It’s a little early for Halloween, but ghosts and goblins have been circling the broadcasting business for some time now. If you spent any time at the National Association of Broadcasters’ annual New York conference last week, you couldn’t avoid them: the explosion of consumer content choices, especially in ad-free environments such as Netflix; widespread declining ratings and the Hunger Games-like battle for a hit; and cord-cutting of the traditional cable bundle with the fall-off of subscriber fees to match.
Although these challenges aren’t going anywhere, the broadcasters are building the fortifications on several fronts to fight for their continued relevance to the public and the advertising industry that have jointly supported them for the better part of a century.
Embracing next-generation (“Next Gen”) technology
I wish I could avoid the nomenclature, but I can’t. The broadcast industry is still struggling to promote “Next Gen TV” rather than the oh-so-not-sexy moniker ATSC 3.0 for the next generation broadcast television transmission standard. To start, the industry needs to ramp up the brave PR battle. Although I’ve seen reports that 55% of the public doesn’t know what Next Gen TV is, that sounds like a pretty media-savvy set of respondents to me. I would bet that on the streets of New York, right outside the NAB conference’s Javits Center home, you wouldn’t find anything very close to 45% familiarity with Next Gen TV.
