Content Discovery a Major Consumer 'Pain Point,' Say Parks Panelists

An overabundance of content is a strength and a curse of the streaming TV market, said panelists on a Parks Associates Future of Video virtual webinar Thursday. “You have to connect consumers to the content they want," said Kamran Lotfi, Gracenote vice president-product management, citing data saying 46% of consumers say it’s hard to find content they want to watch.

For hardware makers, streaming is a “zero sum game” due to the volume of video content available and myriad ways consumers can view it. Smart TVs are currently the most important streaming device for the industry, they’re in 60% of broadband households, and they’re the preferred method for watching over-the-top video, said Parks Research Director Paul Erickson. Samsung leads with the largest installed base of smart TVs; LG, Roku and Vizio round out the top four, which own 79% of the market.

Smart TV makers are in an advantageous position to own the streaming customer “because they’re closest to the glass,” Lotfi said. It’s also the simplest way to watch TV; consumers don’t have to install apps or buy an additional box or dongle when they bring a smart TV home. But they’re still struggling with the content discovery process. Gracenote believes the solution is a mix of algorithms and metadata.

Super-aggregation platforms that combine traditional pay-TV and streaming services in one place are helpful to consumers, as are aggregators that help consumers find content they want to watch, whether it’s a subscription VOD service or ad-supported (AVOD), Lofti said. But discovery is more difficult because of the volume of content available. Consumers have thousands of titles to choose from. They don’t care whether it’s linear, SVOD or AVOD: “They just want to watch it whenever they want to watch it,” he said.

Lotfi compared the choices available to the challenges of e-commerce. Shoppers used to go into a store and choose from 10 pairs of shoes. Online, hundreds or a thousand pairs are available, and shoppers need a funnel to narrow down the ones that will appeal to them. Reviews, descriptions and previews help, he said. For streaming video, “there’s definitely an opportunity for a smart TV at the user experience level to fix this problem,” he said.

Gracenote launched personalized imagery to help with filtering content for viewers, Lotfi said. In the days of DVDs and videotapes, a movie’s genre was set in stone by media packaging, limiting its reach to that genre. It’s possible now to merchandise a title in multiple ways that reflect the different aspects of a movie. He gave the example of The Last of the Mohicans, which had artwork of Daniel Day-Lewis carrying a musket and hatchet on the DVD case. “But anyone who’s seen that movie would realize there’s a very big love component to that story,” Lotfi said, something that wouldn’t be conveyed from the poster art. Gracenote has seen an 11% increase in time spent and lift on titles when rich metadata and IDs were included in search algorithms for content, he said.

Fandango’s Rotten Tomatoes is working with smart TV makers on “collapsing what you want to watch” directly to watching it through links from free fan-based channels with suggested content to linked services, said Mark Young, Fandango, NBCU senior vice president-global strategy and business development. That means viewers don’t have to go outside a movie trailer or interview on a free channel but can be “deep-linked” immediately to the movie they want to watch, he said.

When TiVo launched Stream 4K, it focused on bringing a unified content experience to consumers in a single view with recommendations based on the viewer profile, said Fariba Zamaniyan, vice president-advanced media and advertising. “There’s still work to do to understand the personalization component,” she said, to ensure the tie-in of scheduled programming and app-based programming is available as a recommendation. Different components of content may fit better with certain profiles than with others, she said, and that “pain point” drives a lot of churn.

Quality also affects churn, said Zamaniyan, and consumers’ perception of quality for SVOD content is significantly higher than that of AVOD. When watching free AVOD programming, viewers tend to watch snippets “and are not really engaged throughout an entire program” whether it’s 30- or 60-minutes long, she said. She cited Roku as one free, ad-supported-channel at the NewFront announcements last week bringing original content to their channels to boost retention and monetization rates. “We need to raise the bar on quality,” she said, saying AVOD adoption has “a lot of room for growth.”

Bitmovin Director-Product Management James Varndell noted smart TV makers are growing rapidly and generating more revenue from the operating system than from the hardware. That could set up future tension between the TV OS and the developers whose apps run on the TV over aggregation, he said. TV makers and app developers need to work together to solve the challenge of whether delivery will be through the TV OS or dedicated apps, he said. “It’s very clear from our perspective” that app developers and TV makers work together to deliver “the highest quality playback,” which also includes HDR, 4K, 60 fps frame rate, the latest codecs, and the “best, most integrated [user interface] with all the different interaction” modes including gesture and voice control, he said.

Testing is a challenge for developers, Varndell said, because of the multiple smart TVs on the market dating back to 2016. He referenced the need for collaboration at the technology and user experience levels. If smart TV makers and app developers can work together, “that’s going to help the stickiness of streaming services,” he said.

Parks’ Erickson said SVOD growth is slowing and the growth in streaming over the next few years depends on AVOD for “democratizing access” to people who can’t afford premium services. "It’s a really great opportunity for the market to reach into even more households,” Erickson said.