There’s a lot of discussion this week in Las Vegas at NAB around new television programming models. Big screen, second screen, mobile. Who’s watching, who’s cutting. Workflow, editing for muti-platforms.
One discussion in particular is around “ZeroTV’s,” yes, another new demographic group in the world of TV.
The ZeroTv group is quite interesting. Primarily driven by cost and choice/selectivity, this new group further supports the “cord-cutting” premise. In fact, perhaps a little known fact is that last year in 2012, the cable, satellite and telecom providers added just 46,000 video customers COLLECTIVELY, according to Kagan. Ouch! That is tiny compared to 974,000 new households created the year before year. Now, that’s a shift and certainly starts to point out an erosion is taking place and new demographics taking hold.
The key to me is another comment that’s been somewhat buried in the “data of the industry” and that is that we need to “wake up” as related to the behavioral shift that took place in telephone industry when landlines became subject to the ease, convenience, cost and personalization of mobile lines. Which basically means that it’s all about the consumers economics.
Pay for what you want, when you want, where you want, which then tips towards what’s really in flux is the advertising model versus being force fed programing which the viewer has now shown to have little interest in.
When we can get what we want when we want, and then rewarded from our viewing behavior with targeted advertising of things that we’d actually like to know about….. then it’s only going to explode!
New offerings/models over alternative distribution networks will wake up the “industry” and the “first screen” is seen as still being dominant.
The question really is whether the programming will be delivered via a connection directly to the TV (SmartTV/ConnectedTV) or through a new highbred box (i.e. COX’s new one, ZeeBoxesk or a game console) and then synchronized out to ancillary screens. All screens being personal and selection driven.
Great programming will still lead interest, both in consumption and advertising.
This discussion and debate is all good for the TV industry as it just demonstrates that ALL viewers no matter where they live or culture they’re a member of loves to engage withTV, especially now when the viewer can get specific programming that meets their wants. No longer will their be comments like “I do not watch TV, I only watch public television – PBS.” Then come back on that comment is “do you use the internet 
?”
The trick will be to easily offer a broad range of programming, quickly, that’s enough to scale.
