Digitally bypassing the audience?
Television SF director Deltenre is planning for the digital future. She is relying more on experts and technical possibilities, the audience must follow.
Television SF director Deltenre is planning the digital future. She is relying more on experts and technical possibilities, and the audience must follow.That most soccer fans will have to make do with black bars on their home screens during the World Cup is well known. This is because the majority of viewers do not yet have appropriate televisions that take into account the cinema format (16:9). It is also known that the news will soon be available on cell phones. But just last week, SF Director Ingrid Deltenre made it clear to the public how these developments fit into SF's overall digital strategy for the future. In doing so, Deltenre named three alleged trends she is working from. She refers to these as "spectacle in living rooms," "mobile TV" and "drag-and-drop: everything on demand." In concrete terms, this means that cinema can make its way into the home - at least in terms of picture and sound quality - coupled with a huge pool of documentaries and TV films from the SF archive, which will be opened up to TV consumers for "TV on demand. And those who want to watch TV on the go will in future be able to call up corresponding services on their cell phones or other portable reception devices. "Any programming strategy, any corporate strategy that doesn't take this digital development into account would fail," Deltenre said. "SF must help shape the digital future."
Orientation to expertsComparing the SF strategy with the multi-part study "TV - Medium of the Future," which the SF marketer Publisuisse is currently conducting, it is striking that Deltenre is primarily oriented to experts and their ideas rather than to audience needs. According to the study, TV consumers are hardly interested in mobile TV - because of the picture size, the quality, the additional costs and the lack of atmosphere on the move. TV experts, on the other hand, consider location- and time-independent TV to be the pioneering development of the future of TV.
With the cinema experience at home, Deltenre also has different priorities than most TV consumers surveyed for the study - and also than most experts. If, on the other hand, SF opens up its archives for time-independent on-demand offerings, it will meet the needs of its audience exactly. However, there is still the question of what such offers will cost. Because the study clearly showed that TV consumers do not want to pay more than what they already spend on TV, radio, Internet and telephone: around CHF 100 per month.
One thing is clear: Deltenre's thoughts are not based on the Publisuisse study. The latter is too recent for that. Deltenre cited other sources in her remarks: For example, SF is monitoring demand on its repeats channel SF info, on its own weblogs, on teletext, as well as the download rates of broadcasts on its own websites. "Our broadcasts on the Internet are being accessed more and more frequently. There is a doubling of video-on-demand usage every year," said the SF director.
When it comes to mobile TV, however, Deltenre's argumentation becomes vague. "The audience increasingly wants supplementary, exclusive mobile TV content: short and mobile-friendly," she claims. SF knows from numerous tests that news is particularly important for mobile TV users. But the SF director knows little about the potential. "It's still difficult to estimate how our journalistic offerings will be used via mobile," she says. "We're only in the development and experimentation phase here."
Better quality in any caseWhether people want better sound and picture quality, Deltenre doesn't even ask, she just assumes. If you want time-independent TV, you need digital TV. And that implies better sound and picture quality. Deltenre will help those fee payers who do not consider this necessary: By delivering more black bars to their homes.
Markus Knöpfli
Orientation to expertsComparing the SF strategy with the multi-part study "TV - Medium of the Future," which the SF marketer Publisuisse is currently conducting, it is striking that Deltenre is primarily oriented to experts and their ideas rather than to audience needs. According to the study, TV consumers are hardly interested in mobile TV - because of the picture size, the quality, the additional costs and the lack of atmosphere on the move. TV experts, on the other hand, consider location- and time-independent TV to be the pioneering development of the future of TV.
With the cinema experience at home, Deltenre also has different priorities than most TV consumers surveyed for the study - and also than most experts. If, on the other hand, SF opens up its archives for time-independent on-demand offerings, it will meet the needs of its audience exactly. However, there is still the question of what such offers will cost. Because the study clearly showed that TV consumers do not want to pay more than what they already spend on TV, radio, Internet and telephone: around CHF 100 per month.
One thing is clear: Deltenre's thoughts are not based on the Publisuisse study. The latter is too recent for that. Deltenre cited other sources in her remarks: For example, SF is monitoring demand on its repeats channel SF info, on its own weblogs, on teletext, as well as the download rates of broadcasts on its own websites. "Our broadcasts on the Internet are being accessed more and more frequently. There is a doubling of video-on-demand usage every year," said the SF director.
When it comes to mobile TV, however, Deltenre's argumentation becomes vague. "The audience increasingly wants supplementary, exclusive mobile TV content: short and mobile-friendly," she claims. SF knows from numerous tests that news is particularly important for mobile TV users. But the SF director knows little about the potential. "It's still difficult to estimate how our journalistic offerings will be used via mobile," she says. "We're only in the development and experimentation phase here."
Better quality in any caseWhether people want better sound and picture quality, Deltenre doesn't even ask, she just assumes. If you want time-independent TV, you need digital TV. And that implies better sound and picture quality. Deltenre will help those fee payers who do not consider this necessary: By delivering more black bars to their homes.
Markus Knöpfli
