| Textual Relationships |
| Friday, 28 February 2003 | |
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Revolution Interactive Television Report, March 2003 - TV broadcasters are using SMS as a short cut to effective interactivity and to engage audiences with their shows. On the same January night that Blind Date introduced live viewer SMS voting, Cilla Black announced she was quitting the show. Whether or not our Cilla was unhappy with viewers voting for contestant one, two or three with a text message, there is no doubt the way TV engages its audience is changing. As the industry waits for more people to get comfortable with red-button technology, SMS has nudged forward as a way for broadcasters to interact with audiences. And MMS, which adds sound and picture messages to the equation, is making further impact on an industry that thrives on audio and visual content.SMS notification started the ball rolling, letting broadcasters update viewers about their favourite shows even when they weren't in front of the TV. Then broadcasters realised they could use the mobile channel to interact with an audience during shows, with voting and competitions. All of which has led up to the entire format of a channel being based on SMS, as is the case with Txt Me TV. With the floodgates opened by SMS voting on Big Brother: The Rivals in 2002, no flagship reality TV show now seems complete without an SMS element. Miss World, in a three-year deal with service provider Flytxt and Regenerator, hosted what it claims was the first global text vote at the final, held in London on 7 December 2002. SMS messages from 94 countries contributed half of the total votes in deciding the winner. SMS has proven appeal and commercial viability. Big Brother 3 generated more than 13 million text messages - 10.3 million at premium rate - and created 2m Euro (£1.3m) in revenue for O2, while a vetran of SMS interactivity, MTV's Video Clash generates more than 40,000 messages an hour. Chris Short, Creative Director for Interactive Media at production giant Endemol, the company behind Big Brother, says: "Since the first Big Brother in 2000, Endemol has developed few TV shows that are not based around or intergrated with SMS." So far it is largely used as a a voting mechanic, but that is changing. "We are doing a pilot for a game show that lets its viewers play the game using SMS alongside the on-screen players. SMS will be a major source of interactivity on all TV formats as it will take a while for iTV to gain the same level of penetration as mobile phones, which will also become more developed," he adds. SMS has become attractive for broadcasters seeking alternative revenue streams from linear advertising for several reasons. The mobile phone has far greater penetration than a satellite or cable set-top box, for one. "The penetration rates of mobile and set-top boxes is about 80 per cent, according to Oftel, and 35 per cent respectively, creating a large gap between the sizes of audience that can be reached," says Stephen van Rooyen, director of media services at marketing communications company Broadsystem, which has worked on SMS TV projects including ITV's Record of the Year. SMS TV doesn't require additional hardware of the involvment of Sky, ntl or Telewest, which can involve long and expensive application development lead times: participants can be billed individually, rather than as a household; and it's a way for broadcasters to generate revenues through reverse billing. But will it overtake or eradicate the need for red-button technology? For Sky, which has introduced SMS interactivity across most of its Sky Active series, red-button technology is here to stay, but SMS is a welcome alternative. "Introducing SMS interactivity is less a technology-led decision and more about giving consumers choice. We are looking at a number of ways to allow viewers to interact with programmes via SMS," says Miles Pearce, head of communications at Sky Interactive. John Curtis, chief executive of Red Fig, a company that develops what it calls 'participation TV' services for clients including BBC and Granada, agrees. "Consumers will choose the device through which they want to interact. One person could be sitting in the armchair with the remote control while someone else uses a mobile to send an SMS," he says. But Eran Drukman, vice-president of sales and marketing at Comverse TVGate, interactive TV messaging division of software company Comverse, believes the remote control will win out. "With a remote control, you are inside the TV experience, flipping channels, which is more likely to generate a reaction," he explains. "When more TV operators let viewers send SMS via remote control, people will prefer interacting using that route." Sky Active's portal already allows users to send and receive text messages using their remote control. "We added a return path in September and have seen a major uplift in usage," says Pearce. "It lets viewers converse with each other via their remote control. Where there is red-button, SMS and premium-rate telephony options, red-button is the most popular means of interaction, but it works side by side with SMS," he adds. One drawback associated with SMS TV is capacity. SMS enabled programmes tend to go out at peak times and viewers want results quickly, which means heavy traffic over a short period of time. Messages can get lost or not picked up in time. According to van Rooyen, the technology needs to improve. "It is very simplistic; there is no room for error, and if you don't get the syntax exactly right, your vote will be lost or not counted. In some cases, service providers just plainly get it wrong, as seemed to happen at the end of Popstars: The Rivals, when confirmation vote messages carried a different name to the performer the viewer thought they had voted for," he says. But as demand for SMS TV services grows among broadcasters and viewers alike, technology firms are launching products that can make their lives easier. Relationship marketing company Whoosh, for example, launched a product called Real Time Messaging Service at the end of 2002, which allows media owners more than 3.5 million text or picture messages an hour. "As the novelty value of interacting with the medium starts to wear off, consumers are demanding that the promotions and communications run by programmers be more immediate, fast paced and timely," says David Bainbridge, client services director at Whoosh. "We can give live formats the ability to process millions of votes or messages during the show without the fear of log-jamming of in-bound messages". "For pre-recorded formats, SMS mechanics embeded into the show can allow the winner to be announced at the end of the programme. For quiz shows, there's the opportunity for viewers at home to play along in real time, and there's also the potential for picture messaging to be used in live programmes." Bainbridge adds that the service will let advertisers run a competition in an ad spot, with the winners notified in the next slot to run - ensuring an audience for the next ad break. The percentage of the screen needed and disclaimers required, however, can make SMS promotions during a show unattractive to broadcasters and viewers. "A red button may appear in the top corner of the screen and sit there passively but the same is not true in the case of SMS, which even compared with premium-rate phone lines need considerable promotion and explanation," says van Rooyen. But according to Ashley Smith, senior research analyst at digital media research firm Vandusseldorp & Partners, everyone is pulling together to develop SMS TV services. "The application developers first approached broadcasters with SMS TV proposals, while the mobile operators were not proactive at all, but have since realised that they need more revenue form data services and are therefore more proactive in forging partnerships with television shows," he says. Jane Crossley, mobile development manager at Granada interactive, which worked with Flytxt to turn Blind Date interactive, agrees. "In 2000 we were thinking of ways to develop interaction between SMS and TV, but the operators threw their hands up, telling us that we'd melt the network," she says. "It was only once all the networks began to offer premium-rate services on a common short code that we saw a take-up of services. Some operators feel they have their own mass audiences - in some cases even larger than broadcasters' audiences - and don't necessarily need to seek more out." Smith believes the third-party SMS application providers may be squeezed out of the chain as SMS interaction becomes the norm and broadcasters and operators take the process in-house. O2 has already set up an in-house SMS TV division, which is run by Hugh Griffiths, the company's head of portal and content. "Mobile networks are responding to the demands made by programme-makers and application developers by investing in SMS infrastructure, he says. To date, it has been the mobile operators that have gained the lion's share of the spoils. Each message either sent or received costs the viewer between 10p and £1.50, depending on the service. Mobile operators take up to half the proceeds, broadcasters receive about one-quarter and solution providers get about 15 per cent, with the rest taken up by taxes. "The networks make a considerable return on providing network access," says van Rooyen. "The incremental effort required for any campaign is zero or near-zero, while the tariff sheets, particularly in comparison with the premium-rate fixed line industry, are farcical. Moreover, payments and payment terms are an industry embarrassment, he adds. Crossley agrees. "SMS does not compare well with telephony, for which we get about 14p or 15p from a 25p phone vote. We get significantly less from a text vote and I believe there is potential for greater co-operation between media owners, mobile operators and service providers, she says. According to Nigel Walley, managing director of digital-media consultancy Decipher, there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to revenue split, which tends to be decided on a deal by deal negotiation. "The TV companies are inexperienced at negotiating these sort of agreements and mobile networks have done very well, but that is changing as the TV companies realise the value of what they have, he says. But as Griffiths points out, the mobile networks have made a heavy investment in technology, have access to the audience, carry the data and can offer an existing micropayment system, whereby customers pay for premium SMS services via their mobile phone bill, and this puts them in the driving seat when it comes to deals. "Big Brother and Pop Rivals wouldn't have been possible without our investment, he says. "The current revenue model is not inhibiting development, but ensuring improvements in the speed and performance of SMS TV interaction. So far, SMS interactivity has primarily been limited to voting applications and targeted at a young audience. However, broadcasters targeting a different audience are beginning to use SMS - Channel 5, for example, aimed at a wider audience of 16- to 34-year-old ABC1s with a campaign to promote its Movie Bonanza Tuesday night programming. Once they had opted in, viewers received weekly SMS and email reminders with the time and title of the night's film. At the end of each film, viewers were invited to take part in a competition by answering a text message question related to the film they were watching; one winner received £1,000. "Teenagers are no longer the fastest-growing group of texters: it is now the 20- and 30-somethings, says Carsten Boers, vice- president of sales and marketing at Flytxt. Indeed, as performance improves and TV companies incorporate SMS more closely into programme formats, it may become more than a voting or chatting mechanism and could let viewers dictate the outcome of soap operas, for example. Comverse TVGate predicts that SMS will be used in conjunction with chat shows such as Jerry Springer, where viewers could 'chat' during the show about what the participants should do with their lives. "The idea of allowing viewers to interact with TV content is to generate emotions from the audience, and that can happen in drama, reality show voting or for chat around a particular programme, says Drukman. But SMS shouldn't be tagged onto every show just because it can, warns Endemol's Short. "I think that in five years' time, lots of people might wish they had drawn the line some time before. We must not forget that one job of TV is to tell a conventional narrative story, and this is a major element of TV programming. Only a minority of TV shows are suited to interaction; our job is to develop them to capitalise on it, he says. One of Endemol's latest projects is a show for Channel 4 called The People's Book of Records, a surreal version of the Guinness Book of Records. A typical challenge is how close to a horse contestants can get a Jilly Cooper novel before it notices them. "We want to trigger an audience to send in photos of themselves using MMS attempting the record being shown on the TV or suggesting new records, says Short. MMS allows broadcasters to capture images and sounds that interactive TV doesn't, because iTV images are isolated to one room in the house. With MMS, viewers are able to take pictures from outside the living room and send it to TV stations for broadcast. But everybody is waiting for MMS penetration to reach the level SMS has before this really takes off. Vodafone, which launched its Vodafone live! picture messaging handsets last year, claims that 380,000 people owned one by January, with 90,000 in the UK; by March, it expected to have sold a million. With MMS set to add a visual element to mobile messaging, chat and particularly dating-oriented chat, such as The Dating Channel, will benefit. "MMS is not something we have implemented, but it is something we are considering for The Dating Channel, as it's the obvious next step for us to enable viewers to communicate and date, says Richard Jukes, managing director of Euro Digital Corporation, the broadcast division of Telecom One, which airs The Dating Channel on Sky digital "Eventually, we hope to enable all members to send and receive unique avatars via MMS - this is exciting, as it offers viewers an even greater level of personalised communication. However, as MMS is still essentially a niche technology, we do not currently feel it is vital to the overall business strategy. Until it is more widespread, we will continue to focus on SMS, as this is what our viewers tell us they want", he adds. But it might not be long before viewers are sending their own mini-films to TV stations, and as Java-enabled phones become more widespread, downloading of games will become more popular and could be tied in with characters in TV shows. "The ability for us to extend our programming beyond the duration of the show by inviting viewers to interact using SMS and MMS and play Java-based games based on the programmes is enormously valuable", says Granada's Crossley. So, as picture messages and branded games become an integral part of TV formats, television will extend further into audience's lives. "Viewers will become totally submerged into the format and will have access to it at all times", adds Crossley. "The programme itself will become ubiquitous across a day, regardless of where the viewer is or what they are doing. We have already seen this to some degree with Big Brother, where full-time access is available via the internet, and we believe that this will extend to the mobile", she says. A passer-by with a camera phone, for example, could provide breaking pictures in a news broadcast; variety shows could include home audiences in particular segments; and viewers could send in photos of their most embarrassing moments or holiday snaps to a holiday programme. Although MMS is not yet mass market, Short claims it is great PR to attach to a programme. "We tell mobile phone manufacturers and operators that we will heavily promote MMS to develop it into a mass-market device, at which point we can monetise it, he explains. "We want to develop critical mass, so we have to drive it by pushing it wherever we can." Txt Me TV lets viewers chat on-screen via text messages Launched in December 2001 on Sky digital channel 686, Txt Me TV was created to let viewers text messages to be shown on the TV screen. "It was an interesting opportunity to allow people to chat using SMS as the return path, without the complications of interactive TV, says Boaz Tal, managing director of Txt Me TV, a joint venture between mobile services firm Amplefuture and Sirius Retail Television. For the first six months, viewers had to call premium-rate numbers to gain credit or pay via the channel's web site (www.txtmetv.com) before they could begin sending SMS messages. By late-2002, the company had access to a short code across all networks using an O2 platform, and SMS interaction became a reality. "Some 90 per cent of the screen is created by the audience and, unlike iTV, it is uninterrupted by menus and boxes, says Tal. The company employs Text Jockeys (TJs) to monitor the chat and keep it flowing. And these TJs now have their own shows and fans. "The TJs have become virtual TV personalities and the show has almost evolved into a chat between the audience and us, says Tal. Viewers can chat privately using SMS at a cost of 50p a text, using screen names that do not reveal private mobile numbers. The show receives from 6,000 to 7,000 SMS messages a day. "The payout to the mobile operators is ridiculous; we get less than half the total after tax. Some operators are waiting to see whether the market picks up and when it does, I hope they will be more flexible," says Tal. Having run a competition giving out camera phones, the show is sending out mobile reporters in their local areas, asking them to send back mini-news reports. "We are adapting to every new thing the operators introduce. SMS is just text, but pictures, graphics and video are what make TV. "Txt Me TV will evolve with the mobile industry, so we can collect interactions from viewers and put them on air. "Our limitation is the imagination; once people are familiar with it, they will have the freedom to express themselves on TV in text, sound and video." Best Inventions offered SMS vote For the second series of the BBC's Best Inventions, a sister show to Tomorrow's World that aired for six weeks from 13 November 2002 and showcased three amateur inventors, the producers introduced live SMS voting. "The first series was pre-recorded and relied on studio audience votes to pick a winning invention, explains Catherine Mabb, producer of Best Inventions. "So many viewers said they wished they could have voted, so introducing SMS voting was a natural progression." Using a service provided by Red Fig, each show began with a 30-second pitch from three inventors. The home audience was asked to send an SMS to a short code, at 12p a text, to vote for the invention they thought deserved to win. The show continued with a three-minute film from each inventor and a historical film about existing inventions, and after 20 minutes, the SMS vote was closed. Red Fig collated the results and fed them to the BBC production team. The winner was announced at the end of the show, and won a prize that Mabb says "money can't buy", such as a meeting with a major retailer. More responses were received via SMS than via conventional telephony - 60 per cent to 40 per cent - indicating that SMS was the medium of choice and most readily available method of participation for viewers. © Copyright Flytxt Ltd 2006. Unauthorized use of any content constitutes a material breach. |
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