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Communications Future of TV Snap

The BBC’s commercial arm outlines challenges in protecting its media value as new media threat looms

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By Jessica Goodfellow, Media Reporter

May 25, 2016 | 5 min read

In a world where content is becoming increasingly commoditised, the BBC’s commercial arm is trying to protect its own media value by understanding alternative ways to sell its shows beyond the views they generate.

Future of TV

This is one of the key challenges for the corporation’s commercial arm as it looks to secure its share of media budgets that are shifting from all types of mediums to where people are spending their time. From driving discovery to creating and satisfying demand, the corporation is locked in a state of introspection to understand how TV can still be relevant in the mobile age.

While it’s registered initial successes on YouTube – it gathers over 120m views a month across all of its brands on the platform – Facebook is not so simple. For the BBC, organic reach on Facebook is under one per cent. To compound the challenge, understanding how people are watching its content in this way is hard for the broadcaster to gauge at the moment. Indeed, while the competition to appear in Facebook’s news feed is fierce, metrics are becoming harder to define.

This was the view of head of BBC Worldwide's Digital Studios, Alex Ayling, who told The Drum at its Future of TV event this week that while Facebook is an important video platform, its metrics are overinflated. One view on Facebook is defined by three seconds of viewing in mute on autoplay, while a view on Youtube is 30 seconds.

“While likes and subscribers show me an affinity to a brand – they are helpful but are not doing anything for me, since our organic reach is under one per cent on posts. My favourite metric is watch-time – this is really hard to cheat and is what powers the YouTube algorithm. But with watch-time there is no unified metric yet. There is no unified time that advertisers are looking for, what is the thing we are going to start selling that is not views?” Ayling said.

Getting quantifiable data from new media is not limited to Facebook; many brands have voiced the same issues with Snapchat. Ayling confirmed this, but added while the quantity of data you get from Snapchat is minimal, the quality is high. Since its move to digital-only, BBC Three has been building Snapchat development into its shows, with more shows across the BBC portfolio promised.

It would seem the next natural move would be for the BBC is to join the Discover platform, following in the footsteps of other media owners like MTV and CNN. Ayling said he did indeed consider the service ‘but then saw the price tag’. While this may not phase the likes of Vice, Buzzfeed and Vox who are built to inhabit such spaces, the BBC’s resources are not so wide and consequently has to be more frugal with where and how it makes its media bets.

“If you can go all in you can reap the rewards but it is a high resource spot. You have to create eight pieces of specific Snapchat content a day that is not on any other platform.” Ayling further clarified his reasons for staying away from Snapchat Discover.

Despite their expertise on how to produce quality content, traditional broadcasters like the BBC have struggled to commercialise their experience amid the rise of the likes of Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime.

The only thing left for traditional broadcasters with a vast backlog of experience is to push quality content. It is true that anyone can become a storyteller but not everyone is good at it, Ayling said: “The BBC is really good at telling stories – that is why we need to focus on - everything we know about telling stories just on a different medium.”

Yet while streaming services are breaking down the definition of what is TV, they are also big spenders. In fact, Netflix was BBC Worldwide’s biggest customer last year, according to Ayling. Netflix also has the ability to stream content across of all its hubs day-in-day, cutting down a show’s release windows, dubbed by Ayling the ‘piracy window’.

“In an ideal world Netflix would have all the same shows in its archive and release them all at the same time across the world” Ayling concluded.

Communications Future of TV Snap

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