Big data and television business models

(Big) data and television business models

December 2015

The Guardian: adapt in real time the location on articles on the web pages based on views

The Economist: identify customers likely to cancel their subscription and propose special conditions

Publishers use the most highlighted sentences in an e-book in their advertising material

CNN uses Dataminr as an “early warning system” of news

DVR: subscribers that record music channels receive pay-per-view concert offers

Sky airs different advertising to different sub-segments of its viewers

In a world of abundance, big data links content, consumers and context

The Figaro uses data for its on-line readers to qualify its e-commerce services

“Five or six years ago we started a new media model, charging for access through a metered system. When we started doing that, it was primarily to build a revenue stream online, but probably what was more important over time was the data and customer insight that that gave us. That’s what transformed the business,”John Ridding, Financing Times

• Increase customer/viewers base• Increase sales of content• Increase up-selling and reduce churn• More efficient ad-sales• More efficient content commissioning• Ancillary revenues

Use of big data:

• Content acquisition

• Offer/line-ups, catalogues

• Targeted advertising and automated advertising placement

• Adapt pricing (yield management)

• Promotion/recommendation

• Cross-selling

(Big) data empowers all key functions

Key business objectives:

• Sale of data

“Big data” helps everything from marketing, to distribution, to planning.”Matthew Eric Bassett, NBCUniversal

“(Data is) one of those things that as companies realize the value, they will make it part of their core company function so they can leverage it in the way that continues to strengthen their position in the market.” Juan Gorricho, Disney Theme Parks

• Recommendations algorithms• Better informed decisions on production• Automating video stories using Big Data technology• Adapting the content to the context

Content: Promotion, acquisition, adaptation, automation

“We have a big team of people who are experts in programming, who see many, many different pitches and read many, many different scripts. But then there’s definitely the data part of it as well, where we enter different elements of proposals into our system, and it spits out a prediction as to ‘Will Netflix members love this?’ and ‘How many people will love it?’”Joris Evers, Netflix

“We’ll find clusters that show people who are interested in Jennifer Lawrence are also interested in penguins”Ky Harlin, BuzzFeed

Advertising: Make TV as accountable as digital

• Programmatic advertising, where TV channels sells qualified customers directly to advertisers through common sets of criteria.

• More information on TV viewers

• Addressable TVs

• Combination of media and advertisers data

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“Data and technology will change the advertising business in the next five years more than we've seen in the last 30 years”Linda Yaccarino , NBCUniversal

• Automation

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• From unstructured to structured data:• Unstructured data, including video, audio, email, research, social media feeds and more, which represent 80 percent of all

Big Data

• Storage and processing costs • Costs decreasing but data volume increasing

• Data scientists• Acquisition of external data

• Sky Media combines internal data from all the Sky platforms with purchases from Tesco’s 17 million Club card holders• Retrieve data for Programme-related from social networks• Geolocation data• Etc.

Significant costs associated to big data

• Profile • Content description• Popularity• Tastes• Context• Etc.

• Content producers• Broadcasters• Aggregators• Distributors• Users

• Device• Web• Market research• Company• Etc.

Data Data producers Data sources

Complexity

But big data implies complexity and costs

“Raw data is both an oxymoron and a bad idea; to the contrary, data should be cooked with care.”Geoffrey Bowker, University of California

“The challenge is taking the scale and size of data and making achievable results”Ranga Muvavarirwa, Time Warner Cable

• Need to cross data• Need for scale• Need to access web data• Google, Facebook gathering TV-related data

Challenges for media companies

Data brokers ?

• Data brokers (e.g. Acxiom, Experian, Dunnhumby) entering the TV scene

Will media companies keep control of their data ?

“The things that Acxiom has always been good at – utilizing data to create better targeted marketing campaigns – can now be applied to using data to create better experiences for people everywhere across any device. Not just at their mailbox.”Scott Howe, Acxiom