summer of 2019 acquisition of Tok.tv. Fabrizio Capobianco explained one important rationale for the transaction: content rights that operators have.
“The reason we were looking for a partner is that the sports teams we served – Juventus, Real Madrid, Barcelona – they don’t have the rights to show the game live. My final dream was to be able to sit in front of the TV and just say, ‘Hey call Brian, we’re going to watch Giants baseball together’ and then we’d have a laid-back experience. For me, I want to watch the game with a beer in my hand, so it’s meant to be audio-enabled and not require typing. So, where we’ve recreated that natural experience, that was really successful.”
Indeed, Ring’s survey data showed that 39% of sports viewers had interest in this use case. But while it’s clear that sports has the high-emotion appeal that is a perfect fit for Watch Together use cases, Minerva has aggressively expanded into the live TV and entertainment domain as well.
Their first major event was the Oscars. The result? The Minerva team found an entirely different segment of consumers, 70% of which were women, that resonated with the Watch Together experience in a totally different way. And for Fabrizio, this underscores how engagement can be deepened across a range of genres.
“Personally, I watched the papal election with my dad and that experience was phenomenal. So for me live news events have great potential. And the other major insight we found – the most amazing experiences aren’t necessarily with fifty people. You only need one person to watch something with for that to be a very compelling experience. It changes the way you watch television.”
These varied and deeply engaging experiences, which are built on top of the best content, are major differentiators for operators, according to Matt Cuson. “If you’re the content owner, you want a direct to consumer strategy. But if you’re a pay TV operator, your competitive advantage is really local. It’s your local geography. Every one of your subscribers represents a local interest. If they like eSports great; if they like Rubik’s cube solvers, great; your job is to get it to them and create a good experience around it. And yes, that can be a Watch Together experience.
Ring presented another datapoint on the most important TV content navigational features. Not surprising was how popular the Linear TV Guide is. However, “content browsing” and then also especially “recommendations” both scored on the lower side of the scale presented in the survey. Cuson, informed by his expertise, gave a plausible answer.
“I do think [recommendations] are important but what’s essential is combining recommendations with search, or combining recommendations in terms of how you restructure a channel guide or how you reorder stripes on the fly for a personalized experience. You need to create the whole experience as personalized, not a single piece of content as being specifically recommended without context.”
The next datapoint discussed was Ring’s favorite of the report (See image left). In it, the survey asks respondents to focus only on major sporting events and select the interactive features respondents are most interested in. Most selected 2 responses and the single most popular response was “Cheer to participate in game / event / feed,” with 44% of the survey panel making that selection.
Mr. Marcus liked that option as well. “I couldn’t agree more with cheering. I would love to be able to cheer, remotely.”
Matt Cuson followed up on that idea noting that all of these use cases work well with sports, and that Minerva’s strategy vis-à-vis empowering operators with interactivity is to start out from the position that live content – sports, news, live events and all others – is the most powerful starting point for operators to build TV services that can re-build TV systems to prepare for growth.
“To enable these operators to create the best place for the best content means we have to take advantage of the fact that they have the live sports content, live news content, it has high emotional appeal, and we want to drive our innovation on top of those advantages and amplify them.”
The discussion ended on another fascinating component of the survey results as well as the empirical experiences Fabrizio has had in pioneering Watch Together use cases for the top UEFA football teams globally.
“With respect to this popular ‘cheering’ feature, the way we’ve built the Minerva client is to have a carousel of options for sounds and so you can have sport-specific or even team-specific options that are important creative hooks. But also it’s worth noting, while the ‘selfie’ option may not have resonated as well in this survey, we know from our experience operating the Watch Together platform for years is that people actually really loved that feature.”
Indeed, over 12 million selfies taken by soccer fans in the Tok.tv database are evidence that where fans who may not have thought about capturing a TV watching memory ahead of time loved the opportunity to do so when it was presented in the right context.
“For us, our vision, we want our product to answer a simple need: I don’t want to adapt to television. I want television to adapt to me. That’s a central goal for our innovation efforts including not only Watch Together but also Smart DVR as well.”
Webinar: #FutureOfTV – Watch Together, While Apart? Can Cable Comeback? Will TV Be Social Again? And other topics!
If you missed the July webinar hosted by Minerva Networks and Ring Digital, here’s an opportunity to see what you missed. Submit the following form to watch a condensed 12-minute video of the event, which includes all the best takes from that session. If you prefer to read about it, you can find our summary blog post here.
Register for access to this latest video, where you’ll hear Matt Cuson, VP of Product & Marketing at Minerva, Fabrizio Capobianco, Chief Innovation Officer at Minerva, Brian Ring of Ring Digital llc, and special guest Claudio Marcus, VP Strategy at Comcast Advertising discuss the latest datapoints surfaced by Ring Digital’s #FutureOfTV Survey, Watch Together: Is the Future of TV Solitary or Social?
Topics include:
- How many consumers watch in a lean-back vs. a lean-forward mode?
- How can operators build user experiences that exploit their strongest advantages?
- How appealing is “Watch Together” for live sports content?
- Will “Watch Together” use cases work well with non-sports content?
- What are the most important content navigational experiences, from the perspective of the 1,101 consumers in the Ring Digital survey?
Should you have any questions, please contact your Minerva sales representative or email us at sales@minervanetworks.com
REGISTER TO WATCH THE WEBINAR
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Live Webinar Registration
FutureOfTV 4: Watch Together, While Apart? Can Cable Comeback?
Will TV Be Social Again? And other topics!
Date/Time
July 22, 2020 at 11:00 AM in Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Brian Ring here, thanks for visiting. This is Ring Digital’s first #FutureOfTV Live Webinar / Panel! With collaboration from Minerva Networks, it’s going to be the best darn webinar, period.
Register now and you’ll get an exclusive, condensed version the day after.
What’s on the docket?
First, we’ll look at our latest survey research on the future of TV viewing. The report, “Watch Together: Is the Future of TV Solitary or Social?” probes generic areas of interest such as customer satisfaction and also dives deep into specialized, shared TV experiences, including the ability to watch with others, while apart. But we’re going beyond that.
Some of the key questions we’ll tackle:
(1) What are the top 3 must-have features for any virtual watch party experience?
(2) What do sports viewers want in interactive, covid fan experiences?
(3) After years of steady decline, is cable on the verge of a comeback?
(4) What makes up a great TV user experience?
Featuring:
Fabrizio Capobianco, Chief Innovation Officer at Minerva
Matt Cuson, VP of Product at Minerva
Claudio Marcus, VP Strategy at Comcast Advertising
For more on the topic, see my latest column on Fierce:
Minerva Sees Amazon Cloud as Fast Path to Innovation
Certified as Amazon Select Tier Technology Partner, Minerva taps into AWS to power highly differentiated pay TV services
July 8, 2020 – San Jose, CA – Minerva Networks announced today the acceptance of its Minerva 10 platform in Amazon’s Select Tier Partner program. Minerva 10 and AWS enable pay TV operators to quickly transition to innovative television services that can be delivered at scale to a broad set of devices. With several years of AWS deployment experience and millions of subscribers using the Minerva platform, this milestone is one more step in Minerva’s on-going commitment to bring exciting innovation to market.
“Our mission to power the best place for subscribers to enjoy the best content is all about rapid innovation,” said Jean-George Fritsch, Chief Technology Officer at Minerva. “Amazon’s rich portfolio of cloud services provides the perfect environment for Minerva to quickly deliver highly differentiated services such as Watch Together and Smart Highlights.”
Unique features powered by Minerva 10 and AWS include:
- Intelligent Content Delivery: Minerva’s Policy Resource Manager (PRM) actively controls which streams client applications should use based on the device, location, user and subscription level. This service ensures efficient use of the content delivery network resources. Minerva PRM also enables service providers to set and enforce rules for stream concurrency.
- Watch Together: With this service mobile subscribers can seamlessly talk, chat, share sound effects and take group selfies while watching their favorite programs. This innovative feature eliminates the hassles of switching between video playback and social apps. Consumers can communicate and share without ever leaving the video experience.
- Sport Highlights: Combining AI with audio and video processing, the Sport Highlights service creates customizable highlights reels seconds after games are over. Designed for sports fans who might be short on time, users can filter highlights based on duration, type of play or player.
- Content Monetization: Minerva 10 provides powerful tools for operators to drive subscriber engagement and content merchandising. By combining a highly configurable User Interface with trending and recommendations services, operators can promote content to drive on-screen purchases as well as advertise broadband or mobile services. Cross selling is key to increasing subscriber revenue and reducing churn.
- Voice Control: Amazon offers one of the most popular voice platforms; Minerva 10 takes full advantage of Alexa voice services on the Fire TV devices.
Leading service providers worldwide are tapping into the Minerva platform running in the Amazon Cloud to quickly and efficiently deploy next-generation television services that will delight subscribers for years to come.
About Minerva Networks
Minerva is the leading provider of service management solutions for the delivery of advanced pay television services. Over 300 operators worldwide have deployed Minerva’s software platforms to offer next-generation entertainment services to their subscribers. With Minerva, operators are able to quickly transform their Pay TV services to provide a unique user journey anywhere and on any device. For more information, please visit www.minervanetworks.com
Press Release – Minerva Sees Amazon Cloud as Fast Path to Innovation
Survey: 39% of Live Sports viewers have interest in virtual Watch Parties
39% of Live Sports viewers surveyed have interest in watching together, virtually. Amongst all 1,101 video & TV viewers surveyed, 26% expressed interest in the concept. The survey also found strong feature-level interest in the ability to virtually “cheer”; in private and secure group sharing; and in two-screen experiences.
While personal screens, time-shifted viewing and online video algorithms support solitary TV, the data reveals an opening for TV providers to nurture a new source of value — shared TV viewing experiences.
June 25, 2020 – San Jose, CA – For all video and TV viewers surveyed, 26% were interested in the ability to watch TV simultaneously with others, while distanced. That number rises to 39% amongst those with Live Sports as a primary TV viewing habit. The survey found strong feature-level interest in the ability to engage in a two-screen user experience; and the ability to have private, secure group sharing experiences.
The explosion of personal screens, online video, time-shifted viewing and self-reinforcing personalization algorithms has led to a decline in appointment TV and a rise in solitary viewing.
Pre-covid, this decline of socially oriented TV left an opening for TV providers to build a new and differentiated source of value – the shared TV viewing experience. In response, a small group of innovators dedicated themselves to building better shared TV. That included Tok.tv, acquired by Minerva last Fall.
During Covid-19, we have also seen others react to this social deficit that can be helped with innovative TV. Hulu is a recent example, having launched a Watch Party test feature on June 11, 2020.
As we look to the return of sports in an at-home, socially distanced economy, Minerva decided to sponsor Ring Digital’s June 2020 edition of the #FutureOfTV Survey in order to gather more data about what consumers want in their social and shared TV viewing experiences.
The report, titled “Watch Together: Is the Future of TV Solitary or Social?” is based on a consumer survey of 1,101 video & TV viewers. Detailed methodology is included with the report.
Selected highlights from the survey include:
- 39% Top 2 Box interest in social viewing amongst Live Sports viewers
- 26% Baseline Top 2 Box interest in social viewing amongst all viewers
- Feature-level demand for social viewing was further indicated by these data points:
- 39% Want high quality audio & video. We interpret that as “they want it to work.”
- 30% Want private, secure group sharing features versus 15% that selected public social media sharing
- 28% Want two-screen experiences, with the ability to view TV and chat on their mobile device
- Also, among users with interest in live sports, 44% selected the ability to virtually “Cheer” as a feature of greatest interest; Chatting with gifs, emojis and polls was next with 33%; and Sports Betting / Fantasy Sports Contests ranked third at 28%.
The full, free report also contains additional insights and commentary on what consumers want in a best-in-class TV user experience. It is available for free as an eBook download, here: www.minervanetworks.com/watch-together-survey
“Our mission is to power the best video services for consumers to discover and enjoy the best content, either on their own or together with the people they love. As sporting events return, the survey results suggest our new Watch Together service has largely hit the mark,” says Fabrizio Capobianco, Chief Innovation Officer at Minerva Networks. “These survey results strengthen our commitment to enabling a new TV service that addresses the needs of a wide variety of consumers and viewing habits.”
In addition to downloading the report, you can learn more about how social viewing technologies can open new TV service possibilities by attending a live webinar, titled “Watch Together While Apart: Sports Fandom TV, Covid-style”, scheduled for Wednesday July 22, 2020 at 11:00 am PST.
Contact Information:
Matt Cuson, VP Marketing, Minerva Brian Ring, Author, Ring Digital
marketingteam@minervanetworks.com (310) 713-4417
About Minerva Networks
Minerva is the leading provider of service management solutions for the delivery of advanced pay television services. Over 300 operators worldwide have deployed Minerva’s software platforms to offer next-generation entertainment services to their subscribers. With Minerva, operators are able to quickly transform their Pay TV services to provide a unique user journey anywhere and on any device. For more information, please visit www.minervanetworks.com
About Ring Digital
Ring Digital is a revenue growth agency that uses consumer surveys to understand viewing behaviors, inform client product strategies and execute go-to-market thought leadership for vendors serving TV providers, networks, studios and broadcasters around the world.
Free Report: Is the Future of TV Solitary or Social?
ENERGIZE SPORTS VIEWERS AT-HOME
Technology can pull us apart, and TV is no exception. Personal screens, time-shifted viewing and recommendations support a trend toward solitary viewing. But technology can also bring us together, and Minerva’s innovative Watch Together feature enables subscribers to watch and cheer for Live Sports with friends and family, even when apart.
- What is the level of demand for shared TV viewing?
- Which genres are most likely to attract users of such a feature?
- Do users prefer one-screen or two-screen experiences in this context?
- How do Live Sports viewers stack-rank their level of interest in various interactive features?
See the answers to these questions and other #FutureOfTV insights by filling out the download form.
DOWNLOAD THE REPORT
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