But, with classical pay-TV subscriptions around the world plateauing, many pay-TV companies are now peeling out sports from their bundle, via over-the-top internet streaming offerings.
Case in point – Australia’s Foxtel, which has around three million total subscribers but which last year launched Kayo Sports, an entirely separate streaming sports provider.
“(It’s) pushing kind of over 400,000 subscribers already in the last 12 months and they’re all new and different customers to the Foxtel business,” says Mark Frain, CEO of Foxtel Media, Foxtel’s ad sales house, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“There’ll be a second streaming service that will launch early 2020, which is the entertainment version.”
The Kayo launches mimic the earlier template set by Foxtel’s former UK News Corp stablemate Sky, which in 2012 carved out its own channels for an OTT offering called Now TV, which was estimated to have crossed 1.5 million subscribers last year.
For Frain, it’s all about consumer choice at the right pricepoint.
“The global streaming platform is a very congested area, but that streaming strategy for Foxtel is giving us access to part of the Australian population that we haven’t traditionally spoken to or they haven’t engaged with Foxtel because the price point’s been too expensive,” he says.
The Kayo Sports app includes new targeted ads, dynamically inserted in place of ads from linear streams.
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>This was the approach taken by Ashley J. Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp., which specializes in linear TV and video yield optimization, as she capped off the proceedings at Beet Retreat Miami in November.
The final panel of this year’s conference featured Anupam Gupta, Chief Product Officer, 4C Insights; Daniel Harrison, Head of TV Solutions for Oracle Data Cloud; and Jakob Nielsen, CEO of GroupM’s Finecast addressable TV business.
Declaring that “TV needs to change,” Gupta pointed out that while so-called enemies like Facebook and Google require advertisers to “do it their way” behind walled gardens, at least those companies offer application-programming interfaces. Those API’s facilitate valuable things like ad buying, targeting, reporting, measurement, creative testing and creative trafficking.
“Where are the API’s for the one trillion impressions” that comprise traditional TV?, Gupta asked.
Harrison said the Retreat was a great place for him to gain a better understanding of the financial and technical complexities of advanced TV. His reflections:
“You have to be able to adjust and redirect to achieve your goals. Coming from an Oracle Data Cloud perspective, I’m a bit neutral to all of this because regardless, we look at data as the fuel for innovation and it’s how do we enable this data in every and any place that a client wants this to be to achieve some goals.”
Nielsen warned that progress will be curtailed if agencies and tech suppliers make things too complicated for marketers. Said he: “One thing I’ve seen with advertisers is they are super excited about what we’re talking about. They’re seeing benefits of household targeting, using their own first-party data, to be able to do creative rotation in a different way, near-time optimization. That’s a journey that we’re on. We have to remember to take them on that journey, make it simple, give them what they need but don’t give people too much.”
Swartz suggested that it’s “human problems, not technology problems, that are holding us back.” This led to a discussion about current business models and methods that, while familiar and comfortable, won’t move things ahead at the desired speed.
Gupta described attending meetings with agencies and marketers in which everyone understands the importance of more data-driven TV audience buying. When he asks how they are currently executing it, responses typically include Microsoft Excel. “Then we say okay how are you processing large-scale datasets? ‘Well we don’t have the engineers to take second-by second-data from ten-plus million devices,’” Gupta related. “The point is, you’ve got business issues around talent, around the software not being there, around the horsepower not being there. Those are the issues holding you back. It’s not the desire to do something.”
Said Harrison: “Innovation doesn’t happen because you desire it. It’s because you must do it. You really don’t have a choice.”
Nielsen said there are too many tech solutions and there should be more use of fewer of them going forward. He offered these examples:
“We use Videology within Finecast to do some of the decisioning we’re doing and we have Sky in the UK use Videology as well. We work with Invidi in Australia, they won a fantastic deal with Foxtel, and we were very supportive of that. We went in nearly hand-in-hand and said we suggest you pick Invidi because that works with our systems and that means we can spend more money with you.
“The unpleasant part of that is there’s tons of technology companies that won’t exist in the future because there’s simply too much and it’s too complex.”
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“2015 will be the year many of them realize they’ve got to get on this programmatic TV journey to imp the relevance of TV in this digital era,” according to Mark Frain, sales head of MCN, a joint venture of News Corp’s Australian subsidiaries Foxtel and Fox Sports which sells ads on channels. “If they don’t , doomsayers about TV will be proved right.”
Frain’s MCN is already making in-roads on that journey. In October, it announced it was going “fully programmatic” by launching a private marketplace using AOL, as WSJ reported.
The firm, whose assets number 68 television channel brands and 122 websites including Fox8 and Fox Footy, recently launched its own initiatives this year to, Fraine says, “apply the dynamics of programmatic in a digital sense and bring that to linear TV:”
A new Foxtel set-top box, iQ3, that is “100% IP-driven”, will further allow advertisers to buy household-level addressable ads in the next year, Frain says.
We spoke with him this week at a taping of industry titled Why TV Advertising Will Never Be the Same. The event was co-produced at AOL in partnership with Beet.TV. For more videos, please visit this page.’
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