Tags containing: "live streaming"

What Twitch can teach the media about audience engagement

May 14, 2024 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Twitch – the go-to platform for gamers and live streamers – may have something to teach the media about as a news production and engagement. New research shows a generational shift in live news production, emphasizing community-driven storytelling and interactivity and real-time engagement. Amazon-owned Twitch’s popularity among young audiences challenges traditional journalism to confront the realities of how news consumption is changing.

In their paper, Recasting Twitch: Livestreaming, Platforms, and New Frontiers in Digital Journalism, researchers Maxwell Foxman, Brandon Harris, and William Clyde Partin explore Twitch as a new platform for journalists and examine how the platform influences journalistic practices. They analyze three popular Twitch channels: The Washington Post (WaPo), Hasan Piker, and Patriots’ Soapbox (PSB). The authors chose to focus on these three channels due to their popularity and distinct modes of news production thereby offering a comprehensive view of the platform’s impact on journalism.

The research highlights several themes regarding news production on Twitch: the concept of liveness, various styles and formats used, engagement with the audience, professional identity and boundaries, and the platform’s relationship with digital intermediaries.

A Twitch approach to live news and entertainment

Central to Twitch’s influence on journalism is its unique approach to “liveness.” Liveness refers to audiences routinely tuning in and interacting with creators. The platform encourages viewers to actively contribute during streams through Chat, which also becomes content that hosts react to aloud. The real-time back-and-forth entertains users.

While WaPo relied on exclusive coverage and traditional broadcast formats, Piker and PSB (which appear to no longer be on Twitch at all) integrate pre-existing content and engage directly with their audiences, fostering a sense of community and immediacy. This dynamic interaction blurs the lines between creators and consumers, redefining the traditional roles of journalists and audiences.

Media style and format

Each channel exhibits its style and format, reflecting the diversity of content on Twitch. The Washington Post’s channel (which hasn’t broadcast since May 6, 2024) took an approach that resembles traditional broadcast journalism. Piker’s is a social media-inspired mix of news and entertainment. PSB offers hyper-partisan commentary. Twitch provides a wide range of approaches to news production, which allows news brands to cater to diverse audience preferences.

Professional identity and boundaries

Each channel navigates journalistic boundaries differently. WaPo adheres closely to traditional journalism practices. However, Piker and PSB embrace their roles as ideological commentators, blurring the lines between journalism, entertainment, and political activism. This fluidity in professional identity can challenge traditional journalistic integrity and objectivity norms.

Audience engagement lessons for media

Audience interaction is central to all channels, with each streamer fostering a collaborative relationship with their viewers. Piker and PSB rely on audience contributions for content and validation, while WaPo maintains a more traditional broadcast format with limited on-air engagement. This direct interaction enhances viewer engagement and fosters a sense of community, continuing to blur the distinction between creators and consumers.

Twitch and media audience engagement

This study recognizes Twitch as a way to offer new and innovative forms of journalism that challenge traditional norms and practices. Its unique approach to “liveness,” diverse styles and formats, and dynamic interaction with audiences could impact how journalists produce news as it reflects how audiences engage with information they enjoy.

ESPN’s Esports channel (active almost daily as of May 2024) has 88.8k followers
https://www.twitch.tv/espnesports

However, while Twitch has lessons to teach legacy news organizations, it seems few have found a sustainable model on the platform. In addition to the sites included in the research, it appears that channels for Wired, Complex, Rolling Stone, and Vice have all gone dormant. In any case, this research highlights the evolving relationship between live streaming, entertainment, and news.

The popularity of Twitch (as well as other social platforms) among young audiences needs to offer more than competition for media brands. It is important that we experiment by going where the audiences are. However, it is also important that we begin to understand the reasons audiences gravitate towards these platforms to find ways to better attract and engage them.

Advertising | Industry-Research

Digital advertising insights as the market reaches attention saturation

May 3, 2017 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Digital advertising will capture 77 cents of every new ad dollar this year and will surpass TV advertising in five additional countries, reports GroupM in its annual Interaction Report. Rob Norman, global chief digital officer and author of the report, addresses the value exchange between the user and the advertiser. Norman points to new revelations in today’s advertising model, “Attention is a reward not a right. Useful advertising is a function of relevance which in turn is a function of time, place, context, cognitive targeting and creation, and actionability.”

Once again, overall daily media usage grew by nine minutes in 2016, to a total of eight hours. Mobile and its many devices drove the increase with a 14-minute increase of time online. In this report, GroupM states that the 2017 forecast appears to be approaching a point of saturation. They see this period as a time of two distinct challenges: peak advertising and peak segmentation. Peak advertising refers to a state of reduced commercial interruption and peak segmentation is the point at which the value of user data cannot be converted in value. Both of these challenges can offset advertising results, for example when inefficient allocations counterbalance detailed targeting precision.

GroupM media snapshot offers key insights on digital platforms and marketing practices. These include:

Advertising paradigm shifts

GroupM recommends that every brand have data and every brand have a data story. Without a data story, a brand lacks discovery, relevance and algorithmic referred platforms. Today there are also expectations of augmented reality and data overlays. Consumers expect brands to have a voice (which may soon be powered by artificial intelligence) to increase consumer interaction, both structured and unstructured.

Many market channels are experimenting with limited commercial interruption on a whole, or within individual programs. The thinking here is the less cluttered an environment, the higher the recall, the more an advertiser is willing to pay the premium that offsets the reduction in inventory. And further, the better the advertising, the more native to its environment, the even better and improved recall. This thinking warrants creative advertising content to be easily placed inside programming and network context.

Media options:

TV with commercials, as we know, will continue to exist. However, commercials will be more creative with skippable options.
A middle ground of mostly short form commercial content will be traded with guarantees on view duration and “sound on” consumption. GroupM’s current standard will continue to apply; human verified exposure to 100% of the video window, audio on and 50% of the ad viewed.
An entirely new creative category that values both time and attention with the opportunity scale and share.

Platform profiles

Google/YouTube/Google Preferred

Google/YouTube/Google Preferred want to change the idea of the “forced view” advertising television paradigm, which is the forced completion of a commercial. In contrast, Google’s TrueView counts viewing only after a video ad is clicked on or after completed viewing or viewing of the first 20 seconds. The video ad length has no limits, it can be longer than 30 or even 60 seconds and the advertiser only pays for the ads the consumers choose to watch.

Combining the viewership data with all of Google’s other data, provides a robust and detailed report of an opt-in view. Despite YouTube’s success, it has not achieved the watercooler moment of significant simultaneous reach. Consequently, YouTube is often used as a compliment to TV and not a replacement. Even Google Preferred, an aggregation of its highest quality content, has difficulty building scale. The impressions are often placed in questionable content causing marketers concerns.

Facebook/Facebook Video Live

Facebook’s video product is questionable as an advertising vehicle given unease with auto play and sound off. Unfortunately, the consumer’s news feed is now being populated by content that is not necessarily of interest. GroupM shares their Moat data which implies that for every 20 video ads served in the news feed, three are watched for three seconds or more and just one is watched for ten seconds or more. Facebook believes that even minimal exposure has value. However, advertisers need to factor into their own valuation of the platform’s performance to accurately reflect actual video ad consumption.

Facebook’s Live video inventory is familiar to the advertiser because the ad frame is content rather than just the user interface. These ads are initiated by the producer of the content with Facebook determining which ads are seen.

The challenge of measurement is huge with the need to identify and share who watched what, where, for how long and on what device. This is a necessary building block to assess ad and audience value.

Over-the-Top (OTT) or Connected TV (CTV)

Over-the-Top (OTT) or Connected TV (CTV) refers to “television” content delivered via streaming over the internet to a smart TV, streaming Player (such as Apple TV, Roku, Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV) or gaming console. OTT services offer consumer choice, new distribution for program and channel owners and new opportunity for advertisers. The OTT inventory is currently limited but becoming more targetable and measurable. OTT offers an opportunity to reach quality content in a brand-safe and on-demand environment.

A hybrid service combining on-demand and live linear television, called skinny bundles, has a number of strong players in the marketplace; AT&T, Turner, Google, Verizon, Hulu, CBS, Sony and Sling (Dish Network). The premise here is that consumers via their broadband connection can access a reduced channel line-up for a fraction of their original cable bill. The monetization of skinny bundles is based on subscription sales, highly targeted advertising (at a higher cost to marketers) minus the network transmission fees.

Audio on-demand and streaming

Spotify is an online on-demand music collection with the added the ability to find playlists from others, to customize your own and download music for offline listening. Spotify is generally recognized as the global market leader with 100 million users and 40 million subscribers. Pandora, on the other hand, is more about music discovery and a radio service. Pandora decodes music on hundreds of vectors and uses it to create custom “stations.” Pandora also launched an on-demand service (including offline downloads) bringing it closer Spotify’s model. Neither Pandora nor Spotify are profitable, as about 80% of their revenue is returned in royalties to artists and labels. Pandora and Spotify revenue models include subscriber fees and advertising revenue.

AOL/Verizon

The merger of AOL and Verizon offer the world’s third largest aggregation of ad impressions with scaled “channels” in news, sports and finance, and significant ad tech assets and first party data from Yahoo Mail. While it may not challenge the duopoly of Google and Facebook, it could be, if executed properly, a strong offering for advertisers.

Twitter

Twitter is a unique environment for brand video advertising and for brands to be an immediate and timely connection to consumers. While Twitter’s social significance is unquestioned, it still has not established itself as a profitable entity.

Snapchat

Snapchat has over 100 million users. It is the first of the internet mobile giants to offer a multimedia person-to-person communication experience. The Snapchat Lens is the most innovative digital ad product since the keyword and the news feed. It’s native to the platform and the ability to offer brand assets in user communication makes earned media that much more powerful.

Pinterest has approximately 150 million monthly users with approximately half residing in U.S. People use the platform to collect and share images. While often used by hobbyist, it also presents highly commercial and monetizable categories like fashion, food, design and crafts. Pinterest users “pins” (picture postings) of what they like and also learn about what they do not know much about from other user pins. This duality offers a unique advertising opportunity to reach different audience across the lower, mid and upper marketing funnel.

Google and Facebook Duopoly

The market dominance of Facebook and Google is concerning. Google operates seven platforms with more than a billion users globally: Google itself, Google Play, Gmail, Chrome, Android, YouTube, Google Maps. It also operates five of the top 10 apps. It’s data machine monetizes user information through paid search, through the Google Display Network (GDN) and through YouTube.

Facebook has more one billion people using it every day, Instagram has 600 million uses and Messenger and What’s App have another 1 billion users. Three to four of the 10 most used apps are operated by Facebook. Facebook Audience Network competes with Google’s GDN among mobile publishers. The company is video centric and this forces a dependency on content outside of their network. To date, new models and interfaces have not disrupted the duopoly or the dominance of these two players.

Conclusion

Technologies growth and advancement in both hardware and software is shifting market dynamics from the Information Age to the Intelligence Age. Today’s digital strategies must include plans to build a content destination that allows users to find, experience, share and buy and have the high probability for sharing and recommending.

Innovation | Video

The Washington Post is focused on video. Here’s why

February 8, 2017 Jan Ozer—Independent Technology Journalist

In an era when many publications are contracting, The Washington Post is expanding, particularly in the group charged with producing and hosting web videos. To understand why, we spoke with the Post’s Micah Gelman Senior Editor, Director of Editorial Video.

Tell us about the recent expansion in the video department.

We recently posted close to 30 new jobs in the video department to expand our efforts in two basic ways. First, we want to present videos with our news stories when it’s complementary to the story. Second, we’re developing content for over the top delivery, and delivery in UGC and social media sites, to position The Washington Post as a video destination.

Let’s look at the first focus. Where does video fit in for a newspaper?

The Washington Post produced six hours of coverage of the Women’s March with over 8.3 million views. (Editorial note: per Facebook statistics, the Post had over 4.1 million views for the election and inauguration, and over 8.3 million views of the Women’s March).

Video has become a core part of our mission to present readers with a full 360 view of the news; it’s complementary to the written story, not either/or. Some news is inherently visual, so we present video as part of the story. Sometimes video enables a deeper dive into the content, so we present that.

Sometimes, the story is live and we produce that as well. For example, we broadcast the recent presidential election on Facebook Live for eight and a half hours, the inauguration for about nine hours, and the Women’s March for about six hours. Each event drew millions of viewers.

Overall, we want to become a one stop shop that presents our readers with the story produced in all the formats that it should be in.

What percentage of stories do you cover directly as opposed to using footage from other sources? How will this change over the next 12 months or so?

Today, about 40% is original, and 60% is from other sources. However, even when we use third-party video, we put our own editorial package around it, adding reporting, annotations, and other elements that makes it original. Over the next 12 months, we’ll double the size of our video staff and that’s probably going to flip to 65% original content.

Though our base is in DC, we’ve sent video journalists to North Korea, China, to cover multiple terror attacks overseas, as well as covering stories all over the United States. Our readers are global and so is our video coverage. And this will expand greatly over the next few months.

Can you elaborate on your over the top strategy?

A Washington Post YouTube video discussing how quotes from 1984 are relevant in 2017, dramatically boosting sales of the book.

The next phase of growth is to position The Washington Post as a destination for video. We want to change the perception of The Washington Post as a legacy newspaper with video, to a video-first enterprise, essentially re-imagining The Washington Post as a video destination, not only on Facebook Live, YouTube and other social media sites, but also over the top via Apple TV, Roku, and Fire TV.

Editorially, what works well in an article page typically isn’t as effective as a standalone video consumed on a living room TV. So, we’re producing longer, more scripted pieces with studio quality production value. We’re adding YouTube-style personalities, and producing video to distribute not only through our own OTT apps, but through other channels as well. Again, it’s video as the destination.

How do you market OTT content?

That’s the key question. We have to use all available megaphones to call attention to what’s new and what’s different and promote our discoverability, to let our readers and viewers know what’s available.

Talk about what you’re doing on social media.

We’re producing 150 to 175 events a month on Facebook Live, YouTube Live and our own website. While it’s easier to monetize video on our own site, Facebook Live and YouTube Live provide scale because we’re attracting an audience that wouldn’t come to our site. So, it’s very valuable to us to be on both sites, and other social media properties.

How does Facebook Live compare to YouTube Live?

Facebook has been very aggressive in their own repositioning to a video destination, which obviously YouTube already was. YouTube viewers are on that site to watch multiple videos, which is obviously good for us, while Facebook viewers are a bit more passive and on the site for a range of content. They’re both really valuable audiences to us in different ways.

Can you briefly describe the tools you use to capture/edit/encode/deliver your streaming videos?

We shoot either using DSLRs, or with Sony FS5 cameras, which are 4K and deliver more broadcast quality. We use LiveU on-camera transcoders/transmitters for sending live feeds from the field, and edit in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Tell us about your staff.

We have about 40 on our video staff, almost all capable of shooting and producing events, with about 32 regularly shooting and producing. Fortunately, we’re far enough along in the evolution of video journalists that many of our staff have experience in other places. Otherwise, we have staff who worked in TV, some who came through photography, and some that were trained as multimedia journalists.

Perspectives | Video

Facebook shifts focus from live-streaming video to long-form

January 26, 2017 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

Although Facebook paid millions to the likes of the New York Times and BuzzFeed to live stream a certain number of videos — a $50 million investment altogether — publishers now say Facebook is talking to them less about live video and more about premium quality content, according to Recode’s Kurt Wagner.

“Our goal is to kick-start an ecosystem of partner content for the tab, so we’re exploring funding some seed video content, including original and licensed scripted, unscripted and sports content, that takes advantage of mobile and the social interaction unique to Facebook,” Facebook’s Ricky Van Veen said recently in a statement regarding original content.

While the one-year contracts haven’t yet ended, and there’s no official word from Facebook about them, it appears that they may have been a short term strategy for the platform. It also turns out many publishers aren’t interested in renewing these one-year Facebook Live contracts either. Some told Recode that Facebook’s compensation wasn’t enough to justify the time and resources needed to produce the live streams. So what’s the future of live-streaming on Facebook, and how can publishers get on board the new push for long-form video?

Live-Streaming Is Here to Stay
While some may interpret the news as Facebook admitting that live-streaming was never a profitable prospect, all arrows point to live-streaming’s staying power. Live viewership among Internet users decreased slightly in the second half of 2016. YouTube and Snapchat experienced small declines in market share of live-streaming, but Facebook’s market share actually rose from 14% to 17% between June and November of last year, according to eMarketer, suggesting that Facebook is emerging as a leader in a market that’s still in its infancy.

Meanwhile, Facebook has announced a slew of new tools and features for Live: a video tab on the Facebook app that makes spotting live videos easier (which helps fight against the algorithms that might keep viewership at bay); the ability to broadcast onto Facebook straight from a web browser (which is sure to keep Facebook competitive against the video bloggers doing this on YouTube); a “Live Contributor” role Page admins can assign people to broadcast live from the page; and enhanced live video metrics for people with at least 5,000 followers. Facebook is also planning to introduce mid-roll advertising, which will finally offer some payoffs for publishers who haven’t yet profited from these video streams.

Mediocre Content from Publishers Can’t Match Viral Hits
So it’s not necessarily that Facebook doesn’t believe publishers will now stay clear from Live altogether. In a breaking news moment, Live is the best way to reach as many as 1.7 billion viewers at once. Think of last year’s coup attempt in Turkey, or when House Democrats staged a sit-in to push for gun control.

Let’s also not overlookthe shooting of Philando Castile by police, and his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds’ Facebook Live stream in the immediate aftermath. Or even Chewbacca Mom, laughing in the glory of her own happiness, and the subsequent viral sensation she became.

When publishers slog through Facebook Live like it’s a chore, it shows. Hosts wear their ambivalence on their faces, and the quality is mediocre at best. With the abundance of competing content, users have no incentive to watch a live-stream. When individuals take to Facebook Live, however, it’s different. There’s no ambivalence. There’s the necessity that comes from immediacy. And the result is connection.

Brands Are Already Succeeding with Long-Form Video
Connection is the reason why some brands would prefer long-form video anyway. It often seems like Facebook is calling the shots these days when it comes to influencing media. But on-demand video services and live streaming are already pushing marketers to think beyond short 30-second ads, and toward advertising that is, essentially, stand-alone entertainment that connects with the viewer.

Case in point: Luxury brands like Burberry and BMW. Short commercials, which helps boost brand recognition, aren’t as important to them as it is to lesser known companies. They have loyal customers who are more concerned with the identity of the product — and identity comes from the perspectives, narratives and dramas you can present in what are basically short films. It’s a shift within marketing — “being” becomes more important than “having.”

Meanwhile, remember that ad blockers are some of the most popular mobile app and web extensions, with one out of every five smartphone users blocking advertising on web browsers, according to PageFair. Again, it goes back to the cable industry analogy. Just as viewers make time for premium long-form programming, getting them to turn off ad blockers requires making quality advertising! Because web advertising has become so targeted, there’s also more potential to experiment with advertising lengths.

So even though live-streaming on Facebook has been hit-and-miss so far, these could just be growing pains: Publishers will likely continue efforts with live-streaming and creating their own long-form video for editorial—and let’s not forget their focus on monetizing, regardless of format or platform.

Perspectives | Uncategorized

Here’s why NBC isn’t fretting over lower Olympics TV ratings

August 18, 2016 Mark Glaser, Founder and Publisher – MediaShift

For so long, live sports were the one remaining chip that pay TV had to keep people from cutting the cord. But that chip is slowly losing its value, as Twitter scoops up more streaming sports, and ESPN considers launching its own streaming service.

And for this year’s Olympics, NBC is letting more people see highlights on its NBC Sports app, while limiting live-streams to pay TV subscribers. The result is that NBC has seen a big shift from TV viewing to streaming for the Games in Rio — but all views are off from the highs in London in 2012.

As CNN’s Frank Pallotta put it, “After six days of prime time coverage, the NBC broadcast network is averaging 28.1 million viewers, about 20 percent fewer than it had during the London games in 2012. The totals are almost 10 percent lower than the Beijing games in 2008.”

And consumption habits have changed drastically since eight years ago, and even four years ago — with a lot more people consuming sports content on digital devices. But still, NBC attracted between 20.6 million and 33.4 million viewers on its broadcast network alone this year, according to Nielsen data. “Those are really big numbers by today’s standards,” Barry Lowenthal, president of media buying firm The Media Kitchen, told Reuters. NBC also saw a bump in TV ratings last Thursday thanks to emotional wins from popular Olympians — ratings which were quadruple the ratings of CBS, ABC and Fox combined.

Comparing any year to London requires some context: London’s 2012 opening ceremonies attracted 40.7 million viewers. That’s tough competition for anyone.

Hooked on Highlights

So it’s important not to discount these TV numbers, as well as not to overestimate how much growth is coming in through digital streams. Sure, NBC recently recorded its 100 billionth minute of live streaming, but the combined online and television network viewership in the first five days of the games was still 8.6 percent lower than the recorded numbers during 2012.

Online growth may be helping to offset the decline in TV ratings, but it may just be that the overall digital landscape — with people catching only the short clips of the highlights online and breaking news alerts coming onto phones before competitions are aired on tape delay — is making it more difficult to sit and watch a game continuously anywhere. With Hulu and Netflix and Amazon, as well as traditional TV programming, there’s a lot of competition for our attention.

“It’s not that we’re watching less, it’s that we’re watching more than three channels,” Victor Matheson, a professor at the College of the Holy Cross, told the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Flint and Suzanne Vranica.

Advertising Remains in the Mix

Consumers have also become accustomed to one of the boons of streaming and on-demand viewership, which is that they don’t have to sit through ads. But the opposite is true with these Olympics. It’s harder to escape ads, whether you’re watching live to catch the action as it happens, or watching highlights on the app, where ads are shown at the beginning of each clip. And that adds up to quite a lot when the app continually crashes. (Of course the best way to avoid ads is to skip them on your DVR.)

Another potential relief from ads might come if Comcast (which has paid for the U.S. rights to broadcast the Olympics through 2032) offers a subscription package to consumers that eliminates ads entirely. That could be a way for the company to monetize that impatience.

In some ways, the challenge of reaching more fans — whether through traditional or newer mediums — is the challenge of knowing who those fans are and what they want. It’s not necessarily the case that all TV viewers will eventually migrate online. It’s also worth noting that this year is a bit exceptional with other news stories distracting audiences. From the presidential elections (whose conventions were also live-streamed) to the anxiety over the Zika virus, distractions from breaking news stories and events has been boundless. It could be easy for any sports event — yes, even the Olympics — to simply creep up on a person.

But no matter how you slice it — TV, social media, app, DVR, streaming, etc. — the Olympics are one of those cornerstone events that will always bring in paydays to networks, no matter how people get the content.