Los Angeles — Consumers are confused by the concept of TV Everywhere, according to a panel of experts at The Cable Show 2014 who collaborated with the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing on a study to examine the concept.
“I think as an industry we’ve had a unified vision for what TV Everywhere can be and what we want it to be, and everyone’s really excited about it,” said Tracy Powell, VP of distribution marketing, A+E Networks. “We talk about it a lot. But we haven’t had a unified voice.”
Powell was joined on stage by Vito Forlenza, director, TV Everywhere content and product strategy, Comcast Cable; Mark Gathen, senior director, video product management, Cox Communications; David McNaughton, senior VP, marketing, Mediacom Communications Corporation; Greg Weinstein, VP of audience development, Univision Communications; and moderator Angie Britt, VP, advanced products at CTAM, to present the findings of their research.
The confusion they found among consumers stems primarily from the ambiguous nature of the term TV Everywhere and poor user login interfaces.
To combat those issues, the study published a logo, which features the letters tve and a series of connected boxes, that providers can tailor to their needs.
In addition, CTAM published seven first-phase recommendations for the industry to follow with regard to customer TV Everywhere sign in.
They are:
• Sign-in language and placement
• Customer support for sign-in failure
• Service provider selection
• ID linking & social media sign-in
• Sign-in iconography
• Cobranding between service and content providers
• Time to live: Verification duration & single sign-in
CTAM’s research is ongoing and Britt said findings for additional phases will be released in the future.
In the meantime, though, she said that the industry as a whole needs to work together.
“It is going to take all of us to be able to be successful with the consumer in leveraging the guidelines and the recommendations and the positioning and the category naming and what not,” said Britt.
For detailed explanations of CTAM’s findings, go to: www.ctamtve.com.
