Manchester United: global brand, going mobile…but not as well as they could.
Later this year, Manchester United is launching an app that will stream their digital channel, MUTV. Launching an app for mobile streaming of Man U content is a sensible business decision. Mobile viewing is rapidly outstripping all other viewing, and team-specific apps are a great way to capture the direct attention of a team’s fan base.
The app is probably going to be a rousing success. Man U has a massive, loyal, global fan base, and mobile viewing is growing rapidly in popularity. I’m sure their profits will be huge.
But not as huge as they could be.
What, exactly, is the app is going to do? Let fans interact with each other? No. Chat with the broadcasters? No. Share out clips to your own social channels? If the creators of this app plan to do that, they’re not telling right now. User generated content? Not even close.
All of this is one-way content. Yes, it’s on mobile, but is that enough to make it cutting edge? I think that ‘television in your pocket’ is a very, very limited way of seeing mobile broadcasting.
Television is strictly one-way. The hierarchy between the content creator and the audience is clear, and the distance between them is huge. The creator sends things out, and the audience consumes them, and if they don’t choose to send an email or make a phone call to register their reaction to something, then the creators will never, ever get feedback.
But mobiles are hyper-personal. They’re interactive, and they’re kind of intimate. They ping and buzz and catch our attention all the time, in tiny ways that are noticeable only to ourselves. And most of us use them for two-way communication as much as we use them for one-way communication. The digital broadcasting platforms that are popular — Facebook, Youtube, Buzzfeed et al. — have user interaction built in. The promise of digital broadcasting is that everyone can be a broadcaster, and if you’re good enough, then build yourself an audience that waits for what you create, consumes it, and accepts your influence. Not without commentary, mind you. But still — there is the chance to rise above the crowd and be seen. Or rather, it’s the other way around: you can be seen, and the crowd can choose to lift you up. A hierarchy can be created, but the distance between creator and audience is variable.
I’m left puzzled about the MUTV app. Why would they elect to just transfer an old medium onto a new device? With the rich, transformative medium of interactive broadcasting available to you, why would they decide to ignore all of the value that could be created for everyone: fans, creators, and sponsors?
I still wish them luck. I know that the transformation of the media industry is going to take many years, and there are significant forces trying to maintain the status quo. But soon, those forces will weaken. Sponsorship money is running towards influencer-driven, multi-channel broadcasting. It’s what the viewers want, it’s what the sponsors want, and in the very near future, it will be the best possible business choice for rights-holders too. So I don’t think the next Man U app will look like this one.
I’m the co-founder of Speakerbox, a media tech company that is solving the problem of the extreme fragmentation of the audiences across all digital platforms. We’re giving content creators and rights-holders the power to build a unified audience out of these fragments. We’re also building realtime analytics so the producers can watch audience behaviour and make better decisions about how to create the effect they want. Want to talk about the future of media? Hit me up here on Medium, or send me an email at kirsten@speakerbox.tv.
