Life After Cable: Mark Zuckerberg, the Content Savior
Thanks to YouTube TV, cutting the cord just got a whole lot easier…But is that really the final evolution of Cable?
If you’ve ever picked up your cable bill, mumbled a 4-letter word and wondered why you’re spending over $100 per month for dozens of channels you never watch, then the news around YouTube TV’s pending launch undoubtedly caught your eye.
For only $35 dollars every 30 days, about 40 channels backed by Google Artificial Intelligence and limitless DVR cloud storage can be all yours.
Sounds pretty good right?
Set at a similar price point and comparable number of channels (though the specific networks differ), Hulu is also scheduled to launch a similar skinny bundle sometime this year. The once haven for those who wanted less “I’m Yours” basement covers and more cable-quality content, Hulu will now be looking to steal marketshare from the newly announced YouTube TV product, in addition to incumbents DirecTV Now and Sling TV.
Both the YouTube TV and Hulu platforms give consumers more options, by-and-large include the most-watched networks and offer a lower price point than the traditional cable package.
So, what’s not to like?
The primary downside of these new offerings is the overall lack of viewer choice.
While these models certainly aren’t the a la carte pinnacle many consumers have been hoping for, these new products are fundamentally limiting for one key reason: they continue to define TV as the consumption of content from a narrow set of pipes and sources, a solid granite block that exists in a time of amorphous and infinite possibilities.
As complaint-driven subscribers who shell out over $1,000 annually, the question we all should be asking ourselves is why isn’t “cable” everything we consume: the on-demand high-brow documentaries, the nightly national news AND the grainy, first-person videos of your buddy surfing off the coast of Hawaii?
And wouldn’t there be tremendous value for an advertiser if their messaging was aligned with content that was so finely targeted that you could all but guarantee brand recognition?
Well, we’ll get there in a minute.
YouTube TV is looking to build scale before it’s remotely profitable, relying on a subscription-based model instead of an ad-based one. Hulu is primarily in the same boat, backed by 4 large media companies that look to Hulu as the digital destination for all of their pre-produced shows. Spurned by Netflix and bewildered about how to monetize on YouTube, Hulu is essentially one giant hedge by mass media to ensure that their content isn’t forgotten in the world of infinite on-demand programming.
However, where cable companies, over-the-top services like Apple TV and new skinny bundle offerings fall short is they fail to see the future of TV as “social.”
This new manifestation of the social consumption experience is far less about showing tweets on-screen or seeing which of your friends are watching a live video of you trying and failing to dunk on an 8-foot basketball hoop; rather, it’s about aggregating like-minded viewers through data and analytics instead of relying on the average consumer to discover interesting content. It’s essentially about creating virtual micro-ecosystems of viewers.
Cable companies often create channel neighborhoods: the grouping of similar networks by category or genre so that viewers who are looking for a certain show or type of content at any given time can likely find something, anything that is close to what they want.
But what if the video that is most similar to what we want to watch isn’t in the group of channels where we’re surfing?
What if a product could know and find the best content for us, without us even knowing it?
Introducing Mark Zuckerberg, Content Savior.
Facebook Live already has scale, an attentive audience and a plausible plan towards recreating TV across all platforms. Zuckerberg has brought Facebook Live to over a billion people already, telling them that their tight-shot video of the menial moments in life is important when, in reality, he and everybody else in the world doesn’t actually care.
He’s accomplished arguably the greatest feat in modern media history: he’s flipped the camera around 180-degrees and told the viewer at home that they are more important than the Kardashian’s, Beyonce and Justin Timberlake combined.
Of course, this belief that he’s instilled in Facebook Live users is a total fallacy: no one cares what you just ate for lunch or what mall you’re shopping in. If you’re sitting 50 yard line at the Super Bowl, OK fine, maybe that’s actually a camera angle and perspective that you couldn’t get from a Joe Buck-led broadcast, but the rest of the content on Facebook Live is the epitome of noise.
Having already professed the desire to build towards an ad-based revenue model and looking to license pre-produced content in the future, Facebook Live will soon not just be your friends imbibing at an over-crowded bar, but rather it will be a digital ecosystem filled with everything from that day’s sporting events to the next season of your favorite binge-worthy show.
With the help of all of the data that we willingly share with Mr. Zuckerberg and his colleagues on a daily basis, Facebook Live’s version of “cable” will know what you want to watch better than you know yourself and the possibilities for what to watch won’t be confined to 30, 70 or even 200 channels.
The ads will be highly targeted (and possibly include long-form custom content to keep viewers even further engaged) and Facebook will be able to bring together viewers into new communities around events, common interests and lifestyles in the same ideal that Zuckerberg spoke of in his manifesto a few weeks ago.
All demos will be represented (Facebook is, after all, what “old people” use these days) and, given that advertisers already spend a disproportionate amount of their digital dollars on Facebook, they are at least comfortable with the sales funnel in Menlo Park.
Brands, too, are increasingly involved with Facebook Live by the day, experimenting with engagement formats and trying to build digital populations that rival their linear counterparts.
Despite the increased opportunity for independent content producers to gain scale and reach new audiences on Facebook Live through data-targeted content, the big brands and mass media entities will likely still win out, able to create more content at a faster rate and higher production quality than the average 16-year old with a smartphone.
However, increased competition from independent producers will only ensure that quality content is all that bubbles up and into the mainstream.
More importantly, community-oriented, virtual ecosystems ensure that we are all spending less time channel surfing or wading through the waves of nonsensical User Generated Drivel. We’ll be able to focus on the moments and events that are most-relevant to us, all existing in a single digital sphere.
And finally, yes there are likely to be some paywalls constructed in the future around certain Facebook Live content that is now free, but I’ll take targeted ads and the occasional incremental spend for programming over a $100 cable bill every day of the week…
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