The year ahead: second screens, a saved marriage and a possible bereavement

The great thing about the future of the media is that it changes every five minutes. Just when you thought you had finally got a handle on things, everything gets thrown up in the air again, like some sort of media perpetual motion machine.

Just in the last 24 hours:

• The Guardian Media announces that it is going to launch a digital edition in Australia. Is this another precursor to an all digital Guardian, say around 2016?
• Facebook launches a beta edition of ‘Graph Search’ which seems to be an internal search engine for 1 billion Facebook users. Wow. Does this mean you can find new tennis partners in your town?
• Newsworks says 12.2 million Britons now own a tablet and a further 7% of the population intends to buy one before Easter. More iPad newspaper subscriptions?
• Tesco takes a brand reputational hit of gigantic proportion by being forced by the Irish, who have more horses than they can afford to feed at the moment, to admit that some of the old cheval got into their beef burgers. Big crisis management PR contract in the offering?

Roll back two days and Deloitte dropped its annual media and technology forecasts for 2013 including the thought that one billion smart phones will be shipped for the first time this year.

How is that going to change things? How can we know?

The consultants also dynamited one of the sexier topics for media chat horror shows – the dreaded impending threat from the cord-cutters. According to Deloitte – and it’s a pretty outrageous claim – only 1% of American multi-channel subscribers will actually cancel their subscriptions. If so where does that leave Netflix as it spanks the cash on more and more content deals?

Enough questions, let’s try to introduce some order into this forecasting the future business.

At first sight it’s going to be a tough year without either Lord Justice Leveson or a succession of scandals at the BBC to kick around. A bit of horse meat in Tesco burgers doesn’t cut the mustard for long.

We know where we are with Leveson – a non-statutory independent regulatory body underpinned by civil contracts – and Lord Hunt should, if there is any fairness in the world, be its first chairman.

The BBC is much more problematical. They have had a damning inquiry into the two Newsnight scandals and despite manifest managerial incompetence nothing has happened other than one deputy top man retiring slightly early.

There is the Lord Tony Hall hiatus until March – but Tony really should be at work now.

Nick Pollard’s work is only half done. He put his finger with admirable precision on what had gone wrong and why, but he deliberately avoided saying what should happen next.

The former head of Sky News should be awarded an immediate contract to come up with precise proposals for restructuring BBC News and for improving communications between the Corporation’s warring silos.

It would not be too far-fetched, though a touch radical, for Pollard to be actually given a 12-month contract to run BBC News and prepare for the merger with the BBC World Service before handing over to a new generation.

As for the larger picture on television, we have at last got rid of the last few flat earth fanatics who think that television and TV channels are on their last legs in the face of the onslaught from online, social media, cord-cuttings etc…

The final confirmation comes from social media companies such as Twitter showing more and more enthusiasm for climbing on the television bandwagon. Just look at the Twitter-Nielsen deal in the US to create a Nielsen Twitter TV Rating.

So obviously we are now going to have to start talking sagely about the next big thing – The Second Screen.

Oh how we are going to talk about the second screen in 2013.

It is quite important. I know of a marriage, which has quite possibly been saved, by the arrival of an iPad at Christmas. The man of the house is really only interested in watching sport on TV – any sport. Now that his wife is happily watching other programmes on her iPad in the living room, harmony has been restored.

This will be the year of the Second Screen – but be aware of the low base and volume, not just rising percentage trends. As the legendary Irish FT journalist Dominic Coyle, who died this week, loved to say: “Five per cent of fuck all is still fuck all.”

As Touchpoints found out, while 21% of UK adults have been online while watching television at some point of the day, the percentage drops to 3.5% in peak. Even among young adults, the great second screen users, we only get up to 13% – so far.

We are on firmer ground if we try to run Big Data up the flagpole as the topic of the year. More and more advertisers will see real time data on viewing and behaviour – particularly spending patterns – as the Holy Grail.

They will probably have to wait a little longer. Research costs money and they always want someone else to pay. This could also be the year when consumers start to get more pissed off about the amount of information marketeers hold on us, the connections they made and actions taken.

The first serious skirmishes in the privacy wars should start to intensify by September.

A possible bereavement

This will obviously be a tough year for newspapers, although the rise of the iPad provides a small, bright spark, as does the arrival of David Montgomery and Local World for the regional press.

The share price of regional companies such as Johnston Press could continue rising in 2013, though perhaps not by the same multiples as in 2012.

But we must prepare ourselves emotionally for a possible bereavement. If Alexander Lebedev is jailed for “hooliganism” after unwisely thumping someone on live television, or has his assets seized for not turning up to court, the future of the Independent will depend on another sugar daddy stepping forward.

With daily print sales of around 80,000, this is hardly likely, even when you add in the near 300,000 cut price sales of the i and 600,000 free distributions of the Evening Standard.

Only one media forecast can be made with absolute certainty – the Dandy will do less well as a digital only publication than it did in 75 years of print despite all those iPads and smart phones in the hands of seven year olds.

I look forward to discussing these predictions, and many others, at MediaTel’s Year Ahead event in central London today. It’s always a superb and insightful occasion and this year I’ll be sharing a panel with the BBC’s Torin Douglas and IPA president, Nicola Mendelsohn, expanding on our – often fun – discussions to new areas of the media.