VoD Under Discussion At Broadcast Conference

The relationship between audiences and television channels will change over the coming years, as video-on-demand becomes ever more mainstream. This was just one of the messages from last week’s Broadcast Live conference.

Stacey Anklam, head of product management at Red Bee Media, outlined how this might happen by recounting one of her company’s experiences with VoD and explaining how the challenges VoD providers face can be overcome.

She said: “We worked with a cable company when they moved into VoD and they had a nice catalogue of 3,000 VoD items, and the problem was nobody was using any of it. If you can imagine what it would look like to go through an EPG and find the particular piece of material that you are looking for, it’s very difficult with something that big.”

Anklam said that it became obvious that the only way to get over this hurdle was to cut back the catalogue available over the EPG and begin to schedule viewers’ VoD content.

She added: “We married that with what is sometimes called a ‘showcase channel’ where we were creating promotions which were promoting the VoD content, and they were extremely clever. One of my favourites was for Prime Suspect, where we did a re-voice over of Prime Suspect and actually explained to people how to use video-on-demand, without being really antsy about it. It was a really entertaining way to get people to start using that facility and usage went up about 20% after we put this in place.”

Anklam said that audiences will still watch a linear channel if it has content they are interested in, adding: “It’s how you plan that and who will be planning that in the future. Because it will get a lot easier to do those things – through RSS TV and other technologies – the concept of who is planning a channel will change as time goes on.”

Red Bee Media: www.redbeemedia.com