With some surveys indicating that only 45% of cable subscribers know what TV Everywhere is, marketing stands to be one of the key issues for 2014, along with authentication and monetization, said Marty Roberts, SVP of sales and marketing for thePlatform.
"TV Everywhere has been embraced - and is available - by most of the major pay TV operators in North America and increasingly internationally," Roberts said. "Most of the network families have also embraced some sort of offering. There has been a really nice growth in the overall initiative."
The Winter Olympics stand to help move TV Everywhere forward from a consumer awareness perspective. "Every time there is one of these (marquee) events, the consumer base is educated, and access goes up dramatically and then plateaus on the other side. Once they figure out how to do the login, it makes it easier to access again later," Roberts said.
Operators have been trying to make the process easier, enabling in-home automation that prevents subscribers from having to log in when they are accessing a site behind an authorized broadband modem. "This is a really nice step," Roberts said. "A number of companies are (also) embracing social login. Instead of finding a cable operator email address that not many of us use, they can jump out and hook up their cable account to Facebook."
Monetization also will take steps forward in 2014 with advancements expected in the ability for Nielsen Ratings to provide better measurements for mobile usage, Roberts said. Nielsen provides a commercial ratings metric, called C3, which averages commercial viewership and takes into account live programming plus DVR viewing up to three days. These numbers are used to negotiate advertising rates, which often are talked about in terms of CPM, or cost per 1,000 impressions.
"Online video ad rates are healthy," Roberts said. "(For premium content) they are higher than other online ad opportunities. Sometimes the CPMs are higher than for TV itself. That is an absolute opportunity."
Additionally, operators are experimenting with opportunities to upsell content. For example, Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA) is offering Xfinity Streampix. For $4.99 per month, subscribers have access to a higher tier of VOD content across screens, in and out of the home.
Another method is to offer subscribers access to the first movie in a series for free, but to charge for the newest release. "These (types of) opportunities increase the average revenue per customer. There are a lot of additional opportunities to monetize content, both with advertising and commerce-related activity," Roberts said.
Monta Monaco Hernon is a free-lance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].