These deals reinforce something I tried to make clear in an earlier post about the company’s plans: namely, if you don’t like television then you’re probably not going to be very happy with the future of Twitter. The deal with BBC America — which is owned by BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the agency, and carries such popular shows as Doctor Who and Top Gear in the U.S. — will presumably see Twitter run clips from those shows inside its users’ streams, in much the same way it did with ESPN during March Madness.

.@Twitter and @BBCAmerica, home of #DoctorWho & #TopGear, ink deal to offer 1st in-Tweet branded video synced to entertainment TV series—
BBC AMERICA (@BBCAMERICA) April 18, 2013

TV shows inside your Twitter stream

There have been other such one-off deals — as well as arrangements like the one with the Weather Channel, which will bring weather clips into Twitter’s expanded tweets — but the BBC America partnership seems to be the first one that involves an entire channel and potentially all of their shows, and it could easily be the prototype for further such deals. But will users react positively or negatively to all of this real-time video showing up in their Twitter streams?

Meanwhile, Twitter is also launching a somewhat different project with the Comedy Central channel that illustrates just how much the company wants to bring video as an experience inside the stream: the network is launching what it calls a five-day “comedy festival,” but all of the content will appear within Twitter, and most of it will be either created or distributed via Twitter’s recent video acquisition, Vine — which is designed for video clips of six seconds or less.

According to a report in the New York Times about the arrangement, a number of comedians — including legends like Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner — will be posting video snippets of comedy routines as well as jokes using the hashtag #ComedyFest. On Tuesday, comedian Steve Agee will reportedly host a “Vine Dining” party as part of the festival, in which he and others will tell stories in six-second video clips that will be hosted and distributed by the Twitter network.

Video plus brands equals ad dollars

As my colleague Eliza Kern noted in her post last week about the rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, these moves are just part of Twitter’s ongoing plans to not only host TV and video content on the network, but to monetize it (or help its creators monetize it) as well. In addition to Vine, one of the recent acquisitions that could help Twitter do that is Bluefin Labs, which specializes in tracking the real-time data about who is watching what show.

That kind of information — along with the data from Twitter’s partnership with Nielsen, announced last year — would in turn help Twitter appeal to advertisers who are looking for as much targeting information as they can get. And that appeal could be paying off already: according to a report from the Financial Times on Monday, Twitter has signed a major multi-year deal worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” with Starcom MediaVest Group, a large ad-buying firm that represents clients like Walmart and Coca-Cola.

Moves like these — and the launch of Twitter Music last week — reinforce just how much the company has evolved away from its original nature as a short-messaging service that gave you only 140 characters or less, and could be consumed quickly. Now, it is becoming a lot more like a broadcast network, or at least a willing handmaiden for broadcast networks, as CEO Dick Costolo predicted in a speech last year. But is that what users really want from Twitter?

This post was updated on April 24 to note that BBC America is a unit of BBC Worldwide and not a joint venture with Discovery Channel as was originally stated.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Dmitris K and Eva Blue

All of that and more is contained in the latest State of the Media report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, which was released on Monday morning (Note: We will be discussing many of these issues and more at our paidContent conference in New York on April 17). There’s a lot to take in, but here are what I believe to be some of the key takeaways:

The Bad News:

• Cutbacks continue, and consumers are leaving: Close to one-third of U.S. adults say they have stopped using a news outlet because of dissatisfaction over the content — in other words, because they weren’t getting the news they wanted, or the news they expected to get. Survey respondents mentioned both fewer stories in general and less complete reporting, and while it’s impossible to know whether this phenomenon is related to the repeated rounds of cutbacks and job losses, it seems likely.



• No one cares about the industry’s financial problems: One interesting aspect of Pew’s research is that only a small number of respondents were even aware of the financial woes of the media industry — and even worse, those who were the most aware of the situation were also the most likely to have stopped using a traditional news outlet. Are some readers choosing to desert what they see as a sinking journalistic ship? It certainly looks that way.
• The disruption of advertising is accelerating: Although digital advertising rose by 17 percent last year, that was not nearly enough to make up for the ongoing decline of print advertising, Pew said. In 2012, approximately $16 in print revenue was lost for every $1 in digital revenue — an even worse ratio than the already dismal 10-to-1 relationship that existed in 2011. And much of the growth in digital is benefiting Google and Facebook.
• It’s not just newspapers any more: The Pew research shows that local television is also being decimated by the disruption in both viewership and advertising revenue — to the point where viewers have started to notice the difference. Whether because of cutbacks or a desire to appeal to more viewers, Pew says that local TV news is also focusing more on sports and entertainment, and less time on crime and political coverage.

The Good News:

• Demand for news is growing, not shrinking: Although it may be coming at the expense of some traditional players, there is clearly a large and growing appetite for news, since the top news sites saw traffic increase by 7 percent in 2012, according to Pew. And the impact of social media seems to be clearly positive, in the sense that those who have heard about news from friends and family through such channels show a stronger interest in finding out more.
• Some outlets are having success with subscriptions: In the wake of the success of the New York Times paywall, many newspapers have erected their own subscription walls, and this is generating some reader-provided revenue that has helped to stanch the bleeding for some publishers (although even for the NYT and the Financial Times, this has not filled the gap entirely).
• The sources are going direct: This is probably one of the most contentious aspects of the disruption in media — namely, the fact that social tools such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms produce a “democratization of distribution” that allows everyone from celebrities to politicians, and even brands and companies themselves, to reach an audience directly. Is that good or bad for journalism? The debate on that question continues to rage.
• New forms of advertising are emerging: This is another contentious topic in media — that is, the rise of what some choose to call “native advertising,” or sponsored content, and in some cases “brand journalism.” To detractors such as political blogger Andrew Sullivan it is ethically dubious, and to many traditional journalists such as former NYT executive editor Bill Keller it is a “slippery slope,” but new media entities like BuzzFeed and even The Atlantic are using it to some success.

Is the glass half full or half empty?

As with any overview of the media business, there will be those who see this picture as a glass half-empty, and those who see it as a glass half-full — and perhaps a growing number who have completely lost interest in the glass because they are already getting their water elsewhere. As Emily Bell of Columbia and her fellow authors Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson pointed out in their recent report on “Post-Industrial Journalism” and author Clay Christensen noted in a recent interview at Harvard, upheaval is the order of the day in the media business and will likely be so for some time.

Shirky said in an essay in 2011 that we as a society actually need the media business to be chaotic, as unpleasant as that may be, because we literally don’t have any idea what the future of the industry will look like. Even now there are new entities being born, and new models being applied — like the Forbes “BrandVoice” model, or Sullivan’s direct-to-readers model — that could either be the savior of the industry or a dangerous distraction. If you like bumpy rides with an uncertain ending, the media industry is definitely the place for you.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock / Scorpp

The app lets people “watch CBS shows on the best screen available for them,” CBS Interactive president Jim Lanzone said in a statement, “with a host of extra features that give them a richer viewing experience whenever and wherever they tune in.” Those extra features, which will be integrated “by the start of the Fall TV season,” will include “integrated social feeds; live events that allow fans to engage directly with talent; and second-screen experiences synched to the broadcast with additional content for select shows.”

Shows available through the app include NCIS, The Good Wife, Survivor, CSI and How I Met Your Mother, among others. But full episodes of some well-known shows, like The Big Bang Theory and The Mentalist, are missing from the app even though they’re available through CBS’s website. And the app does not provide a way to catch up on past seasons, or even all of a current season: only select episodes are available.

Other networks are also experimenting with offering streaming through their apps. NBC allows streaming of some shows through its iOS app, for example, while Fox only lets users stream full episodes through its “Fox Now” app if they authenticate their subscription to a TV provider.

The New York Times has written about one recent example of user-generated content gone bad: namely, a video clip of a baby pig “rescuing” a hapless baby goat who is trapped in the pond at a petting zoo. Within hours of the clip being posted to YouTube last fall and subsequently shared on Reddit, it had appeared on The Today Show, NBC’s Nightly News, Good Morning America and dozens of other channels — and why not? It was incredibly cute, and had a feel-good message of the kind that morning shows in particular enjoy.

Of course, the video turned out to be a clip from a new TV show, which the creators manufactured and then uploaded as a kind of viral-marketing ploy. Not only did the baby pig not “rescue” the baby goat, but the producers of the show had to spend hours building an underwater track to even get the pig anywhere near the animal — and in the end they had to use a trained pig, after the one they were originally planning to use showed no intention of going into the pond.

Does it matter whether these clips are real?

As the NYT piece notes, when NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams introduced the video clip, he said he “felt duty bound to share this” with the audience, and added that he didn’t know whether it was real or not. Is that enough of a disclaimer to absolve a media outlet of responsibility for figuring out whether something can be verified or not? Many would argue that it is not. Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute compared it to “a form of malpractice” for journalists (McBride has more on that in a blog post about the incident at Poynter).

@mathewi No. Even though it may seem trivial because it's a pig video, it's embarrassing and adds to distrust of the media.

—
Liz Heron (@lheron) February 27, 2013

Obviously, part of what shows like Good Morning America do is pure entertainment — in other words, not journalism by any stretch. But clips like the baby goat rescue show up on programs like The Nightly News as well, and the hosts rarely say anything about whether a clip is real or not. In some cases, these videos come right after a news report about something serious. How are audiences to know when something is “just entertainment” and therefore hasn’t been checked?

In another recent incident, a video purporting to show a golden eagle snatching a small child from a park went “viral” on the social web and showed up on a number of media outlets. It too turned out to be fake — the creation of some hard-working students in a computer-generated imagery course at a school in Montreal. The students deliberately chose something that seemed almost believable, based on “urban legends” of such incidents in the past.

We need to be careful what we amplify

Interestingly enough, the clip was debunked within hours of being uploaded, by another young programmer with some expertise in computer-generated imaging (as well as by other outlets such as Gawker, which pointed out obvious signs others could have noticed). But as with many corrections in a digital age, it took longer for the truth to propagate than it did the original video — and many of the outlets that shared the original didn’t bother to update their audience with the facts.

Om wrote recently about how one of the key responsibilities of journalists in this new age of “democratized distribution” of information is to pay attention to what they choose to amplify and what they don’t, and incidents like the baby goat video bring that home with a vengeance.

If all a media outlet is doing is sharing the latest video from Reddit or a tweet from a celebrity, how is that adding anything meaningful to what viewers can get elsewhere? It isn’t. And if traditional media continue to imitate their online competitors like BuzzFeed or Reddit without adding anything of value, then they will likely find that audiences are happy to go to the original source of that content rather than relying on the TV news to find it for them.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Donskarpo

The Nielsen news was first reported on Wednesday by The Hollywood Reporter, which said that by September 2013 “Nielsen expects to have in place new hardware and software tools in the nearly 23,000 TV homes it samples.” Nielsen confirmed the news on Thursday, with Nielsen SVP Pat McDonough telling the New York Times that the company’s definition of “television household” will now include “those households who are receiving broadband Internet and putting it onto a television set.” According to the AP:

“This will add roughly 160 homes to Nielsen’s current sample of 23,000 houses nationwide with meters monitoring viewing habits.

More significantly, Nielsen will return to its sample to find homes that have cable or broadcast, but also separate TV sets hooked up through broadband. This will add an estimated 2,000 more broadband sets, significantly increasing the sample size.”

The company is also working on ways to track viewing on smartphones and tablets.

Separately, Billboard has begun including official YouTube music video views (from the U.S.) in its rankings. “All official videos on YouTube, including user-generated clips that utilize authorized audio, will now factor into how a song’s popularity is determined,” YouTube said on its blog. Billboard’s charts have included digital download and streaming data, tracked by Nielsen, since last year.

Ever since the days of black-and-white TV, the broadcast industry has been a big-reach numbers game – and despite the hype and allure of the ‘net, it’s still by far the big gun in an overwhelming majority of national media plans today. To wit: Broadcast and cable TV combined lead all advertising categories, with revenues hitting $70 billion this election year, while total market for mobile video and display advertising won’t even hit $7 billion until around 2015. This is a testament not only to traditional TV’s reach, but also to its track record in stimulating sales. Marketers know that there’s simply no substitute yet for the impact of a good TV spot and its ability to convince customers to buy their products.

When ported to a big screen, OTT, Hulu and YouTube can have the same big-set experience; however, none of these players have created the type of audience traction that broadcast delivers. A hot online video can certainly grab several million eyeballs in a short period, but typically only for short-burst viewing and nowhere as predictably as TV, which delivers millions of viewers every night, for hours at a time, 365 nights a year.

Of course, TV’s preeminence as the big-reach vehicle still makes it a comparatively expensive medium for advertisers. This is in part because of the inefficiencies of the marketing buy. For the most part, TV is still bought on the basis of age and gender – two very broad demographics – so advertisers inevitably end up paying for viewers who will never buy their product. For instance, while women ages 18 to 34 may be a great target demographic for selling cat food, there are far more women without cats than women with them.

There have been some advances in media accountability throughout the years. For example, TV programmers finally signed up for commercial ratings a few years ago, charging marketers only for the audiences that actually watched the commercial break, raising the bar and the scrutiny about audience guarantees. (What a shocking move, right?) But there is still a lot room for improvement. In fact, the data now exists to let marketers know that if he or she spends X dollars on the right TV programs –which is to say ones that deliver buyers not just bodies – they can expect almost precisely Y product sales.

Nielsen’s IAG and Precision Demand (disclosure: Precision Demand is a Rho Ventures portfolio company) are making real advancements in the underlying analytics for this. While IAG measures viewer engagement via online commercial recall surveys, Precision Demand uses product-purchasing data to correlate with settop box and viewer profiling information from marketers to predict reliable ROI on TV media dollars spent with remarkable accuracy. For example, in one case study one client was able to calculate sales within 5 percent for all channels and within 1 percent for a big box store by using such data. Thus the same behavioral attributes used to guide internet media buys allow marketers to target key purchasers and eliminate waste from their media spend.

So while the TV industry cocktail conversation continues to revolve around how video is migrating to the Web, there’s another important storyline that needs to be aired: that the ability to strengthen traditional TV buys is not only possible, but readily available now. Agencies must start managing media spends to develop specific sales forecasts for items or services that their clients are marketing, while ensuring that they deliver the target users at the most efficient price. The agency/media equation should not stop with the delivery of tonnage audiences. It needs to take the next step. And once they transition to using a scientific media buy, using the most recent tools available, the result will be a win-win for marketers and TV.

Doug McCormick is a partner at Rho Ventures. Previously, Doug was chairman and CEO of iVillage Inc. and CEO of Lifetime Television Networks.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

The Pew report notes that the number of Americans who regularly go online for news has remained almost exactly the same since it did a similar study in 2010: about 46 percent said that they get news online at least three days a week. But the number of people who said they regularly get news on a cellphone, tablet or other mobile device has ballooned from 9 percent to 15 percent– and the number who said that they regularly see news on social networks has gone from 7 percent to 20 percent.Pew notes that these two trends also go together, in the sense that users who have smartphones (about 48 percent of those surveyed) were far more likely to see news on social networking sites. And those who have iPads, Kindles and other tablets — who made up about 21 percent of those surveyed — are also much more likely to get their news from social networks.

According to the survey, more than 30 percent of the respondents between 18 and 39 years of age said they regularly saw news or news headlines on social networks, compared with about 20 percent two years ago. One interesting note in the report was the tiny proportion of users who said that they got news from Twitter, which is seen by many as a news-driven network — only 3 percent of general internet users said they got news from Twitter, and less than 30 percent of regular Twitter users said they got news there.

It wasn’t immediately clear from the study whether the users who were surveyed got all of their news by reading headlines from social networks or other sources, or whether they followed links from Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn to newspaper or other websites to get more information. Most publishers say those networks have become an increasingly powerful source of traffic, but some readers may get enough of the headlines or news items they need simply by reading posts on Twitter or Facebook — in the same way that earlier users may have gotten their fill of news from headlines on the radio or on television.

One thing is also obvious from the Pew report: namely, that newspaper readership continues its long, slow decline — and radio has also been following the same general pattern. The study says that the number of Americans who read a newspaper the day before the survey was taken fell to 23 percent, down only a few percentage points from 2010′s survey, but down by more than half from the number who said the same a decade earlier.And while TV news consumption has held up much better, it has been in decline over the past few years as well, and the Pew report notes that the future looks like more of the same given how few younger users say they use it for news: only 34 percent of those under 30 said they do this regularly, almost exactly the same proportion that said they got their news primarily from social networks.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly

The latest peddler is Danish public broadcaster TV2, whose Beep tech site says it has learned that Spotify is negotiating to distribute HBO’s upcoming HBO Nordic over-the-top pay-TV service across Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark.

Spotify’s PR folks are being strategically coy, telling paidContent: “There’s always a lot of speculation surrounding Spotify but it’s something we never comment on.” HBO Nordic’s Danish reps also gave us a no-comment. Curious.

The notion that Spotify could branch out from music has always tended to pay more debt to fantasy (and, in fairness, to Spotify’s disruptive qualities) than to fact. Right now, Spotify’s application has no apparent way to deliver video.

But could there be truth this time around?

Besides the partners’ refusal to debunk the report, what is true is that Spotify has considerable clout across the region. At home in Sweden, the service has become music labels’ biggest revenue source; almost 90 percent of music revenue comes from streaming.

Spotify’s billing relationships with several million users throughout the region could prove attractive to HBO as it looks to export its programming on a legal subscription basis.

In fact, that billing relationship alone could be appealing enough for HBO – despite Spotify’s inability to offer video, Spotify customers could nevertheless use HBO Nordic on other platforms and devices. If HBO rode Spotify for bundling in this way, it would be highly ironic, since Spotify itself is desperately seeking bundled-billing partners.

If it works at home, then Spotify could try exporting the TV idea elsewhere, just like it has with music. That would broaden Spotify’s base considerably to becoming a multi-media subscription entertainment company – but it would also put it on a collision course with some far more powerful rivals, and put it at risk of focus creep.

Spotify offering HBO Nordic could also put it at odds with its most important regional partner…

Scandinavian telco TeliaSonera – which has a Spotify bundling deal – already plans to offer HBO Nordic itself to its 900,000 TV customers and on the web for €10 per month.

Spotify gets a quarter of its Premium customers in Sweden from TeliaSonera, the deal with which runs across TV app, mobile and broadband service.

Recently-announced HBO Nordic, launching in mid-October, will offer HBO shows like Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones and True Blood outside of pay-TV subscription but for internet subscription or on-demand transactions, right after U.S. premiere.

Netflix prefaced HBO’s announcement of HBO Nordic by announcing it will also go live in Scandinavia, marking the first time HBO and Netflix squarely will compete for the same customers on the internet.

HBO Nordic will also come pre-installed on Samsung devices.

Comcast product management executive director Mike Berkley became Spotify’s product VP in April.

“Excited to see HBO join us in offering standalone streaming service in Scandinavia…what about the USA? We thought the first match-up would be in Albania.”

HBO had announced earlier Thursday that it was going to bring its programming to Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland this fall. The network will be available via pay TV subscriptions, but viewers will also be able to subscribe to a stand-alone Internet-only plan – something that HBO has long ruled out for U.S. consumers. HBO Nordic will cost less than €10 (about $12.50).

This will mark the first time HBO and Netflix squarely compete for the same customers on the Internet: Netflix had announced earlier this month that it was going to bring its service to Scandinavia before the end of the year.

New shows include seasons of Friday Night Lights, Parks and Recreation, Parenthood, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica and others.

“We look forward to further expanding NBCU’s content offering available to Prime subscribers in the near future,” said NBCU’s Frances Manfredi.

Counting the new shows, Prime Instant Video now offers 22,000 movies and TV episodes free to Prime members, who pay $79 a year for free two-day shipping and other perks. As of April, Netflix had over 60,000 streaming titles (but it still doesn’t have the third season of “Parenthood” — and now Amazon does).