mobile

It’s putting money behind startup Antenna, which builds an online engagement platform and measures mobile and Web audience sentiment.

This year’s annual tech gathering in Amsterdam has an ambitious agenda including tackling shifting business models and new viewer behavior; how broadcasters are beginning to adopt the Netflix on-demand, streaming model with their own online offerings; challenges in delivering new mobile broadcast platforms; the latest OTT developments as well as up-to-the-minute status reports on ATSC 3.0 and Ultra HD.

A new study finds video viewing on smartphones and tablets will rise 43.9% this year, while non-mobile will grow 9.5%. Traditional TV will take the hit, declining 2% in 2016.

People still watch a lot more television, but digital video is gaining, especially on mobile. Within a few years the gap will vanish. But ad dollars may take longer to catch up.

For video consumers, choice is rampant — in both content and platform. In fact, Tremor Video CEO Bill Day says the current environment has created what he deems the golden age of video. When talking about the complexity in reaching consumers amid media fragmentation, Day stresses his belief that it should be relatively short lived as companies like Tremor Video and Nielsen take a broader view of the total audience.

The one constant across some of the most popular platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine — is the growing consumption of video on mobile. So publishers need a new approach to video — one that caters to a mobile, social audience and involves a healthy amount of experimentation around new formats and more efficient workflows.

AT&T is buying satellite TV provider DirecTV so it can offer packages that marry wireless and wired Internet access with traditional and online video. Verizon is buying AOL for technology to improve advertising on mobile devices. And Comcast tried — unsuccessfully — to get bigger, in part to compete better with online video services such as Netflix and Hulu. Here’s a look at what these three companies are doing.

According to Pew Research Center’s annual State of the News Media survey, local TV continues to capture broadcast viewers, with slight increases for evening (3%) and morning (2%) newscasts and larger ones for early morning and midday in 2014. Network television news saw a second straight year of audience growth (5% in evening and 2% in morning), for a combined average evening viewership of roughly 24 million.

Our viewing patterns are shifting and can now watch where we want, when we want. The explosion of devices has given us more access to content and brands than ever before. While the television is still the screen of choice for viewing video content, device proliferation and social-media interaction is shifting the power from the provider to the people.

Burst | Booth SL3312 | Website: www.burst.com Burst, a technology platform that helps content creators unlock the power of mobile video, announced it is joining the NewTek Developer Network, a […]

Eric Scherer, director of future media at French broadcaster France Télévisions, speaking at the MIPFormats Conference: “The TV industry will have to work on a mobile-first strategy. Not a digital-first strategy, but a mobile-first strategy, because mobile is now the first screen, and it’s taking time away from the TV.”

StepLeader today announced that it’s selling its mobile platform to competitor DoApp, while also unveiling a new mobile analytics platform called Reveal. DoApp will leverage Reveal’s audience data to build mobile monetization and build new mobile products in a partnership going forward.

And to think that just a few months ago, few people over 30 ever heard of Snapchat. Now the ephemeral messaging app has set its sights on live sports, making deals with the NCAA and Turner. The goal is to include live sports in its “Our Story” feature, which will begin with coverage of the NCAA’s Final Four.

“We’re just a month into 2015, and there are already abundant signs of online and mobile video’s momentum, with lots more growth to come as the year unfolds,” writes Will Richmond. “Here’s what’s hit my radar so far.”

If broadcasters really want to own mobile, they need to harness and harvest consumers’ infatuation with constantly having their smartphones in hand, writes Neal Augenstein. The reporter and tech editor for WTOP-FM Washington says his own attempt was through an engagement app that lets people listen to the station and browse its site with easy UGC opportunities.

Running a sports league and running a news operation aren’t the same thing. But there are lessons to be learned from baseball’s success in navigating mobile, says media analyst Ken Doctor.

“We’re much more dependent on Facebook than we thought,” says Alexis Madrigal, deputy editor of TheAtlantic.com, who joined Facebook’s Liz Heron, Facebook’s news partnership lead, at the Online News Association’s annual conference to unpack some of the more urgent dynamics of social media and its intersection with mobile. They emphasized that both phenomena are already having a completely transformative effect on the news industry.

Thirty percent of online time is devoted to mobile. But tablet usage is down, as people start using bigger smartphones they can watch TV and browse the Web on.

The E.W. Scripps Co. has been hiring digital-only reps at a rate of about 75 a year, sellers who may not bring with them a book of business but must be uniquely hungry and able to adopt a longer-term sales approach with SMB clients. It is also offering a widening suite of digital marketing services with mobile and video taking on growing importance among its product offerings. This is the sixth in a series of Digital Deep Dive special reports on Scripps.

Despite the exponentially growing role of mobile in peoples’ everyday lives, ad spend isn’t keeping pace. That’s because the amount of time people spend with mobile media is disproportionate to the advertising share that mobile attracts: People spend more than 38 hours per month on their phones, according to Nielsen’s 1Q 2014 Cross-Platform Report, yet mobile comprises only about 4% of total ad spending.

For years, mobile has been referred to as a second screen, something that complements other media but isn’t users’ primary focus. That’s changing. Now, argues a new forecast of top mobile trends from JWT, mobile has become the primary screen for many people. Marian Berelowitz, editorial director of JWTIntelligence, talks about why mobile has become the primary screen, what implications that has for advertisers and whether next-generation mobile devices like Google Glass and smartwatches will ever catch on.

The change, which resulted in lower numbers, highlights the dangers of using self-reported behavior in research studies, TVB says.

A new survey shows live television viewing continues to decline as voters migrate to watching streamed content on tablets and smartphones. The reason for the switch? Viewers want to watch video content “on their own terms,” the researchers wrote. “There’s now little doubt that live TV is losing ground to new technologies.” The poll found that less than half of voters now say live TV is their primary way to watch video content — and some 30% say they haven’t watched live TV over the past week. 

Adobe has published its 4Q 2013 U.S. Digital Video Benchmark report, finding that authenticated TV Everywhere streams more than doubled in 2013 to 574.2 million, up from 222.5 million in 2012. 73% of authenticated views occurred on mobile devices, 22% on desktop and less than 5% each on gaming consoles and connected TVs.

If your station has rows and racks and piles of old  videotapes, you have a storage expense that you can turn into an asset. The reasons to digitize archived news videotape are based on value, the score that businesses use in deciding to act. So where’s the potential value in digitizing the videotape library? There are at least eight great reasons, including providing valuable legacy content for both on air and online.

TBS President David Levy at NATPE: “We produce content for digital and television. The one area we are concerned about is mobile. Impressions are skyrocketing. Penetration is huge. But we have to get to a point with advertisers where we figure out how to monetize it.”

The Gannett-owned NBC affiliate in Boise, Idaho, reports record growth on social and mobile in the past year.

There’s a battle being waged for that much-maligned piece of furniture we all end up in front of sooner or later. Call it the Idiot Box, the Boob Tube or whatever you want — the majority of media consumption still happens in front of the television, and whether it’s gaming, movie watching, Netflix or just listening to the stereo, tech giants are fighting tooth and nail for a seat on your couch. Here’s what they’re bringing to the party.

Mobile is unlike anything media companies have seen before, not just because of the new opportunities that portability brings, but because it levels the playing field between consumer and media professional. Because their is no “audience” for mobile Web, only participants, media companies need to devise a new approach. Terry Heaton: “Mobile news demands its own model, because mobile is its own form of media. It’s not an extension of the way we currently do things; it’s entirely new, because the consumers of news have exactly the same gear we in media have, and that creates a paradigm never seen before in the history of newsgathering or news making.”

According to comScore’s Multi-Platform data, ESPN saw 47.4 million people using its mobile products — just a tad more than the 46.1 million accessing ESPN.com. This marks the first month that ESPN has seen more unique users on ESPN mobile properties than ESPN.com.

The ability to target consumers and advertise to them at the point of purchase is moving out of the blue sky zone and closer toward market implementation, posing a threat to local media’s already declining advertising revenue. At last week’s Place summit in San Francisco, the emerging indoor marketing industry showed it still has a few kinks to work out, but it may eventually pose a serious threat to local media. “The people who should be nervous are traditional media,” says Neg Norton, president of the Local Search Association. “That’s the pool of money that’s ultimately going to get reduced.”

As mobile rises in popularity, TV stations are mobilizing, if you will, to meet the needs and wants of viewers in a wide variety of ways.

The need for mobile skills among broadcast journalists has gone through the roof.  In research from 2010, just 2% of TV job postings mentioned mobile — by the end of 2012, mobile skills were referenced in about 27% of job ads.  For those who aren’t good at math, that’s about a 1200% increase in two years. So, what do news directors want new hires to know about mobile?

As audiences shift to new platforms, media companies are left wondering how to generate revenue from new devices. The message from speakers at Borrell Associates’ “Social + Mobile – Show Me The Money!” conference in Chicago is that the revenue opportunities are there, if media companies know where to look.

Social and mobile media can be lovable and annoying, and it’s the annoying part that holds the most opportunity, says Borrell Associates CEO Gordon Borrell. Methods of how to capitalize on social and mobile will be laid out the firm’s Social+Mobile Show Me The Money conference this month.

Consumers are branching out to new screens and increasing the number of media hours in their days — and marketers are following suit. Advertising on digital media is growing by leaps and bounds, with online video and mobile experiencing the highest year-over-year increases, highlighting the importance of multi-platform strategies to brand marketers.

At the NAB Show this week, a great deal of discussion centered on mobile, which has become a major source of traffic for broadcasters’ digital efforts. Now digital managers are urging their companies to find the key to sating their stations’ mobile audiences, and original content just might be the answer.