The challenge of Choice pushes the challenge of the Social EPG enhancement

written by: Gianluigi Cuccureddu

Details

Published on Tuesday, 28 December 2010 08:47

These are the two conclusions of an article on The Economist on the EPG and the future of television.

One of the points that are highlighted in the article is that pay-TV operators view television as a social experience, thus developing a Social EPG that is fueled by ones network and at the same time offering a recommendation engine on what to watch amidst the increasing amount of choice.

More ambitious plans are being drawn up. Rovi is weaving social networks like Facebook into television guides, so people can recommend shows to each other. BSkyB hopes to let people share the contents of their digital video recorders. Like Samsung and Google, pay-TV distributors reckon they can bring the best of the internet to the television set. The difference is that they think television will be the dominant partner.

In this article as well, was pointed out to the concern of Hollywood's shrinking margins. In one of our articles, we eleborated on Social TV and how that will grow TV advertising. One of the findings was -as elaborated by the NYT in one of their articles- the power of television and "how television viewership is being propelled by people who are increasingly watching certain shows to share comments with friends and family in real time on social media like Facebook and Twitter."

This is a true and realistic power that creates overview within the abundancy of (non traditional) content. Small niches (mini social networks) are created by the viewers themselves, creating loyalty and engagement amongst the mini network towards specific content. This in turn will boost TV advertising but more importantly, it will co-create together with the technology of a Social EPG a guidance what to watch.

This latter is important, because indeed the amount of offered content is increasing, it's hard for providers to be visible. Making use of the power of the crowd is a good example of co-creation, where relevancy and engagement occur, more money can be spend and made. Long tail is key and as explained by McKinsey's Word-of-Mouth Equity a strong and small network will have more influence in the end.

The Volume and Impact equals the Word-of-Mouth Equity.
The Impact is determined by four aspects, Network, Sender, Message Content and Message Source.
The Volume is of importance with regard to the reach per message, but it doesn’t determine the quality of the reach. From an utopian one-on-one marketing point of perspective, the smaller the reach is, but the better the quality is, due to personalized or relevant alignment between Sender, Message and Receiver.

The Social EPG can play an important role to achieve monetization and engagement towards content. The key will be easyness to use content discovery experience.