It is time to move on, traditional TV!!

Back then, we would use yellow pages to search for numbers and addresses, may it be a restaurant or a hospital, or any other service. Now we use Zomato and Justdial. We have moved from stamped envelopes to emails to blogs and social networks. Digital marketing trends over the traditional marketing methods. Digitization is affecting the way we communicate with others, our preferences for entertainment, and ultimately, the way we obtain all types of information.

When all this is digitizing and moving forward, why not media?!! Television is undergoing a digital revolution too.

Starting out as just a DVD rental company online, Netflix has now grown into the largest networks ever.  Hollywood being one of America’s most influential exports, Netflix has become a dominant portal for the product. As old media constantly competes and tries to keep pace with the new modes through which viewers consume content, Netflix has managed to stay ahead of the curve and become virtually ubiquitous in the US and shows rising strength abroad too (with 23 million international subscribers). In total, with over 65 million subscribers, Netflix is a global media program with increasing profitability.

Internet and streaming has always been bringing new competitors. In 2011, Amazon made its streaming video service, Instant Video, available free to every customer who signs up for Amazon Prime program. Subscribers for Amazon Prime exceed twenty million, the numbers growing each day. Apple TV has been launched to stream internet into TV and keeps updating every other year.

What you just read is the international scenario. Moving over to the Indian domain, look at players like Sony and Star TV. SonyLiv was launched in 2013, arriving as a boon to viewers, because this let them stream their favorite shows online. It also provided access to a lot of movies in English, Hindi and regional languages. Star TV launched its own platform, called HotStar, in 2014, which became active in 2015 right in time to stream the 2015 Cricket World Cup. By late 2015, its Alexa ranking was already under 2500. Now HotStar tops as the online source for sports in top 6 metros.

This becomes such a win-win situation for publishers and advertisers. When more people watch TV on the internet, advertisers can easily focus on running more campaigns over them. For publishers who provide the right content, it is all the more traffic to your sites.  For cable companies, it comes down to their ability to adapt to the changes occurring due to customer expectations. They have a window of time in which to do this. The window is defined by three basic factors. How quickly are solutions for entertainment going to find alternative internet TV routes to consumers? How quickly can the solutions deliver on the devices on which consumers want to watch this content? And how quickly can the internet take over satellite and become universal?

On one hand, when most TV networks are moving towards the internet, there are still some networks which believe that traditional TV will indeed triumph and have not taken any steps toward migration. When Reed Hastings Approached the CEO of Blockbuster networks in 2000 to build up a partnership, Blockbuster was not interested. And when Blockbuster wanted to introduce subscription in 2004, Netflix was way ahead of it and Blockbuster was too late. TV is eventually going to be internet dominated. We might just be entering the era where smart TVs would rule the way we enjoyed our entertainment, with apps across them to stream content from the internet. It is a world of cord-cutters out there and internet TV is the only way to bait them. Internet TV is going to be the new black, and conservative TV networks might as well join the revolution!