Get yourself connected

Gideon Spanier
14 Dec 2011

There are now more than 450 different electronic devices that people can use to watch the BBC's catch-up service iPlayer. That means people are watching shows such as Strictly Come Dancing and Frozen Planet on everything from laptops, smartphones and tablets to internet-connected TV set-top boxes and games consoles.

Daniel Danker, BBC general manager of On Demand, says it shows just how TV viewing has been transformed in recent years.

"Tablets have been the biggest surprise of the year," he says, noting the iPlayer app has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times on Apple iPad and 1.2 million on Android since February. This week, the BBC launched its first iPhone app for iPlayer, which promptly topped the iTunes download charts.

All of this might suggest viewing on the conventional TV set is falling. But that's not the case yet.

Britons are watching traditional "linear" channels for a record four hours a day. If anything, technology is deepening our relationship with TV. People with personal video recorders such as Sky+ tend to watch more telly. And many like to use their smartphone, tablet or laptop as a second screen in the home - to search, to shop or to communicate via social media - while watching TV.

Live viewing may even be on the rise as people talk on Twitter and Facebook. Zeebox, a new app, allows viewers to share comments about TV in real time.

So far then, the rise of multiple screens and internet-based video on demand (VoD) has been complementary, rather than substitutional. Teenagers may watch The Only Way Is Essex on VoD in their bedrooms. But the vast majority still like to view TV on a big, high-definition screen and in a family or group.

Yet some wonder if VoD on the main screen, as opposed to a second screen, might yet be a game-changer. Most new TV sets have internet capability, as do many set-top boxes and games consoles such as XBox and PlayStation.

"Are they a challenge to channels? Are they a challenge to platforms?" wonders Peter Bazalgette, former boss of Big Brother producer Endemol, who now chairs digital product placement firm MirriAd. "Does internet-connected TV destroy channels?"
There are signs of change. Cable TV subscriptions in America fell for the first time in 30 years.

Tough economic times may be a factor, but new VoD services such as the movie-streaming site NetFlix are also taking off. The BBC's Danker reports that in the UK a big chunk of catch-up viewing on iPlayer is now happening in BT Vision and Virgin Media homes with internet-enabled TV.

Next week, Microsoft expands its Xbox Live service on its game console to allow VoD from 40 new providers, including the BBC and Channel 4.

Crucially, as Microsoft says, it's about using "the biggest screen in the home". The average viewer is said to watch three times as much video on Xbox as a year ago.

Yet it is hard to see VoD triumphing in this early phase. Even Apple and Google have struggled to make headway. Just 5%-10% of TVs in the UK are internet-enabled and some can be fiddly to set up. According to Deloitte, Britons are as keen to buy a tablet as a new TV.

So Paul Lee, director of media research at Deloitte, believes conventional channels - with well-curated content - will continue to hold sway. "Are we going to radically transform the way we consume TV? Probably not," he says.

Ultimately, VoD will work best when it fits in seamlessly with the broadcast experience, so that the consumer might not even know it is powered by the web. That's what YouView, the much-delayed internet-enabled set-top box from the BBC, ITV, C4 and others, is meant to do when it launches next year.

The key challenge is how users move seamlessly between, say, TV, phone and tablet. Everyone from Apple to Sky and Facebook would love to "own" that relationship across multiple devices as it could be a gold mine for advertising.

"There is an obsession with trying to own the relationship," says Lee, but he expects most people will still "have multiple relationships with different providers".