@Napte Mobile++: The Future Of Video Content According To Cyriac Roeding, CBS

(c) MocoNews

Cyriac Roeding, VP of wireless for CBS Corporation, gave a very good keynote about what he thinks will happen to the content industry over the next ten years, and therefore probably an indication of what CBS will attempt to do. He doesn’t see the big brand productions as being in danger from the new forms of media, but rather strengthened by them. He agreed that the long tail will be very important, but argued that big content and big communities are here to stay because “people like to have friends”, and big sports events and big brand content are what people like to talk about when they get together—especially with someone new. So a great deal of the talk in online communities will be about the big broadcast shows that have traditionally dominated the media. He said the biggest winners will blend professional content with user generated content so seamlessly that you won’t be able to tell which is which. He also said that all TVs will be bidirectional because they’ll be connected to the internet, and mobile phones will become the way to respond to any medium. He also insisted that people will only respond to significant choices that affect the shows, rather than fake choices that don’t really matter.

Another thing he sees as supporting the return of traditional platforms is something he referred to as “VoD Zapping”, which effectively combines the ability to view shows when you want (rather than at a fixed time) combined with recommendations from your friends direct on your TV, as well as recommendations based on your previous viewing history. So you turn on your TV and a notice comes up saying “Wendy recommends The Sopranos” and you can press a button to start the show immediately. “Users will create and install their own content communities, and cellphones will be personal remote controls,” he said. The incredible choice that will be available to consumers raises the bar for content creators, because with the increased number of platforms that need to be catered for and the larger amount of content available it’s more difficult to stick out of the mass, and anything that doesn’t break will go into the long-tail. On the plus side it will be far easier for something in the long-tail of high quality to become a blockbuster.

Roeding referred to providing content for the increasing number of media as platforming. Rather than just extending a brand to different platforms, this is thinking about the different platforms from the start of the content creation process, and developing content specifically for those platforms from the beginning. People use content with different technologies throughout the day, from radio to mobile to TV to computers, and the content has to be developed for each device but give the same overall message. The different platforms should be regarded as catering for different situations the consumer is in rather than different technologies. “The cellphone is not a small TV screen, this is a medium in its own right and it has it’s own rules,” he said. Later he described mobile entertainment as the intersection of entertainment, personalization and peer-to-peer communication, but complained that most mobile content is only entertainment—not personalized or peer-to-peer.

In regards to advertising he said: “360 degree advertising used to mean being present on all platforms… now it’s about platforming advertising messages.” The advertising needs to follow the content, and has to be developed in a very different fashion for the different platforms but still give the same message.

Technorati tags: mobile TV