Data-Sharing a Friction Point Among Content Providers, Parks Event Told

A battle about data sharing is brewing between content owners and distributors and platforms they’re on, said Nick Cicero, Conviva vice president-strategy, on a Parks Associates webinar last week. Cicero noted an uptick in media companies building their own devices, citing Comcast’s Sky Glass TVs unveiled this month by its Sky Group division in London (see 2110070026), plus Amazon’s Fire TV and Roku TV platforms.

Sky billed its platform as the first to “fully integrate content from local public service broadcasters and global streaming giants like Netflix and Disney+.” Subscribers will be charged a fee similar to the set-top box or mobile phone model.

“You have this battle between the TV platform, the device manufacturer and then the application layer on top of it,” Cicero said, “and figuring out what slices are going to own a bunch of the stack.” He contrasted Disney, which owns a large body of content with set makers LG and Vizio that own the operating system and device layers.

Parks analyst Paul Erickson said: “If you own the metal, you can control everything upwards from there.” Consumers would prefer data access to be equal across services and devices so they can have the most personalized experience possible, he said.

Data sharing “is definitely going to be an area of potential friction,” Cicero said, because the quality of the curation inside a service's app allows it to “control a lot more of the experience. When it goes into some place that I don’t control,” such as free ad-supported TV channels, “it makes it a little more difficult, and it’s more of a business discussion,” he said.

That will affect the consumer search and discovery process, which can be better personalized for the users based on the amount of data known about their viewing habits. Data is key to personalization and recommendations that will be increasingly important to streaming services as they look to retain subscribers. A specific show was the leading factor influencing the decision to subscribe to an over-the-top video service in Q1 for 34% of survey respondents, said Parks. Without a contract locking them in, it's easy for them to cancel a service if there's no compelling content that makes them want to stay. Learning granular viewing habits and serving shows that could also appeal to subscribers is key to retention, said Erickson.

“Hopefully, in the future we’ll see more data-sharing,” Cicero said, but currently, parties’ ownership of data is a sticking point. “As a publisher, I’m building the ways to do recommendations, the ways to personalize those things,” he said: “Do I want to give that much data back to a platform to pass through to their recommendation system?”

A challenge in the free, ad-supported streaming TV category is that a service has “one slice in somebody else’s app,” said Cicero, so “I only have a limited amount of data to know what’s working and what’s not working. If I had more data like what I could get with my own app, I could actually make meaningful recommendations.”

Near term, sharing might involve some basic viewing behavior data that’s less granular than the full data set a publisher owns, Cicero said. “Everybody is going to try and improve search and discoverability, and there are multiple layers at which people are going to solve this problem.” Ultimately, Cicero believes the industry will realize there needs to be more data sharing to allow streaming services and the OS layer to get value out of the chain, too. Platforms are “going to have to allow the content to be discovered and not put too many hooks into the process along the way to make sure there’s reasons that people want to buy their devices.”

Competition is fierce for streaming video subscribers, and it’s expected to grow as stay-at-home effects of the COVID-19 pandemic lessen, said Erickson. In Q1, 82% of U.S. broadband households had an OTT video service; 46% subscribed to four or more services. Some 65% of consumers watch OTT video on Amazon Fire TV, Roku or Samsung’s Tizen smart TV platforms.

Cicero cited a “fragmented” streaming world, with more choices than ever in the connected TV space. That's compounded by competition for eye share in social spaces. He called social platforms the “X factor” that, borne out of the pandemic, led to an explosion of video content of different types. There’s a high correlation between social media usage and media consumption, he said. Social media’s reach has to be considered in content companies' strategies for video content discovery due to its scale, Cicero said, noting TikTok passed YouTube on total video consumption hours last year with its “extremely advanced content and personalization algorithm.”