Tag: Mobile

Smart Phones and Mobile Media

Food Network Launches “Discover Food Network” Channel on SnapChat

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbOMqA2AOIk

Popular messaging app Snapchat announced today that it has partnered with top media media brands, including Food Network, in order to launch a new in-app news feature that will allow users to access a collection of the day’s top stories and videos with just one swipe.

The app’s new ‘Discover’ feature includes 12 unique news channels, one for each media partner, plus a dedicated Snapchat channel which will include original content from the app’s creators.

With the move, Snapchat is positioning itself as a media platform — one that reaches an estimated 100-plus million monthly active users. Snapchat Discover will compete with other video platforms and services that encompass video, including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Every channel in Snapchat Discover is refreshed after 24 hours, “because what’s news today is history tomorrow,” the company explained.

Food Network is Snapchat’s exclusive launch partner within the food category. The Discover Food Network channel on Snapchat extends the Food Network brand to reach even more young consumers with new and exciting content tailored specifically for that audience. As well as being an engaging new channel for young food fans, Discover Food Network on Snapchat will provide a new opportunity for advertisers to reach engaged young people who love food.

“Food Network has led the dialogue around food for more than two decades, informing and entertaining passionate and engaged fans, and we are excited to bring it to the Snapchat platform,” says Brooke Johnson, President of Food Network & Cooking Channel. “Audiences are more food-conscious than ever before and the Discover Food Network channel on Snapchat will provide users with the great content they love, designed specifically for their mobile devices.”

Users can tap on a channel and swipe left to flip through each channel’s daily edition, containing five to ten stories selected for the service by the Food Network editorial team.

The expectation is that some consumers will discover Food Network content through Snapchat, then seek more through Food Network’s television channels, digital and mobile platforms.

Mobile Advertising expected to surpass desktop by 2017

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Mobile advertising is growing so rapidly that it will pass desktop advertising by 2017, according to a new report from eMarketer.

Leading the way will be search ads; mobile accounts for 22% of all search ads this year and is expected to grow to 60% by 2017. It was at 2% only three years ago. About half of all spending on display ads will be in mobile’s column by 2017 as well. Other key findings:

Mobile search ads should be worth $4.34 billion this year, up from $3.95 billion in 2012.

Mobile display ads should bring in $3.81 billion in 2013, up from $3.38 billion last year.

Mobile ad dollars overall will more than double from last year to $8.5 billion.

Video-ad revenue on mobile and desktops is expected to hit $4.1 billion this year and rise to $9.2 billon in 2017.

New study shows Moms prefer iPads over iPhone

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A new report from mobile-analytics firm Flurry.com, The Who, What, and When of iPad and iPhone Usage, reveals that moms and home-design enthusiasts, are using iPads more than iPhones.

Meanwhile, health and fitness, music lovers, and video enthusiasts are all over the iPhone.

The heaviest period of use for the iPad during the day is from 6 pm to 11 pm; iPhone app usage also peaks during these hours.

Multi-screen marketing requires a new marketing approach

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Now more than ever, consumers want content at their fingertips and they can obtain it across multiple screen platforms whether it’s by a television, computer, tablet or mobile phone.

The use of non-screen media has declined by 22% since 2008 while television, computer internet and mobile have increased by one hour and twenty minutes during the same time frame.

Consumers have also become more efficient in multitasking since they can retrieve information various ways. About 40% of consumers use their smart phones or tablets while watching TV.

Video advertisers in the past had only one screen to target: the television. However, the rise of computers and mobile devices has boosted video viewing consumption across devices.

Yet, while the TV is no longer the sole video option for consumers, no single alternative has replaced television as the clear top choice for media consumption. According to a new report from ad network YuMe, 49 percent of all media consumption still comes from a television, 16 percent from the internet.

In addition, the report found that the average American owns close to four devices, and total figures show that there are more than 37 million tablets, more than 86 million PCs and close to 287 million TV sets owned in the United States.

So while the television is still the dominant media consumption option for many Americans, the proliferation of internet-enabled devices has cut into TV’s lead. As a result, consumers see video ads more than ever, which can make one spot appearing on only a TV or a computer less effective. YuMe’s report found that TV ads were only recalled about 27 percent of the time. In comparison internet video ads were remembered 43 percent of the time and mobile video ads had a 35 percent recall rate.

While the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and PCs may seem like it would hurt brands, but the key, is to think outside of traditional siloed efforts and focus on a new approach that reaches consumers across screens.

While TV is still the dominant platform for video, we are rapidly moving from a 100m+ household TV market to a billion+ screen based market. Now is the time for marketers to start thinking differently.

YouTube’s Plan for TV Domination

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Quick: Think of watching a YouTube video. What kind of screen pops into your head? Chances are you thought of your laptop, desktop, smartphone or tablet before you imagined flopping down in front of a YouTube video on your widescreen TV in the den.

But that’s an attitude YouTube is desparate to change — and TV makers are eager to help them out. A number of sets launching at CES 2013 this week in Las Vegas — including sets from Bang & Olufsen, LG, Panasonic and Sony — offer the video service’s recently launched “send to TV” feature.

This lets you pair an Android phone with a TV on the same Wi-Fi network, and cue up videos using the YouTube app as your remote. Sony and Samsung apps on some recently-sold TVs already work with the feature, as do TV apps on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii and Wii U consoles. Google TV not required. (Controls in the iOS YouTube app are coming soon.)

And all of that is just the tip of the iceberg. During interviews at YouTube HQ in San Bruno, Calif., the company tried its best to convince Mashable that a Minority Report-style future — one where the majority of us will simply flick videos off our phone screens and have them appear on our TVs, without a second thought — was just around the corner.

“We’re trying to build this infrastructure that scales everywhere from watching 1080p HD-quality video on your TV all the way down to using a dial-up modem in a developing country,” says Shiva Rajaraman, YouTube director of product management. “We’d like to be all things video, and that means getting video into all places” — with your smartphone replacing your remote or your game controller.

It also means turning YouTube into more of a DVR. The company hopes to persuade you to treat YouTube as a primetime, evening watching experience, rather than something you use for cat videos at work.

In this effort, YouTube has a major ally — its audience. The service already experiences a boom in viewers every evening in every time zone in America. “We see traffic spike on the smartphone, tablet, and TV-connected UIs,” says Rajaraman. “Prime time is prime time everywhere, for YouTube too.”

Uniting the Second Screens
Though YouTube doesn’t offer any numbers, a big chunk of this primetime spike is likely to be second-screen watching. You’ve got the TV on in the background, but you just got reminded of the really cool video that got passed around the office.

So what do you do? Reach for the tablet, grab the laptop, pull the phone out of your pocket. Why? Because they seem like the best screens for the job.

If you’re anything like me, you already have the ability to watch YouTube on your TV, along with Hulu Plus, Netflix and Amazon Prime. But you don’t do it because experience has taught you the result is likely to suffer by comparison with those other services.

The big streaming companies offer a pretty consistent video experience. Load a movie on Netflix streaming, and you know it’s going to seem somewhere between DVD and Blu-Ray quality.

Load a YouTube video on the big screen, and there’s a chance the quality could appear somewhere between an 8-bit video game and a fuzzy LEGO art project. There’s not a whole lot YouTube can do about that; it’s the one truly democratic, worldwide video network. Quality of uploads is bound to be all over the map.

No Verified Videos, Some Nudging
So how to overcome our wariness of using YouTube on the TV? During our conversations, I suggested the service start verifying accounts, Twitter-style — you get a tick next to your name if you consistently post videos that look great on a 42-inch screen, say. (Because as we know from experience, simply saying a video is HD when you upload it doesn’t make it so.) You could also use the verification process to clamp down on one of YouTube’s most terrible scourges: the vertical video.

The YouTube team demurred. They’re leery of encouraging user behavior in that direct a manner. For example, there are plenty of times the service can see there’s a problem with your video playing, and can make an educated guess as to why. There have been discussions behind the scenes about having a dialogue box pop up telling you, for example, that you might want to quit the 10 other programs you have running.

“We don’t want to add to the confusion, or look like we’re pointing fingers,” says Andy Berkheimer, YouTube’s head of engineering. “If you suggest the user take action and say it’s something else’s fault, you have to be sure.” Having said that, he adds, “We’ve definitely identified a few scenarios where we can help people out.”

The Sliced Bread Solution
Still, YouTube’s focus is mostly on fixing its video service on the back end. An ongoing internal project code-named “Sliced Bread” has made the whole service a lot smarter about how it feeds video to you, chopping it up into slices much the same way regular internet content is divided into packets, and making a half-dozen other software and bandwidth adjustments on the fly.

“The goal is to get rid of the spinner,” says Berkheimer, referring to the rotating series of dots that shows when a YouTube video is loading. The server software is “making decisions about next five to 10 seconds, asking: how do I provide highest quality with lowest risk of inducing a spinner?”

Getting a spinner, in fact, is the number one predictor of whether you’re going to abandon your YouTube video and move on to something else. So if you’ve found that your videos have started playing more smoothly with fewer interruptions recently, thank sliced bread.

YouTube apps on Samsung and Sony sets sold within the last year will start updating themselves with improvements to the service, as they’re now controlled by YouTube rather than the manufacturers. You’ll also find that if you’re watching a lot of videos on TV, the apps will know that and start offering more HD videos to you.

“If you only watch HD on your TV, you shouldn’t have to go and toggle some settings switch in order to do that,” says Rajaraman.

YouTube Can’t Go It Alone
Ultimately, none of this matters unless the content creators start viewing their stuff as TV-ready. Which is why YouTube is encouraging the whole concept of Channels and Subscriptions. On both the user and creator side, the plan is to turn the millions of YouTube Channels — whichever ones float your boat — into must-see TV.

Developers are part of the bigger picture, too. The company is also releasing updates to its API with a mobile embeddable player, allowing more apps to take advantage of YouTube content. Ultimately, YouTube will rise or fall on what creators do with it. It isn’t trying to be Hulu or Netflix; there are no major deals for movies or cable content on the horizon. Whether it can compete with those services for your TV-based attention is up to you.

Source: Mashable

Watching TV? There’s an App for that.

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Sitting on the couch merely watching TV is so last year.

How about playing along with “Glee” on your tablet when, poof, the commercial appears and up pops a deep-discount Pizza Hut coupon? Or watching “Real Housewives” and, pow, a friend sends a slide show to your phone showing where you can buy the outfits they’re wearing on the show?

Turning television into an interactive experience across the couches of America, the nascent world of “Social TV” links the big screen and the small. It is helping determine which shows prosper and giving viewers a reason to watch television live again — as a shared experience — rather than via DVR.

“There’s suddenly this whole range of different types of experiences where people can do more than just view TV,” said David Markowitz, vice president of marketing at SecondScreen Networks, which builds interactive tablet ads for shows.

TV fans’ new best friend could be a collection of apps to help them jump into a show’s action. Start-ups such as Viggle, GetGlue, Shazam and Miso — and the channels themselves, USA, SyFy and HBO — to name a few.

Small as they are now, these projects have potential to turn the TV industry inside out — and give viewers dramatic new ways to enjoy their shows more.

SecondScreen Networks of New York built a system for the USA Network’s Character Chatter app. When a TV ad appeared during the sports drama “Necessary Roughness” touting the new Lincoln MKX, the system pushed out a special ad on tablets asking questions such as which character drove the sport utility vehicle in the show.

Twenty-three percent of people who had the app clicked on the ad to participate. “That’s off the charts compared to even a typical online ad interaction,” Markowitz said. “Then we did another with Toyota, and it was higher than that.”

* * * * *
The San Francisco-based Miso start-up built the app SideShow to help networks and viewers create their own multimedia projects for following along with TV shows — scrolling jokes, photos and posts, for example — then sharing them so the projects appear on phones and tablets of friends through Facebook.

A teacher and actor in St. Louis, Sarajane Alverson has made a dozen SideShows for her favorite shows. During one scene when Howard of “Big Bang Theory” lays out all his belt buckles on the bed for his friend to polish, her slide popped up: “Just how many belt buckles DOES Howard have?…. approximately 80. … (yes, I counted). That’s one belt buckle for every 1.3875 episodes.”

“We have one big fan of the show ‘Archer’ on FX,” said Shay Fan, a marketing executive with Miso. “During key moments, his SideShow pops up things that are really funny. It’s a real second-screen experience. … Even when you’re watching alone, you can share things with your friends and fans of the show.”

Miso has attracted more than 330,000 users and investments from Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Hearst Interactive Media.

Twitter hashtags are familiar to TV viewers, but not like this: Marketers for the movie “Prometheus” ran ads in the United Kingdom promoting the tag #areyouseeingthis. The second time the ad ran, it displayed tweets the previous ad elicited from viewers. At one point, the hashtag was Twitter’s No. 2 trending topic in the U.K.

A slew of other start-ups are jumping into the mix.

GetGlue and Viggle, both from New York, developed systems similar to the popular Foursquare, with discounts and perks for people who check in with specific shows. IntoNow, backed by Yahoo, has apps that listen to TV audio, recognize a show and produce social media pages where fans chat via Twitter and read actors’ tweets.

Shazam, once just a music ID gizmo, is reaching deep into the biggest shows on television and has grown to more than 200 million users in more than 200 countries. The 2012 Super Bowl was “Shazamable,” so viewers could scan commercials for perks.

Channels such as Bravo, USA and SyFy use Shazam to bridge TV with the tablet and phone. Shazaming “Covert Affairs” on USA, for instance, produces a playlist of the show’s music and behind-the-scenes features on the show’s stars.

To keep track of all this, the new site Fans.TV lets viewers set watch lists of favorite shows and share lists with friends so they can all jump into social TV networks at the same time.

* * * * *
Advertisers, television networks and investors have reason to get into social TV.

Tablet sales topped 81.6 million last year and could hit 424.9 million in 2017, according to DisplaySearch. A whopping 85 percent of tablet owners use them while watching television, according to Nielsen, and tablet owners spend one-third of their tablet time in front of the TV.

Meanwhile, more TV shows are shifting to digital formats and away from TV altogether.

Amazon last week announced a plan to have producers of comedy and TV shows create programming for online streaming and tablets in return for a $55,000 upfront payment and a portion of revenue from toys and T-shirts.

Such social TV initiatives target a fast-developing frontier in technology. Many experts think Facebook already has won the battle to map people’s social relationships, said Ashwin Navin, co-founder of Flingo, which makes social apps for TV sets.

The next battleground is mapping people’s personal interests more deeply, spurring investors into projects that link people’s tastes in the vast TV entertainment market.

The need to measure the new interactions is giving rise to new businesses, too.

SocialGuide, based in Brooklyn, developed ways to scour the Internet for tweets, Facebook posts and other check-ins to compile a top 10 list of shows based on buzz.

On cable recently, that was the New York Rangers and Washington Capitals hockey match, with more than 121,000 comments and posts, followed by the NBA playoff between the Los Angeles Clippers and the Memphis Grizzlies with 102,000 mentions online.

“Sports turns out to be unbelievably social,” said Erika Faust, senior vice president of business development at SocialGuide. Sports accounts for a small share of all TV programming, but it generates more than half the online buzz while games are live.

“It gives producers a sense of the social conversation happening out there,” Faust said. “That can drive media spending” and determine which shows and actors prosper.

* * * * *
Coming full circle, you have Flingo building these kinds of social tools inside smart TVs from Samsung, LG, Vizio and others. It has placed its software in more than 8 million TVs. One new investor is Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and a pioneer in streaming video and high-definition TV distribution.

“Say you’re watching ‘Modern Family’ or ‘Storage Wars’ and there’s a moment you think is great,” Navin said. “With one click on your remote, you can post on Facebook or Twitter that you’re watching it.”

Things are still shaking out in the nascent social TV industry, but one prospect is especially encouraging to cable and network channels: There’s a new appetite for live television with its commercials that viewers can’t skip past.

And that can mean more advertiser revenue.

Most social TV systems work best when viewers are playing along with their friends at the same time. Live TV rather than DVR maximizes this select audience and ensures no one learns too much from all the online chatter about a game or episode they missed.

“That risk of a spoiler from spotting a tweet,” Navin said, “is the visceral motivation to get back into live TV.”

Tablet Usage Occurs Primarily At Home

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Tablet owners in America use their devices inside the home 74% of the time, according to a study from Viacom covering Q1 2012, per an eMarketer report.

96% of those who use a tablet at home said they use it in the living room, and 94% said they use it in the bedroom; this supports the idea that the tablet is being used for entertainment purposes, such as watching content or playing games.

Of note, 75% of respondents indicated they use the tablet inside the home office. As for outside the home, the report found that the airport/airplane (80%), coffee shop (72%), outdoor public place and appointment (64% each), work (59%), and public transit (58%) were the most common places where tablet owners used their device. Interestingly, the store was only cited by 36% of respondents.

SocialTV Activity Jumps in April

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Social activity surrounding broadcast primetime TV in April 2012 increased by 194% over April 2011, according to the latest research from Trendrr.TV. In terms of monthly data, of the top five broadcast networks, FOX had the highest increase in broadcast social share, up 10% in April 2012 from March 2012.

Overall, broadcast was more socially active per telecast than cable was. On the cable front, ESPN edged out Nickelodeon as the top social cable network with 13% cable social share. Other data from the report finds that the NCAA Championship Game, WrestleMania, Bad Girls Club, the NBA Playoffs, and the Billboard Latin Music Awsards were the most social telecasts throughout the month. And in terms of genre, reality TV generated the most social buzz at 36%.

Nielsen finds ‘second screen’ viewing enhances TV experiences

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When viewers watch a TV program with a tablet device, they tend to check their email, hunt for sports scores or seek additional information about the show or a commercial they were watching on the big screen.

A new report by Nielsen Co., underscores what network television researchers have been preaching for more than a year: that “second screen viewing” appears to augment the TV viewing experience rather than steal away viewers.

Nielsen’s State of the Media: Advertising & Audiences report found that men, when watching TV and using a tablet simultaneously, were more likely than women to look for information related to a TV program they were watching (39% versus 34%).

Women were more inclined to seek information related to a television commercial (24% versus 21%).

Not surprisingly, teenagers with tablets were far more apt to visit a social media site while watching TV than were older baby boomers and seniors (62% versus 33%).

The report also found cultural differences in TV watching and the use of digital video recorders. Nielsen said that white TV viewers use digital video recorders on a daily basis twice as much as any other group, while Asian Americans appear to spend a higher proportion of their overall TV time watching their previously recorded programs.

Adults age 25 to 54 appear to be heavily influenced by advertising. Nielsen said that demographic group was 23% more likely than the average U.S. Internet user to follow a brand through social networking sites, and 29% more likely to purchase a product online that had been featured on TV.

Not all TV Should be Social TV

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As one could imagine, I end up in a lot of conversations about second screen TV apps, companion apps, social TV, etc.  Virtually every discussion takes some long varied road to get to a point where all involved agree that the only rule in building next generation TV platforms and products is this: not all TV shows are alike, and experiences must be built with this rule in mind.

Let’s start with #SocialTV – broadly defined in current terms as “people tweeting, checking in, and liking TV shows on social media platforms.”  While I’m pretty jaded in my belief that this is resoundingly uninteresting as a topic, it’s important to think of it on a per-genre basis, and in fact, a per show basis.  One could state that “dramas” for example won’t garner much social TV activity – who really cares about checking in to shows like CSI or House?  Then along comes Game of Thrones, rule broken.  Then you could use Game of Thrones data to claim people don’t tweet while watching live TV.  And along comes sports and reality shows.

When it comes to planning and thinking about how users may/will behave regarding social TV and shows, I recommend thinking about it from two perspectives: (1) live interaction and (2) cultural impact.  The personal drivers for a lot of these activities have to do with the social perspective.  People are interested in “connecting” with others, which drives the interactions (tweeting about your team, someone getting voted off the island, etc).  People are also interested in being part of the cultural zeitgeist – Game of Thrones is “in” and “cool” to tweet about, whereas CSI and House are not.

Next up are companion apps – smartphone and/or iPad apps designed for use during a TV show.  As above, the potential value creation here is entirely about the content.  Do users really want to pull out their phones and read trivia while watching an intense or immersive show like Game of Thrones or The Good Wife?  Doubtful.  Am I going to look away from a visually-rich experience such as Planet Earth? Or how about Family Guy, where half the show is visual gags?  Seems unlikely.  But during any reality show, game show, talk show, or sports? I’d guess there’s a huge opportunity here.

Same moral as above, the right companion apps keep the content in mind.  First, we really don’t need (or want) a dedicated companion experience for every single show that airs – it’s just plain unnecessary.  But regardless of that, the experiences should think about the audience and how they want to interact.  Sports is all about real-time and stats.  Cooking shows, on the other hand, don’t need a real-time experience, but yet offering recipes, how-to, pictures, etc that can be bookmarked, archived, and viewed in the future is quite handy.  Complicated plot-driven shows can offer complementary experiences that supply background or other pertinent information to help audiences keep up with whatever’s going on.

Enhanced content offerings – featurettes, behind-the-scenes, and other options that plunge the user in a further immersive landscape blah blah blah. Now, speaking as the guy who watched all 3 Lord of the Rings movies, extended cut, with director’s commentary on, there’s no question a marketplace exists for extra content.  Blooper reels.  Making-of’s.  Interviews with Cast & Crew.  The key focus again is identifying the right content for the right show and deploying it in the right place.

Do I really need a dedicated app for my iPad just to get extra content for each show I like?  Do I need to subscribe to something?  I think, fundamentally, content creators and technologists need to really spend time crafting the right offering for each individual show.  For example, having the “webisodes” of The Office available openly via Facebook each week is a great solution to enhance that offering.  But if I needed an Office app, with a new Office username and password, would it be worth the investment beyond the “Like”?  Doubtful.

Overall, the time has come for TV technologists, creators, producers, etc to work together to avoid one-size-fits-all approaches to TV experiences.  Every show, every network, every device, and every platform should be regarded as a unique opportunity to engage an audience and tell a story.  Except, of course, for reality shows about celebutantes, which should just go away. Please folks, just do the right thing here. We can do it!

by Jeremy Toeman