For the past few years, the only metric that seems to matter when scoring the streaming wars is subscriber count. That number seems universally acknowledged to be the alpha and omega of streaming service stats.

But, as my friend Rich Greenfield pointed out this week, in a world where all streaming services have some sort of ad-supported option, engagement, or, more accurately, time spent is an equally, if not more, valuable metric.

That’s because many people seem to forget that while ads run on linear TV whether or not anyone sees them, they’re only served on streaming services if someone is there to watch them.

That means that the more time viewers spend on a service, the more ads that service is able to serve to them and the more revenue it stands to make.

By focusing on originals, many of which are released on a weekly basis, SVOD services have unfortunately trained viewers to see streaming services as a specialized viewing experience, a place to go and watch the latest episode (or two) of the most-buzzed-about original series before logging off and moving on to something else.

This is a fine outcome if you are not selling advertising, provided you can keep your subscriber numbers steady. But if you are, and your ad-supported viewers are only spending an hour or two on the platform, that is not a great outcome by any stretch of the imagination.

There is, fortunately, a way to ameliorate this. And that is to borrow a page from the FASTs and roll out linear channels for library content.

This is not a novel idea: Paramount Plus and Peacock are already doing it, and as I wrote a few weeks back, it’s something that many people TVREV spoke with for our upcoming Special Report of the FASTs mentioned as being quite likely.

For ad-supported services, linear channels are a boon because they generally equate to more time spent on a service. Why? Because humans are lazy and if a new show pops on just as the old one was ending, it’s likely we’ll just stay there on the couch watching what comes next. There’s no action to take, no decision to make.

It’s why the SVOD services already all have the next episode of a binge-able series pop up just seconds after the previous one has ended. And why YouTube autoplays video, too.

For streaming services, both FAST and SVOD, linear channels can also be more than just a way to keep viewers watching longer — they can, if curated correctly, become a destination, which is another way to ensure that viewers are spending more time on the platform watching all those ads.

This solves one of the problems that many SVOD services have, which is that there is a wide gap between their originals, which are fresh and timely, and their library shows, which can feel both overwhelming in terms of volume and dated in terms of relevance, making it easy for viewers to avoid them. (The fact that they rarely show up in the algorithm’s recommendations doesn’t help either.)

This latter point is particularly true for services like Netflix that are not associated with major media companies — Hulu, Peacock and Paramount Plus, for example, all have current season episodes of their parent company’s network’s shows, which gives viewers something current to watch when they’re not watching originals.

There’s another reason why many people are betting that more SVOD services will roll out linear channels to help with advertising performance: they can hold bigger ad loads and the shows, mostly network TV series, are cut with ad breaks in mind.

This, it turns out, may prove very valuable given the rumors floating around that the rights to many of those streaming originals do not include the right to sell advertising against them. This means the SVOD services in question will have a stronger need than ever to drive viewers to their library shows. 

The Future Value of Time Spent

While rolling out linear channels can provide SVOD services with some help on the “time spent” front, there are other factors at work that will also limit time spent.

SVOD services face increased competition not just from each other, but from other media outlets like Spotify (podcasts in particular), TikTok and gaming. Time spent on those alternate entertainment options is time not spent on TV, and it is likely that TV will never recover the stranglehold it held on consumer attention for many years.

While this was not a problem when subscriber numbers were the key metric — people will gladly pay $10 per month for a service they only use weekly — it will become an issue as time spent becomes a key metric.

It will be interesting to see if Wall Street starts to recognize the value of time spent, given their fixation on subscriber numbers and over-the-top reaction to small blips in either direction.

That said, those services that can figure out the right blend of programming and the right cadence with which to release that programming in order to keep ad-supported viewers on their platforms for increasingly longer periods of time will be the ones who wind up advancing to the next level of the Streaming Wars, while those who fail to adequately engage their ad-supported viewers will get left behind. ■

Comcast said Wednesday that streaming video from apps like HBO Max, Paramount Plus and others accounted for 71% of all downstream traffic on its Xfinity X1,  Flex and Xfinity Stream platforms in 2020, an increase of 70% over the prior year.

In a blog post May 5, Comcast said streaming saw the largest viewing gains on Xfinity platforms in 2020, fueled by the launch of more than 70 streaming services during the year, including HBO Max, its own Peacock and CBS All Access/Paramount Plus. According to Comcast, OTT viewing rose 73% year-over-year on X1 and Flex. 

In addition, 78% of its X1 customers accessed OTT apps each month, up from 68% in the prior year. Of those subscribers, nearly 80% are using more than two apps each month. 

While Comcast is just one company, it is the largest multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) in the country with 19.4 million video subscribers and 31 million broadband customers. As Comcast and other operators shift the focus of the business toward broadband, streaming and direct-to-consumer services have become increasingly important, evidenced by its own moves into the sector.

Comcast launched Peacock nationally on July 15, and has grown to about 42 million signups at last count. Others DTC services like Disney Plus and HBO Max and Paramount Plus, have 94.9 million, 44.2 million customers, respectively.  

Engagement is also growing. Comcast said that across its entire entertainment portfolio, including X1, Flex and Stream, customers are watching about three hours more per week than they were before the pandemic started. 

Also Read: The Less Discussed Data Points of TVs New Reality 

Viewing was split pretty evenly between ad-supported content and ad-free content, with ad-supported apps like Flex (free to broadband-only customers) and Peacock Premium (free to X1 subscribers). Comcast said that ad-supported content accounted for more than 50% of viewing on Flex, with Peacock, NBCUniversal's Xumo, ViacomCBS' Pluto and Fox's Tubi among the other most-viewed apps on the platform.  

Also Read: Time Spent Streaming Grew 44% in 4th Quarter: Conviva 

Still, Comcast insisted that doesn’t mean that linear TV is dead, especially for sports. Despite the spike in streaming viewing, Comcast said that it saw an increase in traditional linear TV viewing during the year. And they added that data is showing that streaming viewers “value the lean-back experience” of linear. As an example, Comcast pointed to the live guide on Flex, which brings in traditional channels from Peacock, Xumo and Pluto into an integrated guide, is the second most-viewed feature on Flex behind the home screen.

Also Read: JD Power: New Streaming Services Chip Away at Netflix Dominance 

“As we look forward to the rest of 2021, we’re going to continue evolving these three important pillars of our entertainment platforms to meet our customers where they are with the content and features they desire,” Comcast said in the blog post.

In a year that saw traditional TV ratings plunge for once-reliable audience grabbers like the Super Bowl and the Oscars, advertisers and programmers are looking for technologies and methods that drive engagement, Verizon Communications’ chief media officer John Nitti said at the B+C/Multichannel News virtual Advanced Advertising Summit Tuesday. 

“What we're looking for is, how do you maintain mindshare, maintain the ability to connect with prospects and customers, but measure that right,” Nitti told conference moderator, B+C/Multichannel News business editor Jon Lafayette. “Measurement is the key aspect in all this, because clearly things are changing. ... It's not just about blasting out impressions. It's about the conversion and the engagement that you're getting with the customer.”

Also Read: Spring TV Events Offer a Look at Future of Television 

Technology, like 5G, also plays an important role in driving engagement. Nitti pointed to The Super Bowl and The Oscars, each which featured innovative camera angles and information that are in part geared to keep viewers focused.  

During the last Super Bowl, for example, Verizon’s stadium app offered unique camera angles during the game. At big non-sporting events the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Verizon provided 360-degree camera angles that put viewers in the middle of the action.  

“To make it be like you could be there [at the parade] was the only way that you could be there, the ultimate demonstration of what we can bring to life and how you change those experiences,” Nitti said. “Then you fast-forward most recently to this weekend, and the Oscars. Last year we did a 5G portal from Times Square to the red carpet that was in LA. This year we brought that 5G portal to life for any viewer that wanted to get on the red carpet while the celebrities [were] coming in, [to] get behind the stage after they received an award and watch their trophy be engraved or being in the press room.”

That helps drive mindshare and time spent with programming, he continued, adding that in some cases, viewers spent as long as nine minutes in some of those portals. 

“And when you're conveying a complex message ... the more mindshare you have with the customer, the more engagement you have, the better,” Nitti said.

Also Read: Verizon Agrees To Spend More With Black-Owned Media

The pandemic, changes in viewing habits and how programming and advertising is delivered all played havoc with the upfronts last year. Nitti isn’t expecting any dramatic swings back to the old ways of doing business. 

“You'll continue to see the merger of the upfront and new fronts into one time frame,” Nitti said. “If money is going to move, money is going to move. Marketers have become more and more comfortable with digital streaming platforms, whether that be YouTube Hulu, Disney Plus, etc., as platforms of choice. So you're going to look at your video budgets holistically, then you should look at them holistically to see where the opportunity is.”

Nitti said that last year the uncertain situation with the pandemic forced advertisers and programmers to be more flexible, that ability to make last minute changes to budgets and move dollars around inventory is still needed.

“I think flexibility last year was driven by uncertainty,  marketers being uncertain, where things were going, when they were going to be able to open stores, if they were going to be able to open stores, etc.,” Nitti said. “Why should you not be able to make optimizations and change? It's like we're all driving business and ultimately, if I'm a seller if I can prove that I'm driving business outcomes, my budget increases. As a retailer at heart, we need to be looking at our numbers daily, we need to drive those optimizations and have flexibility.”

Twitter has released research showing that it can help marketers better reach viewers when they’re watching live events, particularly sports, on TV.

Data from comScore showed Twitter is the only social network that gets a lift in unique visitors when sports is on the air, Twitter said. During the 2017 Super Bowl, for example, Twitter usage was 19% higher than average while the other social platforms combined were down.

Related: Four Trends in Play for Cable Sports

Twitter commissioned a study from Neuro-Insight, which uses biometrics to gauge the impact the social platform has on sports fans; the company came up with three main findings.

The first is that Twitter makes live sports events more engaging and memorable. When Twitter was used as a second screen to see what others are saying in real time, engagement was up 31% and memorability was up 35% compared with engagement and memorability among fans using TV alone. When a sports event was streamed on Twitter, engagement rose 60% and memorability 59% compared with TV-only viewing.

The second is that when the sports event is more engaging, the advertising in it works harder. Engagement with Twitter ads were up 42% during games on TV, and memorability rose 52%.

Finally, TV ads were also more effective when viewers were also using Twitter during sportscasts. Engagement with TV ads was up 18% and memorability rose 13%.

Related: CES 2018: As World Turns Digital, TV Ads Remain Powerful

“Through our past work, we know that generally the presence of the second screen, specifically with Twitter, helps TV, and we saw a similar effect for live events in this study,” said Pranav Yadav, CEO of Neuro-Insight US. “This means that by having Twitter as a part of the marketing mix, brands can not only reach a bigger audience, they’re actually giving a boost to their original investment in TV. It’s a win-win.”

In Hollywood, superheroes are everywhere, in films, TV shows, books, graphic novels and much else. They're justly celebrated by media companies, because they're powerful enough to carry big profits to studios and networks.

Online there are superheroes, too: They're the loyal audiences who visit their favorite sites multiple times per week or binge on a news topic, sport, team, celebrity, breaking news or show. These are the fans who consume a wildly outsized portion of a site's content, keep returning for more and promote the site to friends, family and social media. In the rush to build a huge online audience, though, too many publishers forget to build through their superusers, their core of loyal, engaged and enthusiastic visitors.

Those superusers should be the focus of your business. They're the rock on which a large audience is built, but more importantly, they're the audience your advertisers want most. They're your most valuable asset, your defining demographic, your most persuasive ambassadors and your biggest consumers. Never forget the 80-20 rule: 20 percent of your audience will consume 80 percent of your content.

ALSO: 'Discoverability,' Social Media at Heart of TV Evolution

So how will you engage those 20 percent? This core tenet of customer-relationship management – one that has long undergirded retail and e-commerce and was really advanced by Amazon - holds that it is cheaper and more efficient to sell more things to fewer customers than to acquire new ones. By understanding your core audience, and tailoring and presenting product and service offerings to their particular needs, you can get the most return on your content.

By personalizing the content experience, publishers are finding that viewers will stay longer and watch more, clicking along through the initial video, a first recommendation and then at least one more. In most cases, these users comprise 5 to 10 percent of the audience but can provide as much as 40 percent of total views. Publishers can monetize these videos with pre-roll that these loyal superusers actually will watch to completion, significantly increasing revenue from existing users.

You can build programming around their interests. You may have, for example, 10 videos of Adele or Beyoncé from Grammy night. Maybe your sports or news site has 10 videos of March Madness upsets. But of those 10 videos, one will outperform the rest. And getting that video to more of your core fans will drive them to watch additional content, and bring them closer to the rest of your brand and products.

This is a very different approach from trying to carve a place for your content on social-media platforms. Publishers are understandably tempted by the giant audiences there but truth is, you can't just "go where the audience is" without a strategy to make money from it.

Instead of focusing so heavily on social media, I'd suggest publishers keep focused on optimizing the experience on their own sites. Leverage personalization across your owned-and-operated sites to engage and retain audiences. Then use social platforms to entice and draw new audiences back to your sites. This isn't a zero-sum game. To go back to the retail analogy, use social to market, advertise and acquire and your O&O to sell.

Some publishers clearly get it. Buzzfeed, long a king of data-driven content, even built a data-management platform called Lookr so its entire staff could easily access and analyze information it collects on its content, so they can make more content fans will like.

Any publisher can take the same approach, leveraging data to build your audience with more appetizing content. But it's not the only way to superserve your superusers, even if you don't have the resources to build your own Lookr.

What do the superusers want more than anything? More of your content. How do you give it to them? Using tools that identify those superusers, understand their specific preferences, and steer more content to them that they’re likely to want to watch or read.

This highly targeted, highly personalized approach to serving your superusers can yield significant improvements in engagement and lift. This approach also can create additional superusers, because now they're also seeing more content that appeals to them.

The result: visitors stay longer. They see more of your content. They're happier, because they've seen more content that they enjoy. They also end up seeing more advertising, but because it’s targeted and focused, they're more likely to be happier about the ads, too.

Your superusers want more than just your stories, videos and photos, of course. The next step, having provided them with more of that great content, is to move beyond your site to create live events, merchandise, podcasts and other experiences that also can be targeted to your superusers. The result: wins for everyone.

Remember, give your superusers what they want, as much and as fast as they want, and watch them supercharge your site. Let them be the superheroes they are, and you’ll fly high, too.

About the Author
Field Garthwaite is CEO and co-founder of IRIS.TV, which provides video personalization and targeting tools for digital media sites.

Total audience measurement — a term that comprises viewing for TVs, tablets, PCs and phones — is finally making its debut in the next several months, with offerings from both Nielsen and the newly combined comScore-Rentrak aimed at tracking viewership across multiple devices and platforms.

While the new measurement products are expected to provide some much-needed insight into changing viewing habits, they also raise a deeper question. As viewers sit in the family room with their big-screen TVs blazing, tapping text messages on their phones and checking websites and social-media platforms on their laptops and tablets, what attracts their attention most?

The TV industry is awash in viewing data at the moment, but the real challenge for programmers — and advertisers — is to find the right data to mine from viewers.

Total audience measurement, once just a pipe dream for many advertisers and networks, is, to an extent, already here. Nielsen made its Total Audience Measurement product available to select clients in a beta-testing mode earlier this year, and is expected to make it widely available by late Q2 or early Q3.

Using a mixture of panel data, set-top and online information, Nielsen’s TAM product is expected to become a widely accepted extension of its TV ratings, the de facto currency of the TV industry. The new product will offer additional insight into what has been an increasingly fragmented TV audience, tracking viewership across devices and platforms and providing advertisers, media buyers and networks with comparable data on digital, traditional TV and time-shifted TV, as well as the ability to measure ads separately from content.

ComScore, which completed its merger with set-top-box data pioneer Rentrak in January, is expected to launch its total audience product — the Total Home Panel — by the third quarter. Total Home Panel will measure the full range of connected devices: TVs, smartphones, tablets, game consoles and OTT devices, the company said.

The Total Home Panel already is in the testing phase and measuring 4,000 active devices, with 60,000 expected by summer and 300,000 by the end of the year. ComScore, a much-smaller rival to Nielsen, began sending the first batch of its cross-platform ratings data — about 15 months’ worth of information — to clients last week.

Nielsen president of global products Megan Clarken has said her company’s total audience product is a “framework,” adding the data could lead to a rethinking of the way ads are bought or sold.

One possible change Total Audience could bring, she said at the Multichannel News/B&C Advanced Advertising and Audience Measurement Summit earlier this month, could be expanding the time frame over which ads are measured from seven days to several weeks.

“Once they see that data, that on the sixth week of a dramatic series my audience has grown 38% outside that seven-day window … we’ll be able to have a different set of conversations.”

But as technology continues to move forward, accommodating for time-shifted viewing on a DVR is just the tip of the iceberg. Viewers aren’t just watching at different times, they’re watching different content on multiple devices, sometimes simultaneously. With all of those added distractions, finding a way to keep a viewer’s attention, or diverting it from something else, has become increasingly important.

While simultaneous viewing sessions can be short, they can also present opportunities to drive viewers to other sites or programs, provide information, promote brand awareness or just offer a quick commercial burst. And as the number of devices proliferate, finding out how to draw and sometimes divert a viewer’s attention become increasingly important.

COMPILING CONNECTIONS

“If you check on your router at home to check on the number of devices that are connected, it’s crazy,” comScore CEO Serge Matta said. “You don’t realize how quickly those things add up: your smart TVs, Xbox game consoles, Apple TV, smartphones, PCs, tablets, Nests, smart locks. But there is also a lot of noise.

“It’s not simply putting in the hardware, getting the data and you’re good to go,” he added. “There is a lot of edit rules, a lot of cleanup and QA [quality assurance] you have to do.”

ComScore compiles that device data on a panel basis. Participants, who are incented by com- Score, opt in to be measured.

With the Total Home Panel, comScore can gather information on up to 20 devices off a single home router, Matta said. While it is fairly easy to determine which household members are using specific devices, the “noise” enters the data set when a neighbor comes over and accesses the home WiFi for a few hours during a visit.

“The fact that we know who’s in the household and what devices they are watching, we have the ability to see the complete viewing picture of everyone at scale,” Matta said. “This concurrent viewing aspect is really important, and it only becomes more of an issue [as] more devices and … more platforms [are used] over time. That number is only going one way — it’s going up.”

Once simultaneous usage is determined, attentiveness can be measured in terms of time spent with the content or ads on each device, Nielsen senior vice president product leadership Kelly Abcarian said. “[That is] a critical metric that we’ve standardized through the delivery of our Total Audience systems,” she added. “It’s important that a media owner or advertiser know how many people were engaged with the deeper content, but also how much engagement they have and for how long.”

That attentiveness data probably will be more of a customized product, Matta said, but it will be a critical tool for some clients to have in their arsenal.

“It’s a derived methodology, but it’s extremely important for advertisers,” he said. “Are they watching an ad on TV, or are they watching on their tablet? The fact that we know it’s the same person within the same household, who is in the household, and what devices they are watching, we have the ability see the complete picture of everyone at scale.”

With Total Audience not quite out of the blocks yet, adjustments and fi ne-tuning are sure to come. “The problem is, we need to get better data to drive these strategies,” ESPN senior vice president of global research and analytics Artie Bulgrin said. “We know how many people are on our digital platform at any given time, and the same for TV. The problem is we don’t know where they are.”

SEEKING BETTER DATA

ESPN is working with comScore and Nielsen on cross-platform data, Bulgrin said. “The data are getting better, but it’s hardly enough to make a big strategic decision. However, at ESPN, we’re assuming that wherever that person is, there is an opportunity to navigate them.

“Our multiplatform approach has been a big reason why we have been able to maintain audiences where audiences across most of multichannel are declining at a faster rate,” Bulgrin added.

ESPN has been at the forefront of driving the second screen, with continuous crawls during linear programs that tell viewers where they can get more information on stats and sports news and through apps like WatchESPN, and news alerts on social media and via email that drive viewers to the linear channel.

“All of that makes the overall TV experience stickier,” Bulgrin said.

The Council for Research Excellence, an independent, Nielsen-funded group of senior-level industry researchers representing cable and broadcast networks, advertisers and others, hopes to have even more detailed data from an upcoming biometric study that will be headed by Turner Broadcasting System chief research officer Howard Shimmel and Beth Rockwood, in conjunction with Nielsen.

That study will examine whether the proliferation of multiplatform devices could affect the future definition of viewing beyond the current “watching” and “listening.” It will also seek to identify how an expanded understanding of multiplatform device use in a household may increase opportunities for capturing exposure to content.

Multiscreen viewing has helped some traditional programmers because of the nature of devices other than the TV set, Telsey Advisory Group media analyst Tom Eagan said.

“The young people — millennials and younger — they don’t fast-forward [past commercials] because they’re on another device,” Eagan said. “So, the programmer doesn’t have to worry as much. From a programming perspective, they might prefer being on the second device, because at least they are looking up once in a while.”

Looking up from the second or third device is a critical piece of the puzzle and one that programmers and advertisers are struggling with as viewership continues to fragment.

Janet Gallent, senior vice president of NBC Consumer Insights and Innovation Research, oversaw a research project on second-screen engagement as part of her role within CRE’s Media Consumption & Engagement Committee. The CRE research found that audio cues and bright colors appear to be tools that can attract a younger viewer’s attention, Gallent said, something she called the “cocktail room effect.”

In general, even when a person is engaged in a deep conversation, they can have their attention diverted by something as simple as hearing their name mentioned across a crowded room, she explained.

“We’re constantly scanning for what is relevant to us,” Gallent said. “There are certain cues that people attend to. If you’re [watching] the TV screen and [you’re] on your smartphone checking your messages, the audio has the potential to get you back. It can signal to you, ‘This is something I should be paying attention to.’ ”

ESPN has been toying with the idea of creating what it calls a “cognitive bridge” in its own labs, Bulgrin said. “In other words, are there ways to navigate people to that second screen and then back to the first screen at appropriate times. Audio can be one component of that. But it’s very early days. A lot more work needs to be done.”

Part of that additional work will come from the upcoming CRE biometric study that will use physiological data from subjects like eye tracking and facial coding to gauge attention.

Bulgrin said biometrics are another key tool for ESPN and other researchers to gather more precise data. “A lot of this can’t be measured by simply asking people,” he said. “You’re relying on recall and rationalized response. A lot of times the body can tell you a lot more than the person can at a conscious level.”

EVOLVING METRICS

In the meantime, Total Audience will continue to evolve as clients use the data and find new uses for it during the trial period before the wider launch in the fall. The potential is to change not only how clients purchase advertising and through which media, but also how they construct ads, Abcarian said.

“The insights are going to help the dynamics of the market to open up,” Abcarian said. “There is tremendous potential there. A major advertiser may choose to deliver a broad branding message across traditional TV, but there would be elements of that message that would be reinforced or reimagined across digital video.

“What Total Audience allows is the ability to understand that unduplicated reach of the audience exposure to that given advertiser’s message, even as it’s recreated or reimagined, which is a really powerful tool,” she said.