Week In Review: Vevo Looks To Become MTV 3.0; Cord Cutting Math Doesn't Add Up
1. Vevo Looks To Become MTV 3.0. Vevo, the music video platform owned by Sony and Universal, is making some major changes to their look and feel, adding in the ability to watch videos in vertical mode because you know, Snapchat. They’re also going to add actual humans to host the videos, sort of like, you know, VJs. (For those of you born after the Reagan administration, VJs, or Video Jockeys, were like on-camera disc jockeys for MTV and VH1. They were quite famous in their heyday and make excellent topics for “Where Are They Now?” profiles today.)Why It MattersOther than reviving the ‘80s, Vevo’s real goal here is to take on YouTube, the behemoth that drives most of their traffic. If they can prove to the teens and 20somethings who use the service that they have value beyond just searching for videos and playing them before moving on to Smosh, then there’s a lot of money to be made.Many others have tried to wean their audience from the YouTube teat, but with very limited success. Vessel proved that even a really big budget and really shiny interface is no guarantee of success.But if anyone can pull this off, it’s Vevo. The effort is being lead by CEO Erik Huggers, he of Intel OnCue fame, so there’s definitely some institutional knowledge of how TV works and why people watch alternate platforms.Plus we loved old school MTV and VH1 and think the time may be right for a return to music for music’s sake. There are a lot of overly polished corporate pop acts in the public eye right now, but all those up and coming indie bands tend to get lost in the great web of Spotify.Speaking of, if there’s ever been a great merger waiting to happen, it’s Spotify and Vevo. Imagine combining Spotify’s domination of the audio space with Vevo’s domination of video. It’s a music lover’s dream: for those of you old enough to remember, how often did you wish that MTV was a radio station you could listen to in your car or on your dorm room stereo.Throw in some live streaming and you’ve got our perfect music trifecta: anytime, anywhere access to the songs and videos you want. A curated stream with recognizable hosts who can be your guides to what’s new, and some live performances you can watch on your phone or on your giant screen sweet TV.Sweet. (That was a word we used a lot in the ‘80s too.)What You Need To Do About ItIf you’re an advertiser, keep a close eye on Vevo and consider whether you want to become a sponsor. As much as we wax poetic about the possibilities, drawing an audience away from YouTube is not an easy task and there’s no guarantee that Vevo will succeed.If you’re a TV network or MVPD, keep an eye on it because you may want to add music programming to your mix if Vevo takes off and music TV takes off again.2. Cord Cutting Math Doesn't Add UpFor the past few years we’ve been nattering on about how the MVPDs have a monopoly or duopoly on broadband access and how that means cord-cutting is never going to become a thing. Because they control both “cords,” all the MVPDs have to do is move a few sliders and adjust their pricing so that it actually becomes more expensive to cut the cord.This week, Colin Dixon from nScreen Media, offers some actual numbers to back that up. In Dixon’s neck of Northern California, it costs $99.99/month for Comcast’s Triple Play package—pay-TV, digital landline and broadband. But remove pay-TV from the package and poof! — your triple play savings vanish, and the resulting broadband plus landline package is $105/month.So getting pay-TV, whether or not you actually ever watch it, saves you $5/month.Why It MattersBecause people in the industry let a bunch of Silicon Valley simpletons scare them into thinking that cord cutting was a real trend and they spent way too much mental energy fretting about it. The above-mentioned scenario, plus the current one, where Comcast and the other MVPDs are putting Netflix, Amazon and Hulu on their set top boxes, make a cord-cutting exodus highly unlikely.What You Need To Do About ItStop fretting about cord cutting and cord nevering and start worrying about better ways to measure viewing and how to implement addressable advertising on an industrywide basis.
