Just a few weeks before sitting down to write this, the news broke of Facebook Watch. It is “home to a wide range of shows, from reality to comedy to live sports”, according to Facebook.
Harsher people than I might suggest that it is a challenge to YouTube: a single portal to access a huge range of video content.
Venerable US entertainment magazine Variety summed up its concern in its headline: “Facebook wants tons of original shows – but it doesn’t want to buy them”.
Facebook, inevitably, looks at this from the other end of the telescope. “Watch is a platform for all creators and publishers to find an audience, build a community of passionate fans, and earn money for their work,” the press release read.
That source of revenue is likely to come from a share of the advertising sold by Facebook. But it might come from other sources. Major League Baseball has a plan to offer a live game a week on the platform. Presumably it has a business plan behind it, beyond stimulating fans to talk about the game.
If content creators want to give their intellectual property away for a potential revenue share, does this matter? I think it demonstrates the continuing shift in the way that consumers watch today, and which is blurring the lines between linear delivery – traditional broadcasting – and non-linear content on demand, and therefore the revenue models which support them.
Ericsson’s ConsumerLab TV & Media reports are pretty authoritative, drawing on very large samples for core research – it is statistically representative of 1.1 billion people in 24 countries. The latest edition was published at the beginning of this year.
It found that viewing on fixed screens – essentially the television in the corner of the living room – has declined by about 2.5 hours a week since 2012. But viewing on other devices – phones and tablets in particular – has increased by four hours over the same period. So, we are actually watching more content: about 1.5 hours a week more.
Traditional linear television broadcasting is not dying, either. Viewing hours have declined by just 16% since 2010, or an hour a week. Given the pace of change, 2010 is back in the dark ages: the first series of House of Cards was not until 2013.
But House of Cards does mark an important watershed in this story. Just about single-handedly it created the concept of binge-watching. All 13 episodes of that first series were released at the same moment, worldwide. A surprising number of people sat down and watched the whole series in one day.
Broadcasters have now chosen to do the same thing, at least for some content. In the UK, Sky Atlantic’s glossy series Riviera was broadcast an episode a week, as normal – but the whole series was available for download before the first episode had even been transmitted.
According to the Ericsson survey, 21% of respondents claimed to binge daily; only 8% say they never binge watch content.
Block delivery is not a universal trend, of course. Other programmes stick rigidly to linear delivery. The inexplicably popular Game of Thrones is closely protected to ensure no spoilers emerge before its first broadcast, simultaneously around the world (or as close as time zones will allow). It creates an appointment to view, driving huge coverage on social media as everyone wants to talk about… whatever it is that Game of Thrones is about.
The conclusion seems to be that streaming services want to give us live content and traditional, linear broadcasters are actively offering us the opportunity to download and binge. Platforms which manage the scheduling and delivery of content will have to become more sophisticated to meet these multi-layer requirements while focusing on maximising revenues.
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