The Jargon Wars: Mapping TV’s Out Of Control Lingo

About a month ago, map maven Evan Shapīro set out to catalog the overwhelming number of buzzwords and acronyms used by the television industrial complex.

In order to get a reality check and to make sure the taxonomy map was not missing any key terms, he turned to Marion Ranchet and me to provide feedback and support.

What you see below is Version 1.1. It’s not final—we need your feedback for that, which you can leave on Evan’s LinkedIn or on ESHAP.

But allow me a few minutes on my soapbox to explain why this is so important and why we need a more streamlined lexicon and not a TV Tower of Babel.

All too often I have been in meetings where it soon becomes clear that the reason no one can agree is that everyone is using the same word to describe something very different. Or, worse, they are using different words to describe the same thing.

Which is why it becomes so difficult to get anything done.

It’s an even bigger issue when it comes to research.

Where—easy example—some companies will include vMVPDs as part of the linear TV category and others will include it as streaming. (In the latter case, it’s often a way to goose cord-cutting numbers and create a more clickable headline. But still…)

There’s AVOD, my personal bugaboo, which can sometimes mean free ad-supported on demand, sometimes mean free and subscription ad-supported on-demand, sometimes mean owned and operated on-demand apps from niche providers, which may or may not be free, sometimes mean various combinations of the above… and despite all that confusion, most everyone seems to think their definition of “AVOD” is the only right one and so everyone in the room winds up using the word “AVOD” to refer to something massively different. And then they wonder why they can’t get the other side to agree.

The Challenge Ahead

I have a keynote I give wherein I attempt to explain the various business models in streaming. It goes something like this. “There are four options: Free and Not-Free, Ad-Free and Ad-Supported. Beyond that, it’s all just window dressing.”

But getting people to that point is going to be a challenge.

When I first started doing this all these years ago, I discovered three things:

➡ Too often people were so wrapped up in their little corner of the industry that they didn’t realize that no one else knew what they were talking about.

➡ People were petrified to raise their hand and ask "what does that acronym mean?" lest they be branded as dumb and useless.

➡ People liked to hide behind a curtain of buzzwords and jargon because they felt it made them sound smart and—this is key—they were not confident enough in their own abilities to push back and use simpler terms—they were cowed by people who went "full buzzword."

For better or for worse, this love of acronyms is not limited to the TV industry. Every industry has their own acronyms. Sometimes like "OEM" (which also refers to the more widely-known Office of Emergency Management, a US governmental body) our acronym is not even the most popular.

Which, to conclude, does not mean that we should not try to simplify the language we use as it will lead to better decisions, better data and a better experience for us all.

This map is a good place to start.