The business opportunities are now here, in a world where the consumption of video both from traditional television, pay, and, of course, through digital media, is on the rise.
Juan Pablo Morales*
Now, more than ever, it is necessary to know how Internet video works, how we can have communications with the lowest possible latency, how we can make video conferences and online events with a different, innovative, entertaining and pleasant realization and how we can reconnect with our audiences through formats that speak to their ears.
The adoption of communication practices through video has advanced in three months which, in other circumstances, would have evolved in several years. Work at home, technology-assisted education, digital journalism, online events, marketing, health care, fitness and exercise, parent meetings in schools, concerts and online celebrations of family birthdays, are some examples of activities that were usually done in person and that are done and safely, even if we wake up unexpectedly in a world without a pandemic, they will continue to be done through online video and video conferencing technologies in a high percentage from now on.
When all this was just going to begin, I came to think that those of us who had lines of business in television production and in video streaming technologies for live events, would have a dry brake on our turnover than the aeronautical industry. Fortunately, however, I couldn't have been more wrong.
A few days after the pandemic crisis and confinement began, I began to receive calls from many people, clients and referrals looking for advice, ideas and quick solutions to virtualize their day to day in many aspects. It was surprising how many people and companies were desperately looking for solutions to integrate streaming into their activities, to facilitate meetings, streamline decision-making or not to lose the links built with their users, customers and suppliers over decades.
The world stopped, but telecommunications began to spin faster than ever and online video-based solutions are perhaps at their best. Streaming stopped, it gained momentum and now nothing can stop it.
It was also expected that the companies that own the large VOD platforms and videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom, would have an accelerated growth in their sales and market capitalization, as well as cyber attacks on their technological structures.
And the best part about all of this is that it became apparent that it's not all about technology, it's about culture. The technology has been here. WebRTC has been waiting for years for a recognized massification, video through social networks has been waiting for its opportunity, online video advertising was not yet equal to traditional advertising, telemedicine has been looking for patients for decades. But the culture only lacked a push, which unfortunately came to it in this way.
Regulation, which is always slower than technology and creativity, has been left almost without any floor in terms of regulations in topics such as e-learning and telemedicine. Universities had to rediseseñarse in a matter of weeks to educate by Teams and doctors to prescribe by WhatsApp. Now you have to react because surely few will want to return to a classroom or a waiting room.
The global connectivity infrastructure now has, more than ever, the enormous responsibility to strengthen, expand coverage, bandwidths and surely, to reduce barriers to access to the entire population, since it will be, for a long time, the safest way to communicate.
It is for this reason that in an era where it is convenient to recognize in advance where the dam will break, being aware of the advances in technology, becomes a condition of enormous advantage.
The word is not to reinvent oneself, but to reoreint oneself.
Video consumption on the rise
The business opportunities are now here, in a world where the consumption of video both from traditional television, pay, and, of course, through digital media, is on the rise.
According to TheDrum, increased video consumption has been reported in all regions of the world amid the Coronavirus crisis. While Netflix's growth added a record 16 million new subscribers globally, people's overall online time has increased by more than 50%. Likewise, advertising is looking for the emotional tone to connect with audiences, nothing else in the United Kingdom, 42% of consumers are looking for informative content about Covid-19, while 35% are waiting for their advertising content to make them react positively and awaken feelings of warmth and happiness.
This is how digital content channels, such as EnchufeTV, which I can pleasantly talk about because of my closeness to them, and of which similar models surely also exist in many parts of the world, have had to imagine a clearly different world and give a twist to the traditional scripts with which they used to work, changing, not in the background, but in form, to move to formats designed to be recorded by talent from their own homes. I invite you to watch your live channel, where you have found a way to connect with live audiences, with interactive models that make them closer, show them more vulnerable, bring them closer as more human. I must pick up on some wonderful words taken recently from the Los Angeles Times where they talked about the enormous need today to produce credible versions of what used to be everyday on TV, but with the resources now available in our homes.
In the television industry we now have a very big challenge. We must design production models, minimize the amount of labor by strengthening the skills of human resources, implement the way to guarantee safety for the crew and talent in each set, strengthen the ways for the traffic of content to post-production and start thinking about stories to tell, so that they connect better, in the midst of our reality.
The word is not to reinvent oneself, but to simplify oneself.
Creativity and interaction
The war for users' attention is now more energetic than ever. The big TV channels, owners of huge production budgets, now have access to the same cameras, lights and microphones as many of our children. The facility to produce content and distribute it is now, and will continue for many months, totally democratic. The difference is in creativity and interactivity. And on this, gamers, YouTubers, TikTokers and Instagramers are far ahead.
So, what can we learn from all of them: the secret is in interactivity and in the delivery of valuable content.
For this reason, Zoom became not only one of the most used platforms in conferences or corporate meetings or on which the discussions of legislators are based, but also the tool to stream an infinity of webinars and remote interviews. Interactivity definitely became the inseparable queen of content.
I have precisely been approached to help some firms design and execute their assemblies, where even 15 seconds of latency are now almost unacceptable. Real-time interactivity, even without 5G, is here to stay.
It is here where the technologies and workflows developed under WebRTC begin to have an important weight within the tools with which it is important to integrate, with a great advantage: they seem a communication tunnel that manages to interconnect with latencies less than one second to its users. If we integrate communication technologies through social networks, surveys, voting and surveys, the results can be very powerful. Again, above all: the user and usability.
The word is not to reinvent yourself, but to reconnect.
I am very happy with all this digital transformation that we have had. However, to be clear, I also take back the idea of the television critic Robert Lloyd, paraphrasing that by this I do not mean that he is celebrating in the least this terrible pandemic, but if we had irremediably to have any, I am glad that online video is being our way of connection to reveal our human ties.
The secret is not to reinvent yourself, but to make it better, different, more visual, "prettier".
*Juan Pablo Morales Sarmiento is CEO and Co-founder of Nuevos Medios Entertainment. You can contact him through his Twitter account @JuanPMoralesS
