The Dirty Little Secret of The Future of TV: Data [Guest Post]

Myer covers a lot of ground in the post, but it’s mostly familiar territory for readers of this blog: Unbundling, linear vs. VOD, social, device ecosystems. After setting the scene with the 40k-foot industry landscape, Myer makes some bold claims about what’s gating television innovation that dramatically oversimplify industry dynamics.

The biggest problem with Myer’s argument is that it ignores the major impediments to progress for both newcomers and incumbents – these include product design in all of its various incarnations, but let’s not forget content rights, content cost structures, and the economic realities of unbundling. It’s not as simple as cracking a new navigational paradigm for on-demand video or acquiring more content.

(For more on the nuances of this industry quagmire, see my Storify from last week capturing a Twitter conversation between Dennis Crowley, Dan Frommer, Hunter Walk, and others, that all started when Dennis’s grandmother couldn’t watch the Pats game in Florida without a $350 DirectTV Sunday Ticket subscription.)

At the end of the day, video services of the future must increase the value of the monthly subscription through a mixture of distribution, content, and user experience, but getting there will require a data-driven approach to the business that embraces platform dynamics and wedges the economics of content in favor of consumers.

This approach should extend to every dimension of the business, including content acquisition. Myer acknowledges that content acquisition is one of the biggest challenges for would-be disruptors. In fact, it’s his hypothesis for why nobody is challenging the pay-TV incumbency:

That’s the old Microsoft embrace-and-extend ploy. I’ll save you my personal thoughts on embrace-and-extend as it relates to product development, but assuming some newcomer could actually afford a content acquisition strategy that successfully equalized the traditional channel lineup, what would be the return on such an astronomical investment, and would it even add value for consumers?

Myer says that newcomers shouldn’t guess what programming is important to the customer, and he’s right. But that doesn’t mean the video service of the future should strive for parity in programming. We now live in a world where the best consumer web products have iterated in part because of data – usage data if your product has traction, but how about general industry research like this Nielsen study that tells us the average US home with a cable package receives about 118 channels, but only watches 17 of them.

The way to increase subscription value isn’t by embracing the same content library, but rather by extending the value of the ~14% of content that consumers do access regularly and augmenting that offering with other relevant content and services. To do that, newcomers should leverage actual consumer data signals if they’re fortunate enough to have built a product that can capture them.

Netflix has built a data-driven product, and this is why Reed Hastings got on stage earlier this month at the UBS Media conference to proclaim that he’s the Billy Beane of digital media.  “We’re very much the ‘moneyball’ content buyers. We’ll look at, OK, we paid X for something, so how many people watched it?” Netflix is collecting and analyzing viewing data that then informs their content acquisition strategy.

Netflix, like the Oakland A’s, must apply a data-driven approach because they simply can’t afford to acquire everything they think consumers might want. It’s been reported that Netflix’s streaming content licensing costs will rise from $180 million in 2010 to $2 billion in 2012. Netflix can’t afford to spend another dime or another million on content that doesn’t directly add measurable value to the service.

But at least Netflix is in position to measure value and apply data-driven learning to its product strategy. This brings us to the supply chain of internet-age content distribution, an ecosystem within which Myer says, “companies need to control at least the device and the service.”

It remains to be scene whether this level of control will prove to be a categorical business imperative. Apple and Amazon seem to think so, and have demonstrated success owning their respective hardware and software stacks.

Netflix, on the other hand, is a service provider that understands platform dynamics and how to extract value and meaningful consumption data at the service layer. Netflix not only operates its service across PCs, tablets, gaming consoles, connected TVs, and phones, but has also developed the technical proficiency to optimize that cross-platform device distribution. This allows Netflix to maintain a direct relationship with the consumer and refine its user experience across platforms.

Incumbents like HBO and Showtime have begun to recognize the value of the direct-to-consumer model with their HBO Go and Showtime Anytime streaming services. Competitors like Hulu and YouTube keep investing in direct-to-consumer efforts to drive greater engagement (Hulu Latino, YouTube Channels). Microsoft redesigned the XBox Live Dashboard as a platform for content providers to go direct-to-consumer. Just this past week, we saw the comedian Louis CK pull off an experiment in content distribution, going direct-to-consumer to the tune of $200k and counting in profit.

These direct relationships, and how service providers leverage them to extract data that in turn informs product development, content distribution, and content acquisition will help shape the real future of television at the service layer. No single service will be able to provide a comprehensive offering so long as there is still exclusive, marquee programming and healthy competition in the device ecosystem. However the dust settles, content must stay accessible and affordable for the consumer.

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