asi: “The killer app for TV is now video”
The challenges to the future of TV advertising and TV research were squarely laid down in the first session of the ASI European TV Symposium in Paris today.
Dan Saunders, development manager at Samsung, gave delegates a glimpse of the company’s plans, while making it clear that all the consumer electronics businesses are adopting similar strategies.
Samsung, the leading TV manufacturer, selling one in every four TV sets in Europe, has a number of allegiances in place, including with Google over Android for mobiles, but the focus was on its Smart TVs.
“The killer app for TV is now video (not TV),” said Saunders, showcasing the potential for 70 applications on a Samsung TV, which can be viewed in full screen mode. These include BBC iPlayer and LoveFilm as well as a range of music services, on-demand services and catch-up TV.
The smart element is not just the apps but also social network services, content sharing and the new user interfaces to access this. The apps are downloaded from the Samsung server to the TV; and thereafter controlled by the content provider’s server.
Saunders said that advertising would be “centrally important” to the content providers, but there would be none on the Samsung portal – at least initially.
Samsung’s apps management and quality control is not unlike Apple’s, except that Samsung do not take a share but crucially do own the hardware. Sky movies could potentially be an app but the Sky platform is essentially competitive to this – unless a further deal is done. And so is Google TV, another platform.
TVs can be controlled by smart phones or other intelligent remotes or tablets and it will be possible to move live programming from device to device within the room in seconds.
Julian Dobinson, insight director at BSkyB, could not foresee a future where one single source panel could measure all viewing. Instead it was his view that data integration would be key on top of gold standard (BARB) data.
His experience via Skyview was that this is complex and requires buy-in from all parts of a business. “We need to move out of our comfort zones of siloed research,” he said. If we don’t look to integrate data the outcome will be “anarchy,” he predicted.
BARB research director Simon Bolus confirmed this view while showing potential new technology from Kantar for collecting viewing data from PCs. Data from many sources will need to come together in the future he stated.