by Andrew Einspruch
Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch attended Screen Forever 2013, the conference of Screen Producers Australia, this past year and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s kindly allowing us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.
With VOD, catch-up viewing, second screens, time-shifting, cord cutting and all manner of changes looming over the content consumption landscape, it makes sense to ask, as a session did at Screen Forever 2013, “Sorry, Where Has My Audience Gone?” Andrew Einspruch tells us that the answer might surprise.
Let`s cut to the chase. Australian audiences are still couch potatoes. According to statistics shown by Dough Peiffer, CEO of OzTam, the TV audience measurement company, in 2008, the average time viewed (ATV) in the five main cities was 3:08. That`s three hours and eight minutes per person per day watching broadcast TV.
Flash forward to 2013, and the number is smaller, but not a lot — 3:03. So even with all the new technologies, devices and competing media, the amount of time Aussies sit in front of the box has been pretty steady.
Not what you might have guessed. If the question is “where`s the audience gone”, the answer, at one level, is “nowhere”.
Total use of the TV set has actually gone up, even if what is being done with it is in the throes of shifting. Live viewing declined from 2010-11 to 2012-13 from 12.5% to 11.7%. In the same period, playback went from 0.7% to 1.0%. The biggest change is everything else, the “Other Screen Usage” category, which went from 2.9% to 3.8%. This is all the other things people do with their sets, like playing with the XBox, watching a DVD, or streaming from the Apple TV.
So changes are happening, just not at a cataclysmic rate (yet). Take time-shifted viewing as an example, where people watch a show within seven days of the live broadcast. The most time shifted program in 2013 was the final ofPacked to the Rafters, which saw an extra 257,000 people watch the show after the original broadcast, an increase of just under 20%.
Unfortunately, those extra viewers may not be as valuable to advertisers as live viewers, as they are more likely to skip ads. Still, that growth in audience is worth having.
What happens after seven days? Not much, really. In statistics never before seen in public, Peiffer said that total TV in prime time gains around 60,000 people from Day 8 to Day 28. If the live audience is 25.7% percent of total people, and time shifting out to seven days ads another 1.9%, the playback from days 8-28 adds just 0.4% more. This seems to indicate is that shows are watched pretty close to broadcast, or not at all.
Note that these numbers don`t include devices that are not connected to the OzTam box in the person`s house. If someone is watching on an iPad or a smartphone, the view does not get picked up. As viewing moves to these devices, capturing those views becomes increasingly important.
Lisa Walsh, Head of Audience Research at the ABC talked about catch-up services, saying they are a chance to extend the reach and time spent with the broadcaster and with a program. The ABC`s service, iView, has already recorded 19 million program plays, but it hasn`t replace broadcast by any stretch. It is more about supplementing and complimenting viewing. Only 1% of the audience watches ABC programming exclusively through iView. That compares to 10% of the viewing audience coming to iView during a given week, and 27% visiting iView at any time.
Walsh said that iView use is growing among both adults and children. While kids are very strong for them, the biggest growth in iView use is by males under 50. However, they may not be tuning in to watch a whole show. If people hear that the first part of The Gruen Transfer was funny, they can use iView to catch up with just that segment.
One of the more interesting bits of information to come out of the session was not a statistic, but more on how the statistics were gathered. Peiffer talked about the device OzTam uses to collect its data. “Measuring a TV set is actually relatively easy. It is measuring an appliance. It doesn`t require cooperation from a broadcaster or anyone else,” he said. “Cooperation from the household is what we get. There`s a meter on the TV that picks up the audio. We match the audio — think, like Shazam [the music identification app]. We`ve got a reference set of channels that we match to, and that`s how we get the ratings. In there as well, the household will log in, say, to the ABC for the family. That`s quite simple. We`re measuring an appliance and what people do on that appliance.”
What is tricky is when you get to a device like an iPad or an iPhone. “You can`t hang a meter off of it. It would be bigger than the iPad itself,” said Peiffer. “So then you try to measure by taking the stream data, or by getting inside the Apple system or the Android system, and put software in there to figure out what they are doing.”
And even if you can solve that technical problem, there remains the issue of who is actually using the device. Is it an adult, or a child who has been handed it to keep them quiet? The devices are shared, especially tablets. Apart from making guesses based on what is being watched, you can`t tell.
It is also important distinguish between a person viewing a program versus streams or program plays. Lay people hear that a show had 500,000 plays on iView, and think of it as an additional 500,000 viewers. But it is not. It`s not a people number, it`s a play, and that is different.
John Grono, CEO of Gap Research also spoke to this, saying that what gets measured online are “stream starts”, and that there may be five of these for an hour commercial TV show, since these shows are broken up with ads when they are sent down the pipe. He emphasised that it is easy to overstate the impact of streaming if these stream starts are not properly accounted for.
But the big picture is that things are changing. Yes, the big screen in the lounge room remains the screen of choice, but not always. If you are watching something a bit raunchy, like Game of Thrones, you might shuffle that off to an iPad in the bedroom for more privacy. Binge watching is on the increase, and broadcasters continue to look for events to hang their hats on, since an event, like sports or a one-off celebration, will bring a captive audience to the TV at a particular time, which is, of course, what the advertisers continue to want.
The simple fact is, it is now really hard for a broadcaster to deliver two million people at a sitting to an advertiser, something that was not nearly as hard just a few years ago. Audiences are fragmenting across channels, across devices , across services, and and across time.
For people like Peiffer and Walsh, this means the task of knowing where the audience has gone is only going to get harder.
Andrew Einspruch is a producer with Wild Pure Heart Productions. His latest projects are the feature film The Farmer, and the web seriesWisdom from the Paddock. You can follow him on Twitter at @einspruch and Facebook at Andrew Einspruch.
