Customer experience expectations in new media world

Media & Entertainment industry is undergoing a major transformation due to changing consumer preferences and availability of many key technologies. These changes are making dramatic impact on the industry – multiplatform consumption, numerous controls of consumption time & formats, and consumer created content are few of them. This is resulting in companies to adopt new business models and improve the efficiencies of their current business processes. It has become important to track & leverage rapidly changing consumer preferences and offer relevant choices, easily and fast – retaining the quality of entertainment and brand value of the company.

Some of the key trends:

• Linear viewership will fall by 30% by 2011
• 66million GBP was UK Video on Demand revenue for 2006. Growth forecast: 50% pa
• Explosion of broadband and mobile connections in UK: 58% by 2007 and 70% 2011. A growth of 8% per annum
• UK Online revenues are higher than print media and TV ad revenues together
• Google UK revenues(£327million) over took that of ITV this quarter(£317million)
• UK Advertisers to increase their online spend by over 12% in 2008
• Rise of social networking – MySpace users count has crossed 10million and youtube take 120million views per day

In the new world of two-way media, the above trends open up a new set revenue streams. Knowing & retaining customers, and delivering personalised content & services are crucial. Customer experience management has become crucial component than ever before. Painfully, the consumer expectation of content is rooted in ‘free of cost’. Adopting right business model and distribution strategy has become critical. For example, when US Television company ABC made Desperate House Wives available for free through their websites & iTunes after a sluggish pay-per-view download trail; the online viewership increased by 16 times.

Specific to the broadcast industry, the UK has been early adopter – by delivering digital media on multi-platforms like mobile TV, broadband TV and IPTV. BBC released its iPlayer in July 2007, Channel 4 for has its 4oD (VoD) service. Both services offer access to archives and latest content. On other hand, ITV has adopted within-website-application to deliver its content and experience. The new form of entertainers on the rise includes British Telecom, Virgin Media, Babelgum, BlinkBox and Joost.

The bottom line, that is no more a subject of speculation at conferences – consumer behaviour along with technology has completely transformed the broadcasting industry. However the key is not which technology is adopted or how it’s adopted; the key is still the content with exclusive rights and effective leverage of brand value at online & onscreen.

Consumer would expect same trusted quality content, seamless delivery and entertainment experience on IP devices as it is on the telly. This is important that along with these expectations – newly found expectation likes ease of use, search, interactivity, and receiving only the relevant content or advertisements.