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Video: The Challenges of Monetizing Premium TV Content Online

Panelists from Fox Networks, MediaRadar, and AT&T Entertainment discuss the challenges premium content providers face in developing reliable and effective monetization strategies as they find themselves increasingly delivering their content over OTT, mobile, and online media beyond the familiar confines of linear broadcast TV.

Learn more about OTT monetization at Streaming Media West.

Read the transcript of this clip:

Charles Napier: I would like now to turn it over to the panel, and so you can hear from the industry experts how are they tackling this shift of consumer viewing patterns to sponsorship and making money to pay for premium content.

Meredith Brace: Working at a linear television company, and selling television content online, you have a couple challenges. The good news is that consumers are there, to those stats. I think we have a third of our audience now watching our shows in what we call digital non-linear environments, so that's everything from a desktop to a tablet to a mobile to a Roku to a Sony PlayStation to a set-top box VOD, so lots of different platforms. The challenge for us has been what you alluded to: One is the tolerance for consumers in those environments. They do not want the same ad load that they see on TV. They're used to in on-demand environments pay, whether it's the Netflix of the world and Amazon, they're used to paying for content, so ad-supported is tough.

The other challenge we have is on the business side of the transactional side in terms of advertisers and agencies, quite honestly, not really snapping to that shift. It's much slower in terms of where the dollars are following.

Jen Wilga: We're definitely seeing this. Many of our clients, like Fox, are being faced with the same thing, so we know that the 30-second spot primarily right now is being done by linear TV platforms, but there is definitely a push, particularly in the digital space to do 15-second ad spots. In fact, we see a 41% increase year over year in advertisers really embracing this shorter format, so we definitely see a trend for that. Any advertising, for example, you see in YouTube, there's a lot of push for those bumper ads, those six-second ads on either side, and we continue to see brands really want to be associated with this, because the last thing an advertiser wants is for you to skip that ad. They want you to see the entire content, so we see that trend a lot.

The other one is absolutely a push towards native, because native is that content where consumers are actively engaged in really interacting with that advertiser. There's been several studies that we've seen. One is saying that a consumer is 53% more engaged with that brand, and actually reading the content through to its completion.

Since you talked about multiple devices, people are consuming a lot of this content on their mobile device, and when it comes down to native, that consumer is four times more likely to click through the ad, to click through that native ad, so I think reducing the amount of content and really having strong content will only help you bridge that gap and have a better relationship with the consumer.

Tony Goncalves: As you see 60% of our mobile traffic being video, and you go consume longform video on a mobile device, and you're met with multiple ad pods, that same 30-second spot times six, how do we collectively, as an industry, expect the engagement of those consumers to be sustained on a device with that level of interruption when it's the complete opposite of a lean-back television experience?

We're no longer in a world where you can create one spot and have it just broadly distributed. Platforms are different, devices are different, screen sizes are different, engagement metrics are different. You can do things with a mobile device you can't do with a television, and we should be taking advantage of those, dropping ad loads down to a point where they're reasonable, increasing the entertainment value of the advertising and the consumer value prop of the advertising itself, and engaging that consumer in a much more holistic way in a data-driven, much more targeted fashion.

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