Week In Review: The Live Wars Heat Up; Dish Loses Even More Subscribers
1. The Live Wars Heat Up
This was a big week for live streaming video. Facebook searched under the couch and came up with $2.2 million to pay well-known Creators to appear regularly on Facebook Live. Not to be outdone, Twitter introduced some interesting new features as well, including autoplay for Android and the ability to embed Periscope video on third party sites.
Why It Matters
Live video is the new, new thing. It’s current, it’s interactive, it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s passion. It’s also how Facebook is planning to steal a goodly chunk of the multi-billion dollar #CreatedWith market away from Google’s YouTube.That’s why Facebook’s plan is so genius. Creators don’t really make all that much money, especially once you factor in the amount of time and effort they need to spend to write/film/edit/distribute their videos. Paying them to use Facebook will definitely spur them to try the platform, and the PR generated by the move helps ensure that someone will be there to watch them when they do.Our only suggestion to Facebook is that they try and make Live videos easier to find. Some sort of listing or algorithm-based customized directory would be great, especially in terms of discovery—we’re not always looking to see video from people and brands we already know and like. And serendipity frequently leads us to discover something very special. So there’s that.Twitter, on the other hand, has a bigger problem: In the Venn diagram of Twitter users and Periscope users, those two circles don’t have a ton of overlap. That means all those interface tweaks Twitter’s come out with recently to let Periscope users post their videos straight to Twitter are not as useful as they sound on paper.Embeddable video is a smart idea though, because, as we’ve previously noted, there are many people who are curious about what’s being said on Twitter, but don’t want to have to deal with the actual platform itself. Letting them see those videos on third party sites is a smart idea—Twitter just needs to find a smart way to monetize them.Our suggestion to Twitter would be to merge Periscope and Twitter so that they work together in a single app. Twitter users have already shown that they don’t want to download a second app for live video. (Twitter should have talked to FourSquare about that one first.) So making it easy for people to shoot live video off the Twitter app just removes another barrier to adoption.
What You Need To Do About It
If you’re a brand and you don’t currently have a live video strategy, get one. That doesn’t necessarily mean shooting your own live video, but rather, sponsoring someone else’s. That someone else can be a Creator, a Hollywood celebrity or a movie or TV show.If you’re a TV showrunner or network executive, then you too should have a live strategy in place to connect with and activate fans. Live offers really personal, real-time interactivity, as well as instant feedback, and it’s a chance for fans to really connect with your actors in a way that doesn’t feel quite as canned as Twitter.
2. Dish Loses Even More Subscribers
Dish reported what sounded like lemons-into-lemonade good news last week when, despite sinking subscriber numbers, they reported a healthy profit due to increased fees. Then analyst firm Moffat Nathanson sent a note to investors speculating that Dish actually lost 330,000 satellite TV customers in the second quarter. Worse still, the note called their baby ugly: of Sling TV, they wrote “combining the two businesses [Dish and Sling] likely observes how quickly Sling TV is hitting a wall. For a one-year-old OTT service, that may be an even more alarming result than the huge 330,000 subscriber loss that same Sling TV result implies for the core satellite business.”Ouch.
Why It Matters
Dish’s problems likely stem from two factors: they don’t offer broadband and the service has traditionally been sold on price.Not offering broadband means that MVPDs who do offer broadband can come in and offer a better deal on a double- or triple-play package. It also means that Dish users are more likely to be cord cutters (for economic reasons) and/or switch to those cheaper double or triple play options, which frequently come with greater bandwidth and no data caps.Finally, there’s Dish’s constant need to get into battles with networks, battles that typically lead to weeks-long outages. While these battles are usually settled fairly quickly, there are enough of them that we could see users getting fed up.
What You Need To Do About It
Gloat, if you’re feeling petty. Otherwise look at Dish and learn from their mistakes. They’ve got a great product with the Hopper and an excellent second screen app, but it seems that at the end of the day, if you sell on price, then price is still a key factor for your users.
