When Prima TV viewers want to watch a programme from the archive, most of them still head to the website and use a traditional internet browser. But in the last three years, the video archive has been gaining more and more share in the hybrid TV (HbbTV) environment. On a smart TV connected to the internet, all you have to do is press the red button and choose from the menu. This method has already leapfrogged watching shows on a mobile phone or tablet.
"It's natural, humans are comfortable beings. When you get the opportunity to watch content in greater comfort and on a larger screen, you always choose that,"
says Daniel Grunt, director of online activities at TV Prima, in an interview with DigiZone.cz. He was accompanied by Iva Nesrstová, HbbTV product manager, and Petr Hatlapatka, head of online sales at Media Club.
This year it will be four years since you launched the first HbbTV tests. I'm interested in what you've learned in that time and where the service is going.
Daniel Grunt: We've learned that it makes sense and that the decision to go for it was the right one. In the beginning, we saw how it worked in Germany. We went there to "catch a glimpse of it" and we thought it had great potential. By then, it already had big numbers there. And when I look at it now, there's nothing more to learn from Germany, we're a bit further along. The hybrid platform is growing very fast. At the moment, two million people have already seen the red button. The number is up by a third year on year. It's a technology that people can understand. You'd think there's no difference between getting to a menu through the red button on the remote or through the app menu on the TV, but it's completely different. The red button works very easily for people. People who come to a hybrid TV are already extending the time they spend with it and increasing the frequency of visits.
What is the position of the hybrid interface now among TV Prima's digital platforms?
Four years ago it was a technical experiment for us. The logic then was simple: the TV station wanted to enrich its linear content, build a relationship with viewers and offer them additional services. The possibility of interactivity is beautiful, but it never really worked in terrestrial linear broadcasting. That was the first reason. Then it turned out that, thanks to a big reach, HbbTV also made sense business-wise. Today, we are in our third year of offering hybrid TV; until then it was really just experiments. It's growing year on year and today it's already the second most important service online in terms of revenue and also one of the most profitable. And you can see that the amount of space that can be sold is growing quite rapidly. We basically offer two models to advertisers. The commercial red button, which can be displayed anywhere, generates around 100 million impressions per month. The second model is video within the archive, this is absolutely the most used service.
In February, you expanded HbbTV to include a paid video library. What are the first experiences with it?
On HbbTV, we have offered users to pay via SMS, and on the website there are payments by card, PayPal or bank transfer. 30 percent of payments are made directly on TV. You choose a movie, enter your mobile number via the remote, receive an SMS, answer YES - and you can watch. Although the viewer is not registered anywhere, and it is therefore harder to match data about their behaviour, but in the first phase we are primarily interested in getting people to try this option. There is a fairly large group of people who make multiple payments, 60 percent of them. It's not just testers trying out the service.
Daniel Grunt; Autor: Karel ChocWhat are they looking at the most?
They are clearly drawn to our own shows. 95-97 percent were for our three series: Black widows (Černé vdovy), Krejzovi and Blue Code (Modrý kód). The only thing that was left was movies. And they were popping up when the shows weren't on, which was on the weekend.
Does that have any significant impact on the deferred viewership for those shows?
Absolutely not. Paid video-on-demand (TVOD) generated viewership in the tens of thousands, and thus deferred viewership doesn't jump much. But classic viewing in a non-paid archive with ads, i.e. on the web, on HbbTV or in an app, adds 6-18 per cent to TV viewership. The "smaller" a show is on TV, the more percentage it adds to deferred viewership. Conversely, with Black Widows, where we had a viewership of over a million, 200-300k views doesn't add that much.
Are there fluctuations in viewership in the video library during the week?
For the paid offer, sure. Black Widows were absolutely the biggest draw there. Once they were over, there was a huge surge of interest on Sunday night and Monday. You also see every time that Krejzovi and Blue Code were on. The curve jumps in the evening, continues the next day, and then it drops. So the curves built on each other throughout the week thanks to the series, ending with Thursday, and the movies popping up more on Friday and Saturday. Viewers have obviously gotten a little used to going there. And when they weren't seeing previews of our own work there, they were picking and choosing from films.
So did the previews work as an enticement to HbbTV?
Absolutely. We ran a campaign across the screens for this option, where a notification popped up saying you could buy the next episode right away. That's part of the reason why those 30 percent of payments happened through hybrid technology.
You mentioned that interest in video is growing. Can you quantify it in any way?
Basically, 30 percent of all our video library videos are already rotating through the hybrid TV archive. Some 60 percent is in the browser itself, 10 percent is mobile apps. The time spent watching video is increasing quite significantly, more than a third year-on-year. An interesting figure is how the consumption of long videos is growing. This is because we divide our production internally into long and short videos - long videos are TV shows, short videos are productions for the internet, such as behind-the-scenes reports. Our long videos grew by 15-16 per cent year-on-year in the traditional browser on the PC, but by 78 per cent in HbbTV. It's natural, humans are comfortable beings. When given the option to watch content in greater comfort and on a larger screen, they will always choose that. That's also why I think the big TV screen will grow more and more in terms of delayed viewing, archive or video-on-demand services in general at the expense of traditional PCs and laptops. On top of that, mobiles will grow to cover the situations when you're not at home.
You were giving viewers the choice of watching shows with ads or without ads but for a fee. Which do they lean towards more?
It's true that they prefer to watch commercials. We have about two million people a month who watch our content, but the paying ones are just over 12,000. So it's a big disparity. We've done it that way on purpose because the first classic response to someone stealing your content is that they can't get it without ads and things like that. So we gave them that option. There's not a lot of people paying, but on the other hand it's not a small income, it goes up to millions in crowns a year, that's always pleasurable. At the same time, it doesn't cannibalize our business at all as far as video advertising is concerned.
In the past, you have boasted about how popular it is on HbbTV, for example, to view leaflets or various quizzes. Do they still work that well?
We pulled the quizzes because we took down the linked service on mobile, which we no longer worked with. As for the flyers, I think there's still a lot of potential there. They get thousands of people a day. That's not a small number, but it could be more when you consider how many people get flyers in their mailboxes. When they get there, they spend four or five minutes looking at them. If a leaflet is 20-30 pages long, they finish the whole thing, they go through it in detail. That leads me to believe that the potential is still there. It's going to depend a lot on educating the market. Our business is working a lot with it. It's still hard to sell HbbTV formats because not a lot of people on the commissioning side have tried them in real life and can't imagine what they are. It's always best to bring the client to the screen, show them - and then it's a different story. For them, it's still something they've heard about rather than seen with their own eyes.
What's the trend in flyer traffic?
Iva Nesrstova: In March, we saw a 32% year-on-year increase in traffic. Viewers most often go to the leaflets via the menu and via the switch-in (a graphic prompt to press a red button that appears when switching to a station or a specific ad - ed.).
Petr Hatlapatka: Clients who put flyers in the app for a longer period of time see an increase in people. Viewers get used to finding a particular flyer on TV. Sometimes we struggle when clients say they don't have an event right now, and they put the flyer away. Then they put it back. But that's the worst thing they can do - people are used to seeing a certain set of leaflets and it's bad when chains alternate between being there and not being there.
Petr Hatlapatka; Autor: Karel ChocHow many chains have their leaflets in the app now?
Petr Hatlapatka: It varies a lot depending on the strong and weak shopping season. At Christmas we had about fifteen flyers, now there are about seven.
You said that you have learned so many things that you can't learn anything new in Germany. What new features would you like to introduce? How about more use of voting?
Daniel Grunt: We created a voting app for the newsroom. I think it will definitely get a lot of use in the future. We've also used voting in internal research to find out how many people in a household watch the average red button TV. So we showed them a prompt with an entry form where we asked them to answer a couple of questions, it was about five pages. We got back 70,000 completed questionnaires! I don't think there are many surveys like that. People respond quite well when Prima talks to them and doesn't just want to sell them something at any cost. That was the response within a week.
Petr Hatlapatka: The first year we did it, we got about 50,000 responses. We thought it was some kind of a technical error, and we tried to figure out if it was some kind of nonsense. But it was real. It was a banner with a question, there was no challenge, no contest, no reward, nothing.
So your researchers are happy about hybrid TV too.
Daniel Grunt: Interactivity is generally important. I think that in the future it is good to collect viewers' opinions and feedback, for example, on the directions of development within the series, the inclusion of a new character and so on. That's a value for Prima's internal team. Within the hybrid platform, we will further develop the video archive, which viewers are clearly getting used to. We want to simplify it, add more content, whether with advertising or for money. Children's content has started to work nicely for us, and we will be acquiring significantly more of that. It's also a great platform to support Prima Zoom, because as a part of the rights purchase we can include about 95 per cent of what's running on TV in the catch-up. So we'll play around on Zoom with grouping shows by related topics. We're playing a lot with the data that comes from the computer, mobile and hybrid layer. We want to start effectively recommending content within the archive.
What about the new capabilities of the HbbTV 2.0 standard?
For that, we're just waiting for higher penetration. Commercial TV offers amazing things, you can unlink ad blocks for example. That's when hybrid TV becomes addressable, where you can serve advertising to each household based on what they're interested in. We're talking about three, four years from now. It will depend on the penetration of the standard in the market. So far it's small, about two percent.
This could be helped by the renewal of receivers due to the transition to DVB-T2.
I'm convinced of that. These are interesting things. If people have advertising out there, they'll get advertising that has more value to them. On the other hand, it has more value for the advertiser as well, because it speaks to those who want to hear his message. And we're still playtesting. In fact, our colleagues in Germany told us that apart from the archive, this is the area where people spend most of their time.
That means how much?
Iva Nesrstova: We have a Tetris game deployed on HbbTV, where users spend an average of 22 minutes. That's quite a lot for the average time spent in the app. And it's a long-term trend, we've had Tetris since November and the value is still this high.
Iva Nesrstová; Autor: Karel ChocSo the next classic will be something like Pong?
Iva Nesrstová: We already have a number of games on HbbTV. Users can choose from a game portal or a classic puzzle. The most popular game is Candy Crush, but our users also play Solitaire.
Daniel Grunt: The TV broadcast then becomes a second screen, because in the small window during the game there’s what's currently running on TV (laughs).
What is the potential for monetisation of the games?
Iva Nesrstová: We have two ways. The first is video advertising between games. The second is through branding, where the client's brand is visible during the game. The Tetris we mentioned now is wrapped with self-promotion on our shows.
So the client can pay to put their logo in the game?
Iva Nesrstova: Exactly, or they can make their brand visible throughout the section. And even the dice that are played with can be changed into anything. For example, into cars.
Petr Hatlapatka: The game is connected to our HbbTV Creator tool, which we launched last summer. Clients can access the app via the internet with a classic Photoshop template, where they just change the graphics, and the moment they upload them back, the game transforms into their colours, for example. It's nothing complicated. Before, when clients wanted games, it was terribly expensive and had to be programmed, but this is done in half a day.
Daniel Grunt: Creator is helping us get more clients for HbbTV. Two years ago, it was quite costly for a client to have an HbbTV app. It cost tens to hundreds of thousands of crowns. But this tool is free and the client can prepare everything himself, or his creative agency, or even us.
Petr Hatlapatka: We did a campaign for the car company SsangYong, they supplied us with the creative in the morning and in 3.5 hours it was ready. That's just to give you an idea of how long it takes to launch an HbbTV campaign today, including the app. Two years ago, it would have been a 14-day event.
Iva Nesrstová: A client had a car test on Autosalon and decided at the last minute that he wanted to use the HbbTV campaign. We put the test that ran on Thursday night on Autosalon into the app, added two videos with the client's spot and information about the nearest dealer, and deployed three apps with city targeting. We ran the campaign by IP address, so viewers were shown a variation based on where they lived.
Reklamní výzva ke stisknutí červeného tlačítka ve vysílání TV PrimaDo elements like this affect the demographics of HbbTV users? Are there any differences in target groups compared to linear broadcasting?
Daniel Grunt: That's more due to the technology itself. It's starting to become mass-market now, but it's still the nicest of TV audiences: younger, more educated, more affluent, from bigger cities. They've bought a new TV, they've got it hooked up to fast home internet, that already profiles you. It's not so much about the gamification as it is about the ownership of the device.
What segment do HbbTV advertisers typically recruit from? Previously, car companies or mobile operators have blazed this trail.
Petr Hatlapatka: Mostly the car companies are there because they target the upper middle class. Prima as a whole can target the masses, but there are car companies that will not go on TV with a particular car model because it is aimed at a more creditworthy group. Historically, we haven't been able to offer them much, except the Autosalon website. But in HbbTV we can offer them such people, and on a more mass scale. Then there are financial clients who don't go into video advertising at all and appear with ads more on financial sites, but now we can reach them with hybrid TV.
Aside from HbbTV Creator, are you developing tailored applications for them?
Petr Hatlapatka: Either they choose from templates in Creator, or they make custom apps. But 60-70 percent of the apps are made in Creator alone. Clients will test to see if there's interest in their message, and when they see that it's working, because we tell them if the click-through rate was below average, average, or above average, they start to worry a lot more about how to monetize people.
Daniel Grunt: In addition to the car companies, there's also a lot of banks. The target audience determines what products to put out there. We try to give advertisers guidance, but sometimes they push the product themselves. For example, we know that when you target short-term loans, it doesn't work as much as campaigns for mortgages, savings and investing. There are differences of orders of magnitude in campaign performance.
What metrics do you use for performance?
For ad formats, the standard is impression counts or click-through rates, audience counts. The app then has a Google Analytics client. Now we are working on a better tool because Google Analytics are primarily for the web. But it serves us to have some idea about the interest in the content or the number of conversions. The client also sees when they get a response from phone numbers or emails dropping into the customer system. So the measurement is very similar to online.
Are there models in advertising campaigns in big markets like the UK, France or Spain that you would like to bring over here?
The Germans are bolder and not afraid of massive formats, which they call XXL Red Button. The TV broadcast is tucked away in a corner and the screen area is entirely wrapped with the client's brand. But it costs an awful lot of money. They don't go much into video advertising, they take their money more from challenges, in-picture banners and apps. In Spain, a TV station made a deal with a pizzeria chain and an HbbTV order appeared in prime time, which led to the collapse of their system.
And talking not just about the hybrid layer, but archive and VOD in general, the UK's Channel 4 is playing a lot with AI. It recognises objects in the video, and when an iPad, for example, appears in a series, it highlights it a little bit and then links the first ad in the ad block to it. They guess the mood of the video that is currently running and adjust the campaigns to that as well. And the BBC tried using AI to put together a programme for a day on TV where they had it hunting in their deep archive, and which didn't have bad numbers. The biggest inspiration will be in terms of working with data, segmenting it, learning patterns and other things.
Let's go back to the Internet video advertising market in general. What is the position of the Media Club representation in this market now?
Petr Hatlapatka: If I take the Czech market from the perspective of monitored video, because we can't see any Google or Facebook data, there is a big three: us, Seznam.cz and Nova. The three of us together have the biggest share of the market pie. Media Club has the most video views, the largest amount of advertising space. Seznam.cz is bigger in reach.
In foreign markets, competitors in linear broadcasting are teaming up on digital platforms precisely to stand up against Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple. Could this be the way for our market as well?
Petr Hatlapatka: I think so.
Daniel Grunt: It will depend on how things turn out abroad. All the experiments are very fresh. Talking about the HbbTV platform, in Spain the three biggest broadcasters have come together to form LoveTV, which is purposefully built entirely on HbbTV. In the UK there is FreeView, which is not yet working properly, and in Germany ProSiebenSat1 is merging with Eurosport and Maxdom. In France, it's again a collaboration between the three biggest operators. But it's all at the beginning.
You're not afraid of Netflix yet?
Foreign services are largely built on subscription (SVOD), which makes sense for larger markets with huge Netflix penetration. France, for example, has a 70% SVOD market share. In the UK, Amazon has some 14 million households with Netflix. In Germany, these two players have 50% of the market. By making the market bigger, it makes sense to go into paid services. In the future, it would make sense to launch something like that in the Czech Republic, but we're not there yet. I'd probably channel it more into video archive with advertising (AVOD) type services to build as much reach on that platform as quickly as possible. Unlike in more developed countries, we have the advantage that the penetration of paid services here is quite low. Netflix doesn't show numbers in small countries, but from the indications coming to us, the Czech Republic is the worst off in terms of market penetration for Netflix in Europe. A lot of factors are to blame for that - language barrier, willingness to pay and so on.
So how to fight the big four GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon)?
The big internet players have enormous power. It's a clash of cultures. The goal of commercial television everywhere is to generate profit. But these players are riding the wave of price of their shares, and for them it's more dependent on the story and market penetration than profit. So there is a complex battle between those who can spend an awful lot and those who want to make an awful lot. Related to this is European legislation that requires VOD services to offer 30 per cent European content. So in the Benelux, Germany or France, Netflix and Amazon are sucking creatives, writers, dramaturgs, actors out of the market. They are making it harder for the traditional players. Netflix's entry into the market has also substantially increased the cost of acquiring shows. And it's doubling every year. All of which puts pressure on the traditional players. In that fight, we're left with brand, popularity, relationship with the audience, tradition - and our own creation. You can see in our paid archive that that's what's most interesting anyway. So if we continue to develop our own work, maintain the quality and not sell it to these players at the same time, and ideally bring together, for example, the three biggest broadcasters on one platform, it can make sense.
What is your relationship with YouTube? On the one hand you have the official channel for talent competitions where you're spinning millions of views, on the other hand there are whole shows on there for free.
YouTube's more of an annoyance. For talent shows, we have to have a channel because of the license. The licensor requires it, so you can't get rid of it there. We've made a couple of attempts to create a set of channels for Prima and its shows, but it just doesn't work. It doesn't help in any way. YouTube is primarily hurting us. There is a lot of stolen content on it, including content that we can't even buy ourselves. We're trying to delete it, but it's not easy. Content ID technology doesn't work as well as they say it does, and it still needs quite a lot of synergy from the team in the medium to which the content belongs. So I employ extra people to protect the content, at an extra cost, and it still doesn't succeed completely.
So you probably welcome the new European Copyright Directive.
If it works, yes. It will probably take some time be effective, but you have other platforms besides YouTube, you have dozens or hundreds of small players in every country that come and go. They steal and aggregate your content, even offer it for money, put it on mobile apps. Tracking down the owner of these apps and getting them to stop is a never-ending process. Quite a few European countries wanted exemptions for small players, because the content filtering requirements could be liquidating for them. YouTube may have the biggest viewership, but then there are these little ants who are not affected by the directive, and you have to deal with it all the same.
Source: lupa.cz
