Sports and Live Content

Netflix streaming was down by up to 25% during the 2012 London Olympics. With Netflix beginning to create its own original content, are sports and live content ways that television will be able to stay ahead?

Staying new and relevant is so important to television programming. At this stage, Netflix and other online streaming services are comprised primarily of old content.

It is also important to remember that the coverage of the recent Olympic games in London was marked by controversy. Much of the outrage in Australia was channelled into the Facebook group Channel 9 Olympics Coverage sucks. Similar criticism was directed toward NBC in the United States for their coverage. The delaying of major events so they could be broadcast during primetime outraged many NBC viewers.

With this in mind, perhaps live content is better suited to online streaming. Will audiences be more satisfied if they are able to stream live content on demand? What will this mean for television?

Kids Programming

Ratings for children’s television station Nickelodeon have recently taken a dive.

 According to a study by Bernstein Research this could be due in large part to content being available on Netflix. They found that children are more likely to re-watch shows they've already seen and are not as strongly enticed by new content as adults are. Furthermore, they found that parents are encouraging their children to use netflix in order to keep them busy. You can read more about this here, here, here, and here.

Despite this, Nickelodeon has renewed its Netflix contract and have denied that this is an issue. Australia creates a large amount of Children’s television content so it’s important that this content is protected. The way different sections of the market respond to online streaming services will be an interesting thing to look at. Perhaps, in the future we will need multiple regulations which apply to different television markets and audiences.

The Globalisation of Intellectual Property

If you read anything online asking why Netflix isn’t in Australia, you will see the same answer repeated: they don’t have the appropriate ‘streaming rights.’

This begs the questions: what are ‘streaming rights’? who are they governed by? and, what happens if they are breached?

Streaming rights appear to be integral to how the online mediascape in Australia will change in the next few years, so this is definitely something which ought to be addressed in our feature.

To further my understanding of this area of law, I set up a meeting with Jeremy Kriewaldt, a partner of the law firm Atanaskovic Hartnell. His explanation was as follows:

JEREMY: Copyright and [intellectual property] law is really all about the same thing, that is protecting the form of a work...Licenses are sold by the producers of a film or TV show to distribute it. The film itself is the intellectual property of the actors, composers, editors, director, but they all signed away their rights to the producers. Licenses cover things from cinema viewings to videotape, or sorry – DVD formatting and release... so that's what these mythical 'streaming rights' are. Nothing special, just ordinary licensing agreements...

Problem with online distribution is that each country has its own copyright laws, and while these have been unified to an extent through the Berne Convention, it’s still a bit of a mess. To really get in there look at the [Copyright] Act and the Convention, that will show you how geographically divided it all is.

Jeremy was very helpful, and a very charming, well-spoken and charismatic man. Our feature website could definitely be more dynamic and engaging if we could include a video interview with him regarding copyright law. This would also make our feature more authoritative – hearing the explanation directly from an expert.

Do you think videos work well in online features? Would you watch it, or skip right on to the next page?

The Catch-Up Effect

Say you've just discovered the intricacies of the meth dealing - science teaching, Walter White in Breaking Bad or the chain smoking, whiskey charm of Don Draper in Mad Men,  you've stumbled across either in a channel flick and the second season is halfway through on your television.

In the days of old you would trundle down to the DVD store and pick up any of the available copies of the previous season...that's if you even made it off the couch, let alone out the front door, before your attention came hurtling back to the latest offering from Harold Bishop and Ramsay St. 

HURRAH! No more! Over the past few years the web savvy and legally 'unconscious' generations have turned to torrenting and online streaming to catch up to shows that would have previously passed them by. The era of the once-off 8pm sit down for the latest installment of Underbelly has been swept away by the knowledge that we can now watch our favorite shows on our time. 

So what is a network to do? 

They rely on guarantees to advertisers that a certain audience share will be met, and thus justify the cost of air time for their product. You would think that with power moving increasingly to the consumer to decide what to watch and when to watch it, such guarantees could become a thing of the past. 

Well it's not all bad news, in fact, services such as Netflix and Hulu which have emerged as the big players in what I would call the beginning of the post-torrent era (with paid low-cost subscription rates), have actually benefited the regular TV ratings of cult shows such as Breaking Bad and Mad Men.

How? 

The recent Bernstein Report on Netflix has termed the phenomenon, 'the catch-up effect' as viewers see later episodes of shows on TV they 'catch up' to the current episode by legally streaming them one after the other through these paid services, bringing them up to date. Alternatively, avid fans can re-watch episodes right up until the newest season premiere on prime time TV,  this effectively secures an audience for the premiere screenings of shows across the stations and as the Bernstein Report maintains, is a definite ratings win for networks. 

What will be interesting to see is how networks will adapt to such a change in Australia. It's likely they will release previous seasons through legal online streaming services much the same way as they have in the US. 

We might even be lucky enough to catch up on all 27 seasons of Neighbours before the next season premieres next year. 

The World Wide - Where?

When I began my search on the legality of online streaming, I did what any self-respecting Internet user would do: I hit up Google.

Unfortunately for me, all the top results were articles and videos detailing how to circumvent the current ban in Australia. This was not particularly helpful.

Stepen Quin and Stephen Lamble wrote of the dangers of relying on Google in their book, ‘Online Newsgathering’. There is so much content on the Internet that much of it will not be picked up by search engines. Rather, I had to turn to the ‘hidden web’ to find material that will point me in the right direction.

AustLii is a portal that allows access to a variety of decisions of State and Federal Courts in Australia. Using a Boolean search (copyright OR “intellectual property” AND internet) I found several cases that will assist the development of our feature.

While there is no case law regarding video streaming, I am working on the assumption that the same principles apply to audio media online. Particularly helpful to my research is Cooper v Universal Music Australia, a 2006 decision of the Federal Court of Australia. It discussed the operation of copyright, licensing and intellectual property rights in the Internet Age. These explanations were very useful, and this case has also given me the names of lawyers in this area of practice who may be available for interviews.

This is a very underdeveloped research area, evidenced by my initial Google search. Our feature will be a real and substantial clarification of a very complex issue. However, research is going to be trickier than I originally thought.

Have you ever experienced problems with Google? How do you find content that search engines don't readily provide? Let me know below!

Caputuring Our Target Audience

Although I briefly touched upon the means through which we are going to wine and dine our target audience with once using our web feature, luring them there is a whole other issue.  

A ring recently designed by google showing the amount of hits your site has

Capturing a target audience with web content seems to be a 'chasing the magic dragon' kind of topic with each of thousand or so guides that populate googles search pages swearing by their unique theory of doing so (in the process, reminding me of the apparent abundance of ways that online ads suggest you too can lose 5 kilograms in one week!). However, unlike the littany of paid-per-view weight loss guides, there are some truths that are consistent between each one that we have decided embodies best practice for our web feature in particular. 

Using a site approrpiately entitled, "The Bloggers guide to SEO" (and the fact that they must be doing something right if they have managed to get themselves finely perched on the first page of a google search), the optimisation of SEO and use of key words or phrases to attract a particular target audience is translated into terms that even the non-tech savy can understand. They, in summary, suggest the use of site specific key phrases that give your subject matter a wide range of matches (for us, streaming, television, netflix, australia, quickflix) which will potentially involve the casual tech-interested search and then a range of more exclusive search terms like (netflix in australia, television streaming australia) which (obviously) connect people inquiring specifically into the topics covered in our web feature back into the site. 

To gather and exploit these trending terms, Google Analytics has become our best ally. As we haved developed our page  and continued to do so, it has been a requisted that we keep a continual eye on the popularity of search terms and related phrases to our peice.  

Doing a search on these terms yeilds less than 5 pages specifically relating to our subject matter which means our SEO mountain shouldn't be too hard to climb. Whilst potentially rudimentary for some, those uneducated (us!) will find it a huge leg-up in actually getting their page seen if they are effective in the world of SEO and key pharsing.  

Google's page on Blogger goes further in-depth concerning coming out on top in the search engine they created and further than that in generating page hits through, what could very easily be Google's motto, thinking outside the box. The page provided an interesting and comprehensive study of a number of different means companies and online entities had achieved and maintained success. This was quite a game-changing read for our web team when considered what our design philosphy and in-house style would be like. Concepts like 'piggy-backing'  are worth a look alone and their stressing on the importance of creating a unique web identity and strategy are all part an intelligent and achievable framework which we will surely keep at the heart of our design and content production. This is to say that, whether successful or not, we are going to try innovate above pre-existing pages rather than just stay in tow!

Readers, be sure to let us know if there are any other design philosophies, websites we should turn our eye too! 

Beauty and the Beast

Charged with the responsibility of providing some copy concerning the potential publication style our web feature is to use, a few difficult decisions came to the fore almost immediately.  

The relatively lengthy process we went through to both come up with an idea and then refine it into the project we have tentatively called ‘Internet Killed the Video Star’ left a clear and conflicting division between the publication style we would like to use and the user base we are attempting to target. As mentioned in our recent presentation, www.Screenhub.com.au embodies the intergrity of written content and continuing relevance we seek to achieve as well as succesfully appealing to the appropriate industry-centric target audience we would like to connect with. However, its design and aesthetics struggle to transcend the typically clunky and relatively stark academic style by which many of these industry magazines are bound. This brought us to the question, which put succinctly is, why has Screenhub elected to use such a style? 

 As in Screenhub, the crux can be found in this same disparity between the information we intended to collate versus the aesthetic we would ideally like to achieve and the fact that at surface level these intentions are seemingly at odds. As simply suggested in Lawrence's (2006) summation of universal rules of 'good' web design, "design and content should reflect the needs of the audience and purpose of the site", Screenhub needs none of the bells and whistles of other tech sites because it is foremost concerned with the quality and accessibility of the content being consumed there. In other words, it would seem that more academic or ‘harder-edged’ news being delivered would most likely miss the point if it tried to generate the graphical explosion and glossy nerd-hype that sites like Mashable and Engadget use so well.  

However, we live in a world where it is well known that there exists a deficit of attention and a surplus of online conent.  Readers skim discerningly through huge amounts text whilst in reality only stopping to consider the bare minimum of information they are presented with (if it is needed, on average a mere 28% of the text on each page). So how to communicate our relatively weighty subject matter whilst retaining some semblance of beauty that web surfers demand?  

To answer that and our design conflict, we are going to try and improve on Screenhub's site through implenting the philosophy that sites like www.techradar.com employs so effectively. Our feature will sustain user attention through a virtually administered Ritalin....  

Not quite, but as a close second, we figure the best way to improve on Screenhub's daggy approach to the web is to use a littany of multimedia which will remain transparent in putting our data first (not as a distraction) but rather allowing us to unpack relatively dense packages of information in a shorter amount of time. Videos, illustrated graphs and all the associated mediums of delivery mean that unlike Screenhub, online education will no longer be a bitter pill to swallow and that we might suppress the omnipresent urge to make that one click back to Facebook. One must look no further than the way techradar reports on a huge number of tech-centric stories but keeps its feed clean yet crisp and enviably modern to see this in its all its white-backgrounded glory. This is not only a means of communication that looks good but speaks in a language that our target audience especially can understand. Indeed, for most in the screen industry (including myself), days are spent combating the bastardly user interfaces of NLE's and perfecting our the ever-fleeting visual language - so, it is our hypothesis that creating a resource on streaming to the extend that we desire will be hugely useful if we can get rid of mountains of information and, in essence, do the readers work for them.