SMEast 2007: Your action items

Steve Safran May 16th, 2007

As I was sitting with Keith Norman from Waterman Broadcasting (Ft. Myers, Florida, the winter home of the best-in-baseball Boston Red Sox), he offered me some good advice about my earlier presentation. Keith suggested that I needed to add some best practices and action items into the presentation. Keith’s right. I tend to get a little worked up in these presentations, and it’s good to list some takeaways on items you can start to implement today. So thanks for the feedback, Keith. (As he self-effacingly apologized for offering up the advice, I told him it beat the standard “Hey, Safran, you have no idea what you’re talking about” I often get.) Here are your action items from Streaming Media East 2007:

Be more reliant on yourself. I tried my best to cause a dustup with Fox Interactive Media honcho Ron Berryman by suggesting that Fox was subverting the locals by going straight to the audience. Little did I suspect he’d agree. And he took the idea a step further: “Local television stations have a lot of work to do. They’re used to packaging programs. Our challenge is having these people become creative…. We’ve got to be innovative to keep (the local) customer online and keep the advertising money.”

Create more content. Nothing new here, especially if you’re a regular reader or member of the LR Faithful. It’s just that there are more examples - and more success stories - than ever. I loved the example from Mariana Danilovic, the VP of Business Development at MediaZone. She talked about how MediaZone helped take the traditional Wimbledon coverage and turn it into a multichannel event. How do you “long tail” Wimbledon? “We’re (putting) professionally-produced media onto broadband media that wasn’t available before,” said Danilovic. “We’re putting up the world feed of Wimbledon – nine simultaneous video feeds, longform video highlights, archival footage, (and) player interviews – lots of new ways to get information you don’t get on television.” Locals probably aren’t covering the Wimbledons of the world, but they do cover local events - marathons and such - and they use a ton of resources for the TV product. Putting a few of those resources into multicasting would do worlds of good.

If you’ve got good quality video, flaunt it. The technology now exists that overturns the last objection broadcasters had to web video - the old prejudice that “it’s not broadcast quality.” It’s now better than broadcast quality under some circumstances, and certainly damn near it in most other circumstances. Of course, getting there requires investment. That brings us to…

Invest in your future. I wrote about the thing I like most about this conference: nobody disagrees about the technology. There are no “us vs. them” camps. While traditional video outlets abdicate their roles, many others come along to fill the demand. An investment of $100,000 - $200,000 in a top-flight production and content management system doesn’t strike new web video companies as an insurmountable barrier to entry. (Compare that to a TV station’s operations budget.) The web is not an expense: it’s an investment. But only if you…

Sell the web the way the web wants to be sold. This is something of an anti-takeaway. Still too much talk here about CPM sales. Martin Nisenholtz talked about the unspeakably large number of video streams the NYTimes.com would have to pump out every month to make a respectable amount of money - at a hefty $60 CPM. Won’t happen. But take that content, turn it into lots of niche verticals in Manhattan? Gold mine.

Take inspiration from the innovators. This one’s easy. Look at the great tools that keep emerging, and the websites that are pumping out high-quality content. Ask what your station can do along those lines. Set up a business plan. Produce the broadband video channel. Local TV still has the archives and the ability to generate the video. It does, however, need to embrace leaner production techniques as part of the overall production process. It’s not a matter of “either broadcast quality or crap.” It’s “some for broadcast, some for web, some for mobile.” To each platform, their own content.

Don’t try to define the audience. Define the niches. Too much of traditional TV thinking is about “our audience” as in “what kind of show does our audience want?” But online, everyone is their own audience. How do you market to that? Especially to a generation that doesn’t want to be defined? Jeff Kauffman, VP of Content and Programming for nbcc: “There is a shift in the way we need to figure out the consumer. The traditional way is to look at what most of the people are going to do most of the time. It’s a lot harder to say ‘this is the only place you can interact with a friend.’ People segment out their behavior situationally… I think they take pride in being undefinable.” Go for more choices with smaller audiences instead.

Let Dan Rayburn run your convention. The recurring site at any Streaming Media conference is organizer Dan Rayburn. Dan could be like many of us - content to write for a living, occasionally mouth off, and let the world sort itself out. Instead, he puts on these events that must involve more paperwork and meetings than I could possibly imagine. The technical snafus at hotels continue to be nightmares, (this is no fault of the convention, it lies with what the hotel can manage to eek out) and Dan is usually seen running around from room to room, often checking the wiring himself. As I was plugging in the Mac cable for my presentation, Dan Rayburn - the conference organizer - asked me if I needed a hand. That’s a details guy.

So, Keith - how’d I do?