Sports and Second Screen - The Winning Combination

1.    Introduction: the winning combination!

Sports are big for TV. To be convinced of this, just look at the amount paid by BT to broadcast the football games of the European Champions league: £900m ($1.5bn/€1.1bn). As BT won the football rights, BSKYB the losing bidder saw its share price drop 11%[1] and £1.3bn ($2.1bn/€1.6bn) was wiped off its market capitalisation in one day. Clearly, the loss of football games rights was seen as a major risk to its future profitability[2]. According to the Telegraph, BSKYB even lobbied Champions League officials for three days to reopen the bid after it was excluded from the auctions.

Sports are big for TV because it can draw a huge number of fans who are ready to pay for content. Together with Hollywood blockbusters, sports form the basis of pay TV. Contrary to films, sports is also very big for 2nd screen.  Nielsen compiled the below statistics[3] that shows that sports is the main driver for tweets about TV shows. Forget about the “X-Factor”, and the US Presidential race--this is all about the Super Bowl; 50% of tweets about TV are about sports. Why do sports events drive so much social TV activity? This is due to the nature of fans and of sports events themselves. Sports fans are really engaged and very emotional about their teams and players. Sports events are broadcasted live and drive immediate reactions. 

Q1 2014 Quarterly Second Screen Update: Impacting the 1st Screen

2^nd Screen has continued to reveal evidence of progress in both monetization and engagement.  In addition to our focused research on monetization in Q1, we have been completed a 30-page research report on Sports on behalf of our society members to help them and their primary stakeholders (investors, customers, management) cut through the hype and the disillusionment and focus on clear examples of what is working. 

If you had the opportunity to attend 2^nd Screen Sunday at NAB, you would have seen the energy around the momentum in the space, starting with the very exciting Twitter Amplify keynote from Mike Park (@MEP) and driving through panels on monetization, UX, discovery, social and enhanced viewing with interesting perspectives shared from Comcast, Roku, Turner, Twitter, Nielsen, Razorfish, Videology, Brightroll, OV Guide, Xbox, the UFC, Razorfish, Kargo, Fox Sports 1, and Tivo.

Some highlights from the update covering 10 major market trends (members and subscribers have full access to all of our research):

1)     Hype and disillusionment. The ‘ying and yang’ of the still nascent space continues to frustrate investors, executives and even consumers.  While the press (particularly the tech press) continue to be attracted to negative sentiment, there continues to be growing evidence in both monetization and engagement with consumers to support the fundamental data that propels the market segment forward, despite a dearth of “killer app” use cases.  The continued investment in 2^nd Screen by nearly every major sporting league and media distributor sheds some light on the potential that is slowly being revealed to the market (see our recently published research paper “Sports and the 2^nd Screen: the winning combination”).  March Madness was perhaps the greatest example of this leading up to its conclusion this weekend in the Final Four.  While the return of the PGA Masters was nothing short of awesome though short-lived, we still have MLB’s “At Bat” app to keep ourselves fully occupied. 

2)     An ecosystem, not an app.  Chromecast released their SDK to the wider population, driving more 2^nd Screen experiences for both Discovery and Control to be adapted from Viewing Experience apps and Roku announced their streaming stick which will also leverage “casting” features for Netflix and YouTube upon initial release (give thanks to the DIAL protocol).  Microsoft continues to invest in its 2^nd Screen ecosystem under the SmartGlass brand, giving better feature capabilities not only to video content, but to games (Dead Rising 3)—and have released an SDK of their own (have you checked out BattleField 4: Commander?).  Finally, Amazon released their new Fire TV yesterday—with a “Second Screen” companion option in the settings menu and casting for Netflix out of the box.  Game on.

8)     Social TV.  Twitter is making a big push into the 2^nd Screen space with both Twitter Video Cards and Twitter Amplify.  Mike Park’s keynote at 2^nd Screen Sunday at NAB last weekend highlights the opportunity for both engaging the consumer and bringing them back to the first screen and for engaging them in the brands whose advertising space enable the video ecosystem as we know it.  John Dixon from Comcast spoke on a panel highlighting the opportunity they envision through the SeeiT feature, whereby consumers can manage their first screen viewing schedule through Twitter.  No surprise, Facebook recently announced their intention of ramping up its capability in the space beyond autoplay videos in your news feeds and enabling your hash-tagged posts to live beyond your circle of friends.  3 million retweets during the Oscars can’t be a bad thing for consumer engagement, and had they highlighted that Samsung phone even just a little bit (water marked brand image in the photo), the advertising potential could have easily been realized 100x over (think Twitter Amplify here).  Watch this part of the 2^nd Screen space closely.

More on Ad Supported Video (AVOD) growth, monetization, the mobile web, ad blockers, consolidation and discovery, as well as an update on monetization and the UX of sporting apps in our report.

@ChuckParkerTech

@S32Day

Second Screen by the Numbers, Q1 2014 - more growth, more engagement, more monetization

2nd Screen Q1 2014 infographic

2nd Screen Viewing Experiences:
73% of TV Everywhere views are on a 2nd Screen.  ReelSeo.  Feb 6th  http://www.reelseo.com/73-tv-everywhere-mobile/
89% of video views on the BBC’s iPlayer are VOD vs. Live.  52% of video requests came from mobile http://www.nscreenmedia.com/tablet-dominate-iplayer-tv-requests-end-2014/
Auto-authentication reduces TV Everywhere abandonment rate from 50% to 10% http://news.synacor.com/Press-Releases/Synacor-and-Midcontinent-Communications-Deploy-Auto-Authentication-for-Sochi-TV-Everywhere-Result-i-163.aspx

2nd Screen Companion Experiences:
35% of 1st screen time is 2nd screened, of which 1/3 is with related content.  41% of that to follow-up on TV ad, 11% to interact with TV, 14% social about TV program, 24% discovery.  Milward Brown http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/222041/its-a-multi-screen-world.html

2nd Screen Growth:
Year over year, share of time spent watching videos on tablets and mobile devices has increased 719% since Q4 2011, and 160% year-over-year since Q4 2012  http://iq.videonuze.com/article/ooyala-mobile-and-tablet-video-surges-by-719-since-q4-2011
Mobile video ad spend will increase 82.1% in 2014.  eMarketer.  http://www.admonsters.com/blog/mobile-video-revenue


Find more information, research, and infographics on our website

Follow our conversation on Twitter @ChuckParkerTech and @S32Day
Join us in NYC to discuss 2nd Screen and sports on June 24th in partnership with the Sports Video Group

Quarterly Second Screen Market Trend Update

2^nd Screen had a tumultuous run up to CES 2014 with the press continuing to be split between hype and disillusion.  While we normally would have written and presented this update at CES, we decided to focus on releasing our research on monetization on behalf of our society members to help them and their primary stakeholders (investors, customers, management) cut through the hype and the disillusionment and focus on clear examples of what is working.  Ironically, the additional insight gained in the first few weeks of January has been invaluable with regards to both consolidation (Yahoo closing IntoNow) and M&A (Viggle buying Dijit, TiVo buying Digitalsmiths).  NATPE also did the production industry a favor by publishing some great research on enhanced viewing experiences as seen through consumers’ eyes as well as those of the production executives making decisions about where to invest in content development (in-depth blog).  Finally, the holiday season has continued to accelerate the proliferation of devices into the market place, driving continued growth in engagement and monetization opportunities for the 2^nd Screen companion and viewing experience ecosystem.

What happened to Second Screen this week?

What a crazy week.  As if it wasn't enough for NATPE to be taking place in Miami (with some great research and stats published about second screen), there was a ton of consolidation activity in our industry (Dijit/Viggle, IntoNow from Yahoo, Digitalsmiths/Tivo) and some rebranding by GetGlue.  At the same time the 2nd Screen Society (S3) published a teaser on its new research about monetizing the second screen, and then Gigaom and TechCrunch wrote some pretty disparaging views, with Gigaom reverting to the salacious headline of "Social TV is Dead".

Monetizing the 2nd Screen--business models that work

Second screen, social media and companion applications are all high on the agenda of executives in the media and technology industries. As a reflection of all major TV and technology conferences in 2013, CES, NAB, IBC, and MIP had several sessions dedicated to second screen. But second screen, while proven as a reality of consumer behavior, is not yet widely seen as a revenue driver. Indeed the reality of the second screen phenomenon is accepted, as is proven by the continuous flow of statistics showing that viewers use another screen in front of their TV (one of the latest being Nielsen saying that 75% of smartphone and tablet users are engaging with second-screen content more than once a month as they watch TV[1]). Another proof of the generalization of second screen is the multiplication of companion screen applications: over the course of 2013 they have become widespread in new geographies including the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Latin America, where they had little presence only 12 months before. Comparing the space with 2012, it is clear that no TV players can ignore it. Even more striking, the players behind some of the most successful apps are large and well established: Peel now has  40m+ downloads, mostly through a global partnership with Samsung; Apple bought Matcha in August 2012; zeebox grew their partnerships with Sky, Comcast (NBCU) and Foxtel, while DirecTV acquired a share of i.TV (which bought Getglue at the end of 2013); Viggle has a longstanding partnership with DirecTV; Comcast has launched “SEE iT” with Twitter[2] and Xbox SmartGlass app was downloaded more than 17m times.  Despite this popularity and the presence of the largest players, few industry executives dare to speak openly about monetization of second screen applications and only a small percentage of 3^rd party app providers have made their progress public. There may be good reason for the industry stalwarts to keep their progress private with commercial competition so tough, but the sceptics of course believe that is because no one has actually experienced much monetization success.  So while many in the industry are wondering where the money is in second screen, next to nobody is ready to “show [you] the money”.

Second Screen market growth evidence: 53m Tablets ship, Twitter wins the Super Bowl and buys BlueFin

So Twitter "won the Super Bowl", bought BlueFin and last Friday we heard that 53m tablets shipped worldwide in Q4 of 2012.  So what?

When a bird breaks through its shell to be born, the world shouts its a market "revolution", but the tiny bird itself has been making progress steadily for a long while--more of a "rapid evolution" with one very publicly acknowledged milestone.

2nd Screen Society announces definitive Second Screen market research study

"The 2nd Screen: Transforming Video Consumption" written and produced by The Intersection LAS VEGAS   — At the 2nd Screen Summit at International CES today, 2nd Screen Society Chairman Chuck Parker introduced data and details from his new research study: "The 2nd Screen: Transforming Video Consumption."  The 250-page document details the current state and five-year projections for this emerging marketplace, which the researchers estimate as a $490 million market today and expect to reach $5.9 billion by 2017.

Created by The Intersection, a research company owned by Parker and TV technology executive Renaud Fuchs, and published by the 2^nd Screen Society, the report presents both the global market size and segmentation of the hundreds of consumer facing apps in the market place, the build-up of the market sizing, a deep-dive on the technology driving this space, the latest trends and case studies on the leading apps in the market. Additionally, the report will cover how consumers are using their 2nd screens as 1st screens both in and out of the living room, as TV Everywhere strategies come into full effect in the consumer market place. "With 35 million tablets sold during the holiday season in 2012 and an estimated 40% of all television viewers now enhancing the experience with a 2nd screen, this is clearly the trend to watch for 2013," Parker explains.  "What can you expect to see in 2nd screen developments in 2013 and who are the current leaders?  How will the giants of today’s video industry respond to this challenge?  We answer these questions and more in this report."

The in-depth study covers everything you need to know about 2nd screen: 

• The technology status and future developments: how ACR and the “system level” 2^nd screen platform from Xbox SmartGlass will have significant impact on the marketplace
• A segmentation of the market and a scoring of hundreds of companion apps: that are used to control, discover, enhance, share and multi-task.
• An analysis of the players in the ecosystem: why studios and TV shows focus on enhancement and pay TV operators focus on control.
• A full-blown usage analysis, business models and market sizing with detailed data to 2017.
• A detailed review of the Top 50 apps:  what works and what doesn’t and identifying key feature sets
• A detailed look at trends and future state of the 2^nd screen market
• An 18-month detailed forecast:  describing trends we believe will have a short-term impact on this emerging marketplace for applications and 2^nd-screen technologies.
• A deep review of second screen as a viewing device

For more information about the research study visit: www.2ndscreensociety.com/research.

The 2^nd Screen Society represents over 40 technology leaders who are committed to collectively advancing the creation, production and adoption of content applications, devices and distribution systems within the new 2^nd Screen Engagement Ecosystem.  The Society is managed on behalf of its members by MESA, the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance.

To find out more about the Report and the Society contact Chuck Parker at: Chuck@MESAlliance.org

2nd Screen expected to dominate the news and exhibits at CES

Already being dubbed the "Tablet Christmas" in London as retailers are seeing tablets fly off the shelves and into shoppers baskets at the rate of 1 per second, there is a large surge expected in tablets this holiday shopping season--so large that IDC has increased their 2012 forecast for tablet sales by 5 million units to 121 million units worldwide.  While the Huffington Post believes the driving force will be the wide spread availability and lower price point of 7-inch Android tablets, one thing is for sure, it is going to be a "2nd Screen CES" as a result, with major TV service providers working hard to attract revenue as more than 70% of table owners use their devices while watching TV.