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Television on the internet
With life becoming ever busier it can be a struggle to find the time to catch your favourite television shows, so New Zealand’s broadcasters are making their content available online. Matthew Backhouse takes a look at TVNZ ondemand. So you’ve missed Shortland Street because of a late meeting, or perhaps you want to watch the evening news without having to wait for the late edition? Not to worry. It’s all available at the click of a mouse, without the hassle of programming your DVD recorder. Welcome to the future of television. As traditional television audiences and platforms become increasingly fragmented, broadcasters are strengthening their online presences. It’s not hard to see why – the internet has the potential to revolutionise the role of broadcasters in much the same way that blogging has had a major impact on print media. One of the exciting developments making such freedom possible is video-on-demand. It’s a similar concept to YouTube, but instead of grainy home-made videos, the content consists of the same high-quality programmes you’d usually watch on television. And video-on-demand has plenty of other benefits; there are no ad-breaks, the full-screen picture quality is superb, and you can watch your favourite shows whenever your schedule allows. Video-on-demand is by no means a new concept, but conventional broadcasters only began to realise its true potential following the success of two very different enterprises. YouTube, the video-sharing website which allows users to upload their own content, set the benchmark for online video distribution, while the BBC’s online television archiving project has proved that generating revenue and serving the public interest can go hand in hand. Now an increasing number of television networks, eager to stake their claim in the online market, are launching their own video-on-demand services. The NBC’s hulu.com website is one such venture already attracting a huge amount of attention. By offering user-generated content alongside conventional television programming, hulu.com is well positioned to chip away at YouTube’s market dominance while making its own content more widely available. New Zealand’s broadcasters are also catching on to the potential. Launched last year, TVNZ ondemand allows visitors to watch the latest local and international content, as well as programmes from the TVNZ archives, at no cost. TVNZ’s Head of Emerging Business, Jason Paris, says TVNZ ondemand appeals to a wide audience. “It’s a great example of TVNZ’s vision of ‘Inspiring New Zealanders on Every Screen’,” he says. “New Zealanders [have] the opportunity to catch up on their favourite shows where and when they want to.” Paris explains how the new service came about. “TVNZ ondemand was launched first and foremost as a catch up service to drive viewership of our FTA [free-to-air] channels and secondly as a significant public value initiative by making content from our archives more accessible,” he says. The website is already proving popular, with over fifty-thousand visitors in June and “a new record of 382,000 streamed events,” according to Cormac van den Hoofdakker, TVNZ’s Digital and Emerging Business Brand Manager. “TVNZ ondemand has been an absolute success,” he says, adding that viewership is likely to increase in the coming months. The most popular programme on TVNZ ondemand include Shortland Street, Moon TV, ONE News, and TVNZ’s current affairs shows, which attract thousands of viewers every month. Nevertheless, there is still more to be done. “We would like to see an increase in people visiting and spending more time on the site,” says Paris. Much has been done to achieve this goal already. Earlier in the year, TVNZ ondemand made all of its pay-per-download content available for free. “We quickly learned that consumers preferred an ad supported model over a paid download model,” says van den Hoofdakker. “We have now moved to a 100% ad supported free to view service.” The range of content has also being expanded to include exclusive web material, such as the widely publicised 50-minute video of James Blunt performing live in Kosovo. TVNZ ondemand has also embraced Web 2.0 functionality by partnering with well-known video sharing and social networking sites. “On Bebo we now have a TVNZ ondemand player where you can watch TVNZ shows, and viewers can share them on their own pages,” explains van den Hoofdakker. “Additionally we have partnered with YouTube, the first such partnership in Australasia, to provide access to selected TVNZ ondemand content through YouTube.” Jason Paris says the intention of these initiatives is “to make it easier for New Zealanders to view, comment on, upload and share content with each other anywhere, anytime.” Some critics might argue that New Zealand isn’t quite ready for TVNZ ondemand, given our relatively slow internet speeds. Jason Paris disagrees, however. “Because our content is streamed you get a reasonable experience even if you are on dial-up,” he says. “However it would be good to see not only the penetration of broadband but the speed of broadband improve sooner rather than later.” In the future, New Zealand’s free-to-air broadcasters may well decide to band together to deliver on-demand video content. “That’s certainly a possibility,” says Steve Browning, CEO of the Freeview television consortium. “BBC, ITV and C4 have just announced a thing called Kangaroo – God knows why they called it that – which is just them saying ‘Hold on, we’ve all been doing our own on-demand services from our own websites, maybe we need to aggregate’. So that’s a bit of a Freeview model – all the free-to-airs getting together to do it.” Whether or not New Zealand gets such a service remains to be seen, but in the meantime there’s plenty to be inspired by. Online video-on-demand is well and truly here. www.tvnzondemand.co.nz 
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