mipTV 2010 – Show Us the Money, Go Mobile and Keep Your Eye on the Screenagers: They are Not Like Us!

It’s the first time in 8 years I was in Cannes, France with no pressure to sell anything yet the word I heard most during the mipTV 2010 conference was “monetize”. 
The message couldn’t be clearer: The free internet ride is over. It’s time for users start paying for good content. They just have to get used to the idea first and good payment models have to be created.

All the other times I was at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes for various tradeshows over the last many years, I was keeping my eyes open for potential clients to sell CD and DVD manufacturing and packaging services to. This time, as an assistant for the EU-funded Interreg project E-Clic via Howest University College West Flanders, I was there to network and to learn. Though not exactly a lay-person in the world of social and cross media, I, like everyone else, could always benefit from some brushing-up on the ever-changing trends in the new media fields. After all, another clear message at mipTV was that if your business or organization is not engaged in social networks then it won’t exist because nobody is going to find it.

 In other words: I Twitter, therefore I am…

This year’s mipTV was all about “Fresh Content and New Deals”, according to its tag words and believe me, tag words are where it’s at these days – along with content of course. Tags are one of the main things that bring people into websites so you had better be sure you are using them well if you are trying to get people to visit yours.

 

But the thing is, people have had it with all the chaos of the web. Yes – tags work when doing a Google search, for example, but who wants one-million websites to choose from when searching for a nearby restaurant when a good mobile app will get you to one right away and 3G Augmented Reality will guide you directly to it via your iPHONE. And chances are that Google searches will soon be a thing of the past anyway. The days of wasting time searching will soon be over, according to many of the experts at mipTV. But with that, the free ride we have all been on will be coming to an end too – for good content anyway. You want good and fast content? Well, bad news – you’re going to have to start paying for it!

That’s of course good news for service providers and advertisers. And in fact, it will end up being good news for the consumer too, or so we are being told.  Most of the speakers at various presentations during the conference came to the conclusion that people are willing to pay for value – if the price is right. There will always be freeloaders but there will also always be freemiums – and that’s where the money is at online. Start out free, get the user wanting more and better and then charge them for the extra service. It will become harder and harder for them to say no and easier and easier for them to pay.
As futurist and trend-watcher Gerd Leonhard put it: “Free makes no sense if you don’t have anything after free”.

Though most agree that it won’t always be easy to monetize online content, it’s clear that 2010-2011 will be the years in which the terms of trade get set and various pay models start popping up. What might start out as free, will slowly evolve into: enter for free and feel free to browse but if you want really good service and content, which we know you do, click here to pay the low fee of… and dive on in! C’mon! We know you want to! You think you are happy now with all this free information? Well, wait until you see how happy you will be with our premium service… C’mon! Everyone is doing it!
And this is really nothing new, is it? Think about it. In our lives away from the world-wide-web, if we can even remember those lives anymore, we were used to such pay models. It won’t take long for us to make the switch online too. After all, we want it all! And we want it now!
Speaking of now – what are you doing wasting time online via your computer or netbook when you could be using mobile, which is always right at your fingertips?
 
According to some experts at mipTV, the days of Web 2.0 are a thing of the past. Welcome to the world of “Media 3.0”! New buzz word or not, mobile IS the buzz right now, no question about it.
As Claire Boonstra, Co-Founder of the Dutch company Layer, put it: “Mobile helps you out. It’s instant. It can help you out in your everyday life and filter out all the extra information that is useless to you”. She later added: “Mobile web will be way more engaging. Apps are temporary”.

Wait a minute! Did she just say that mobile apps are temporary? Did I hear that right? And guess what – she wasn’t the only one to say that. Kurt Sillen, Head of Customer Business Development at Ericsson in Sweden, was the one to bring up the idea in the first place saying that mobile browsers will offer such a superior service to apps that apps will be gone before we know it.
But CEO of USA App site, Mobile Roadie, Michael Schneider was of course having none of it and said that until mobile web becomes as “sexy” and user friendly as the app, that apps are here to stay. He also pointed out that these days; more people are searching for information and goods via apps than via the web. So there!

 

No need to worry if you are web wild or go ape over apps – the conclusion is that we don’t need to think in just one way about all this – we need to think ALL ways. Every market is different and new markets are surfacing each day – all with different needs and likes. What is clear at this stage in the game is that if you are not thinking mobile first, you’re in trouble – as Gerd Leonhard put it. Leonhard added that mobile consumption of – and the conversation around – digital goods is the number one growth story right now. Several speakers at mipTV spoke about emerging markets for mobile, some quoting stats such as these: there are 1.7 billion people online via PC and 4.6 billion mobile subscribers.

Patrick Walker, Director of Video Partnerships for YouTube, UK, said: “Mobile web consumption will sky-rocket in 5 years. It’s all about the browser. Users have strong expectations that content they want should be available 24/7”.

One speaker pointed out how statistics are starting to show that people are going online via their mobile phone apps just before they go to sleep each night, probably because it’s the most portable way to check their email and update their Facebook and Twitter pages while in bed.
Kevin Slavin, Managing Director of Area/Code Entertainment in The States and of the just launched company Starling, recalled thinking in the earlier days of mobile phones as these little computers in your pockets.  “We were always thinking about what this little computer could do.”

 

Did you know, for example, that in Japan, more than 60% of people watch TV on their mobile screens and that reading books on your mobile screen is quite a normal thing to do there? One of the most amusing moments at mipTV was after a short screening of “Detective X”, a mobile novel / television show made in Japan, when the Japanese guest speaker innocently asked the perplexed audience: “You don’t have that on your mobiles”?

Different markets, different desires.
Even more amusing, right after the Japanese mobile detective novel screening, was when a speaker from the BBC used his time on stage to advertise the amazing, wonderful, not-to-be-matched product of the decade –drum roll please- the iPAD!

The iPAD is already taking America by storm and has a long waiting-list in Europe, as the larger screen seems to appeal to many in those cultures as opposed to the smaller mobile screen embraced so much in Japan and used, for lack of other options, by so many in African nations.

Experts at mipTV predicted that the iPAD, or similar larger-screened devices, would reach 50 million people within the next 18 months.  They will be the Kindle killers and won’t do print media any favors either. They will, however, help increase digital newspaper and magazine reading pleasure, which in turn will help digital media have a better platform from which to charge users for viewing content.
 

According to experts at mipTV, the iPAD will also be a further boost for the ever-growing online game market, which is spreading like wildfire and already generating money. And perhaps most importantly, the iPAD will play a role in “media meshing” and “convergence”, bringing all sorts of “screen shifts” to the forefront.

Just look at kids today.

As Gerd Leonhard deadpanned, “these people are not like us”. He explained that media for kids today means “click, play, watch” and not even download anymore.
Rudy de Waele, Chief Networking Officer of DotOpen in Spain, referred to today’s youth as “screenagers”, noting that they have been brought up with screens – all sorts of screens in different shapes and sizes. “Watch what teenagers are doing”, de Waele advised, further explaining that while watching TV, teenagers these days are always connected to the internet at the same time, chatting with friends and sending text messages on their mobiles. The iPAD will fit in well to this scenario as well, he said. “We grew up lying down on a sofa. They want to interact. They are engaging with peers. This new generational shift is activating all these things.
 


“These things”, for example, are companies such as Kevin Slavin’s Starling, where the focus is on converging programs on television with related conversations on social media sites, creating back-stories to TV programs and many more co-viewing experiences and possibilities via a mix of TV, mobile and the web.
A “social watching” landscape is starting to form through which “screenagers” and everyone else will be able to know what their friends and neighbors are watching.
“I probably want to watch what my friends are watching”, said Slavin. He explained that this sort of convergence and these sorts of cross-media conversations are already happening in a chaotic and ad-hoc way. The question now is how to optimize it and make it all interconnect.
Slavin used this quote to illustrate his belief that via cross-media platforms television viewing will return to its roots in theater where people shared an experience:
 “It’s the crowd that releases storytelling magic -the essential, communal, multiplied wonder”.


 
 He said it’s perverse that for all these years there have been five to ten million people watching TV all alone and predicted that within one year we’ll be doing it all together.
“It’s the end of the magic laugh box”, explained Slavin. “From here on out it’s genuine, for better or for worse. We can feel each other in a way we couldn’t feel each other before. Laughter comes from everywhere and everywhere is where we are going to go”.
Video, according to many of the mipTV panel speakers, is also going to know no bounds and be everywhere and on every sort of screen causing a “mobile video explosion”. If you haven’t embraced video yet on your websites, in your advertisements, etc…, well, it time you started. It’s a medium that every type of screen will need to take advantage of. Your iPAD can even become a tool for video production while you are on the run. So start learning how to make videos or find the right people who can!
 


What couldn’t be stressed enough at mipTV was that if your company or organization is not taking advantage of social media websites and adjusting business and advertising models to fit into creating a constantly up-to-date company profile – online – where conversation and dialogue is taking place with clients and potential clients, then you will cease to exist in the near future.

Media Futurist  Gerd Leonhard  urged every company to have a “digital ambassador” who keeps track of and takes part in the conversations going on online about your product, brand or service. “You need to own this conversation”, he said, adding, “if you don’t have Twitter, Facebook, etc…, then you won’t exist…”

Kurt Sillen from Ericsson warned against sitting in existing business models that only act as limiting factors these days. He said there are “tons of means out there” and that everyone should be moving fully into the digital landscape.

The best sentiment by far at mipTV was during a discussion about branded entertainment when one of the speakers said: “A brand can be built over decades but can be disrupted in 140 characters”.

In the chaotic world of too much information and too much content to weed through online, leave it to a conversation at mipTV with Chole Sladden of Twitter, to come up with this all-telling, fewer-than-140 characters statement:
 “Simplicity can be very powerful”.
So go on reader! Get Tweeting and dive into the digital world already, while it’s still cheap, and the mobile world while it’s hot - so you don’t cease to exist!
And order an iPAD already, will ya!


-By Sarah Markewich – project assistant – E-Clic at Howest University College West Flanders