During the Apollo XIII mission, NASA engineers worked without rest to bring back home the three astronauts. One of the main challenges was fitting the lunar craft's air filter with the one from the main spaceship to prevent the crew from passing out by breathing their own unfiltered air. The first one had a circular shape and the second one was squared. Finally, Houston's brains made it: They managed to fit the circle in a square.The TV industry has faced a similar problem during the last ten years when trying to fit linear TV with non-linear TV. For the traditional broadcasters, the arrival of VoD and OTT platforms has become a challenge in terms of competition, but it also has become an opportunity.
Linear TV: It's still alive!
A lot of ink has spilled about the death of linear TV. In previous articles, we reviewed how the digital world stole the first rank in terms of advertising income and some other factors that announced the end of an era. However, traditional TV is still on in our living rooms.
There are many signals to believe that this business is still alive. The first is a generational issue. Many mid-age people still associate their TV consumption with linear TV. Not only because they are used to it, but also because for some of them it's not easy to buy or learn to manage a hybrid TV. In fact, according to Nielsen, 60% of people over the age of 55 continue to consume content linearly.
Furthermore, one of the weaknesses of non-linear TV is the main advantage of the traditional TV format: Selecting content is easier. We've seen how OTT's users struggle to pick up content in an endless catalog and how the platforms try to make this choice easier. This is not that big a problem for linear TV broadcasts and users. Media consultant Guillaume Morel stated that many users just want to sit down on the couch after a long day and relax watching whatever the TV offers without having to choose again.
Another aspect in which linear TV resists is live events, and especially live sports ones. The public is still using traditional TV to watch this type of content. If we take a look at the most-watched content in 2021 in the US, football games are still on top. If the broadcasters get to keep the audiovisual rights for this content, they will assure themselves a good amount of viewers.
Fitting the square with the circle
All right, so it turns out linear TV is not dead. However, we can't deny that non-linear TV is growing and young people prefer it. If we look back on Nielsen's data, we will see that barely 10% of the people below 35 years old consume traditional TV. As the old tale says, the elephant is in the room. What is the strategy of most conventional TV channels to adapt to this reality? Combining both formats.
Recently, the BBC announced the return of BBC3; a channel focused on the public between 18 and 35 years old. The public corporation decided to stop broadcasting this channel in 2016, as it claimed that young people prefer to consume this content on iPlayer, its VoD platform.
Six years later, the BBC walked its steps back and BBC3 is on the air again. According to a comment from the company in The Guardian, the reason is the surprising number of young people that still watch traditional TV. During this period, some shows produced for BBC3 turned on success when broadcasted on the BBC's main channels. Therefore, the British corporation decided to bet on the wise policy of combining both formats.
The coexistence between linear and non-linear TV formats might be the solution for the traditional broadcasters. Most of them have already developed their own VoD platforms for digital media like Smart TV, web browsers or mobile apps. This way, they can offer traditional broadcasting and adapt to the public's tastes and needs that prefer non-linear consumption. However, which are the technical challenges of fitting linear TV with non-linear TV?
Integration of media asset management and media planning
We must count on a media management solution for our catalog and a state-of-the-art BMS (Broadcast Management System) for linear and non-linear media planning to face this challenge. But that is usually not enough; we need both tools to communicate and integrate as if they were only one.
Let's illustrate this with an example of linear and non-linear integration. Our channel is planning the release of a new TV series and also wants to add each chapter into its VoD platform once it has been broadcasted. We first need to ingest the content in our media archive with a media asset management tool like VSNExplorer MAM. Once the content is in our catalog, the series and each chapter incorporate custom metadata allowing easy access to relevant parts of a media file. Furthermore, this process can be automated thanks to the integration of VSNExplorer MAM with Artificial Intelligence search engines like IBM Watson, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure or AWS. We would only need to validate the data in the same interface with the Databinder tool. Through this process, we can generate, for example, automatic subtitles for our content.
Once the assets are in our media catalog, we must schedule its publication with VSNCrea. Thanks to its integration with VSNExplorer MAM, we can preview the content from the catalog and simultaneously modify the metadata if needed, without ever leaving Crea's interface.
From the linear module, we can schedule the programming of our TV Channel. Using virtual blocks that can be predefined and populated with content in advance to save time, we can add a chapter per week to our channel playlist. If the series have a good reception, we can manage its ad rates incomes with the commercials module, which allows users to select the seconds of the spot depending on pricing, the type of Ad Rate cost (Fixed, Cost Per Mille, Cost P
