TV Distribution – A Rapidly Changing Environment

MAY 29, 2012 12:05 AM| no comments

Summer would certainly seem to have arrived here at WebsEdge. But it’s not just the temperatures that are rising as we jump into a very busy conference season.

We’re just wrapping up our broadcast at the World Conference on Quality and Improvement in Anaheim, California and we’re soon off to the American Society on Engineering Education’s annual event in San Antonio, Texas. Both fascinating events focusing on engineering excellence and innovation. Producing the programmes has been really rewarding and has allowed us to work with many outstanding companies and universities.

One of our other recent events was the American Psychiatric Association’s annual conference in Philadelphia . Now you wouldn’t think that all this activity allows for much reflection but whilst presenting our shows for the APA I got to thinking about how much television – particularly the area in which we work – has changed.

Now our mantra is linking issues with audiences. And that all starts with great content – a fairly obvious but often overlooked fact. At the conference we then distribute this content in many different ways to make sure the audience gets every chance to see it.

We start by playing the programmes in the delegate’s hotel rooms, which remains extremely popular. And we also show all the footage on screens around the conference centre itself and at our purpose made studio at the event. And lets say these traditional forms of distribution remain extremely effective.

But there is no getting away from the fact that things are changing! We’re seeing an enormous growth in social media that manifests itself in two main ways. People are using social media – particularly twitter – to provide a running commentary to what they are watching. It’s a way of connecting to their friends and colleagues who may or may not be watching the same programme.
This real time opinion stream is sometimes positive, sometimes negative, but never predictable.

The second interesting development is the use of mobile devices. In Philadelphia over 20% of our digital viewers were through mobile devices. Last year that category would hardly of existed. This obviously changes the whole dynamic of our audience as people can now watch the programmes not only wherever they want to but whenever they want to as well. Interestingly in Philadelphia we also found that almost two thirds of our digital viewers were women.

Which only goes to show, I think, that the traditional values behind our work stays the same whilst the technology used in its distribution is evolving at a frenetic pace.

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