A leading industry expert has said that despite claims made by the BBC’s director general, Tony Hall, the reality of TV consumption is not online, but in live broadcasting.
In plans late last year outlining the future of the BBC, Hall said that the Corporation wants its on-demand platform, iPlayer, as a “front door to all BBC content,” and this week relaunched the service in a bid to ensure it is “fit for the future,” as well as moving its flagship youth and comedy channel, BBC Three, entirely online.
However, speaking at the annual Connected Consumer Conference on Wednesday, Nigel Walley, managing director of Decipher, said that although the TV sector has forged an “even more complicated world,” it is not changing nearly as fast as anyone thinks.
“When Anthony Rose was heading up iPlayer, people said that the service – with its ability to curate and personalise content – was going to be the future of the BBC,” Walley said.
“That was cobblers then and is cobblers now. iPlayer is not the reality of TV consumption.”
Walley cited figures that show the BBC’s video on-demand service – seven years after its launch in 2007 – still only accounts for 2% of all BBC viewing, while the remaining 98% is from live broadcast. This is in spite of the 10 million daily requests going through iPlayer.
Walley said that the way Hall is positioning the iPlayer platform is not dissimilar to the way Google chairman, Eric Schmidt, has tried to present YouTube in the past.
Following a $100 million investment in YouTube original content in 2012, Schmidt infamously claimed that the online channel had “already overtaken” traditional broadcast.
“We have let the popular press and the digital trade press lead with misconceptions about changing behaviours,” Walley said.
However, ITV’s controller of commercial digital products, Jon Block, was quick to refute Walley’s assertion, arguing that with increasing interconnectivity between devices, the TV industry is actually changing “incredibly quickly”.
iPlayer is now available on over 1,000 devices across four screens and over 10 billion programmes have been requested since its launch, with over three billion of these coming in 2013 alone.
“When analysing TV over a 12 month period, it seems like a slow evolution,” Block said. “However, we only need to look at data to see how the industry is changing.”
Research from Nielsen shows that while television largely dominates the time people spend watching video content, it is not in isolation.
An increasing number of people are watching video online and on their smartphones – particularly significant among 18-24 year olds, who are also decreasing their TV consumption.
The research found that women in the 18-24 year old demographic are watching 7% less TV now than they were in 2010, with the figure increasing to 10% for men.
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