ITV - paid for previews next?

That's not the case at all - I said 'ITV's core demographics' (plural).


Well again, commercial broadcasters don't care if they expect it or not.

If it can't make a profit then they're not getting it - end of!


...aren't one of ITV's core demographics.


We're just going round in circles now and I don't think you have a good understanding of commerical broadcasting at all. We'll see who's right while this plays out over the next couple of years, anyway.

But they are making a profit from it. And usually, if your customers are showing great enough demand for a product or service, it makes perfect sense to offer it. It's up to ITV to make it commercially viable of course.



And with that comment you demonstrate that you blatantly don't know what you're talking about at all. There are whole articles published about ITV's attempts to pull in the ABC1 audience, and whilst they don't always hit that demographic, they are the people that ITV are aiming for.



I think you've demonstrated not only a poor understanding of commercial broadcasting, but also of public service broadcasting, the importance of the audience and the proliferation of new technologies.

No they're not! The ITV Player is a monumental drain to ITV as a whole. Same with 4oD. I thought we'd already established this earlier in the thread.


I'd say the BC1 audiences are well catered for but they still don't seem to like lowering themselves to watching ITV1, for some bizzare reason. Their loss.

It should also be noted that the BBC provides hardly anything for the C2DEs. That's why ITV1 is doing so well. But that's the opposite problem of the broadcaster not wanting to lower it's standards. Their loss.


We'll see.

Of course not, but it goes without saying that it's the young who are growing up with timeshifting, on-demand and +1 channels who find traditional TV old fashioned. You haven't explained who are in ITV's core demographics


You're right there, very few do care about buzzwords.... however a lot do care about watching what they want when they want.

No, you asserted that fact, without anything to back it up.

But even if it is affecting their finances, as I said a page back, the benefits of such a service isn't just a matter of what it does to a balance sheet.


It doesn't? I think you need to look a bit harder.


Now I'm confused, I thought ITV was doing badly?


Your ideas do seem to be coming from the Rupert Murdoch school of new technology - ignore and withdraw from the new medium and it will go away. The fact is that once a genie is out of a bottle, whether it's video on demand (in the case of TV) or Google/news aggregators (in the case of newspapers) it's not going back in again.

Providing a service just because your 'competitors' provide one isn't beneficial when your competitors know full well that you're making a loss by doing so.


I was going to ask for some examples but I think we're better off not going there, again.


It's doing brilliantly. Not just in terms of ratings but in finances, too. The naysayers who predicted the collapse of ITV less than a year ago were completely wrong and ITV is going to continue to do better and better.


The genie will have to go back in again. It's possible if all the newspapers and all the commercial broadcasters co-operate to attain their desired outcomes, which is a change in how consumers perceive the connection between the price and value of their product. I say this because I think that as with newspapers, the only feasible direction broadcasters can take their video on demand and catch-up services is down the subscription route, because advertisers just don't want to spend more money.

Sky TV used to be free to view, now it's not. NTL dial-up was completely free with no catches for a couple of years, then it wasn't. Both managed to retain users very easily. Mp3s used to be seen as something that you'd never pay for, but people's attitudes have changed.

... forever and ever amen,

Not even the intern in the marketing department would come up with that copy.

ITV reported a loss of £2.7bn in 2008, and revenues for the first 9 months of this year were £1.31bn. I know you're all about the numbers Chie, so you work that one out for us. Don't forget the £0.75bn hole in the pension scheme money - that's an easy mistake to make.

On the up side there's been a bounce in the share price in recent days, because they are predicting a 4% increase in their net advertising revenues next month - even though they will be down 12% overall by the end of the year, they also announced.

As you said, its a business. The fact that they are maintaining their 1% lead in peak viewing (which its always had, hasn't it?) is irrelevant in the face of vacuum-like chasms in your spreadsheet.

You'll know that from whatever sector it was you said you work in.



That's an interesting way to respond.



Yes, a cartel. That's always jolly nice for the consumer.

If I'm reading your post correctly you're now accepting that a web presence is necessary for broadcasters.

Subs and charges can be part of that. Advertising will be too. "Advertisers don't want to spend more money" is specious. They are spending less given the global economic conditions, but it continues to be a billion dollar industry.

More than half of all advertising is now online. Advertisers are not slow to spend their money where they think it will be effective.

Unlike home recording, where you can skip past the ads, online players don't let you do that.

So the 30 second commercial they've paid to embed in Corrie will definitely be shown in full - no need for all that "subliminal ads when fast-forwarding your PVR" chatchka you were suggesting earlier.

Consumers may be, "stupid" to you chie, but the market gives them what they want - not the other way around.

That's the free market, and television.

The majority of that loss was not covered by debt and every big company has a pension deficit.


Some people were predicting a 10% drop in revenue for last month, which never did materialise. In the event it was only 3%. So ITV is doing better than predicted.


Being self-employed I'm well aware of this Gavin, yes. I think 'vacuum-like chasms' is being a bit melodramatic though.


It was nice, polite and not at all personal. A concept which you appear to be only faintly familiar with, sadly.


I refer to my previous comments about the fact that online advertising revenue is spread too thinly. That 'half of all advertising' is shared between millions of websites.


I see, and do you think the viewer will be watching very intently, as they do whilst fast-forwarding to make sure they press 'play' at the right moment when the ads have finished, or will they just do something else like check their emails / forums / Facebook until they hear the programme starting again? You can't honestly believe everyone is going to sit there staring at two minutes worth of adverts when there's so much else to do on the computer.


Wonderful.

The 'half of all advertising' is spent putting adverts across millions of sites, in a 'hammer out the banner ads and hope people click' approach. It is an entirely different concept to playing a commercial in between a television programme, and this concept is absolutely no different if it's on ITV1 or on ITV Player.

Advertisers may have to put their banner on hundreds of sites to get a million people to view their banner - let alone click on it to get more information - but in the future services like ITV Player will allow them to target maybe two million viewers of their desired demographic with their video advertisement which in 30 seconds provides a lot more information than a banner advert - and they're clickable now as well. Advertisers will pay for that.

On demand is still a new service, but BBC iPlayer has already seen hundreds of millions of programmes downloaded. In the near future, an episode of Coronation Street on ITV.com may have 2million viewers, and once advertisers have to compete for the slots the value of the space increases and they won't be able to pay the paltry amounts they do at present.



Television viewers can make a cup of tea during the ad breaks. This must be the reason that advertisers have refused to advertise on television for the last 50 years. Oh wait.

Strangely there only 1-2 ad breaks on the STV player ( same as Ch4) yet ITV try to ram a 2mints worth down you throat

No, I'm certain the two scenarios are very different.

With television, your average viewer probably doesn't go out to make a cup of tea every single ad break. When they do nip to the kitchen or the bathroom the probably return about a minute before the end of the ad break, meaning they still see a couple of ads anyway. It's even better in a family situation where only one person goes out to make the tea, while the other two or three members of the family unit stay in the living room.

The contrast between that and something like the ITV Player is absolutely massive. For a start, nobody is going to sit there and actually watch the adverts at all. They're always going to find something else to do while they wait for the ads to finish.

But say the viewer keeps the sound on during the ITV Player ad breaks (and this is assuming they don't even turn the volume down) and goes off to browse, for example, Digital Spy. Now you've got one set of adverts coming through the speakers and another set of all singing, all dancing visual flash banner ads on Digital Spy. The two conflict with each other and it draws the viewer's attention away from the ITV Player advertiser's message.

Advertisers know all this and that's why they'll never pay anywhere near £35 per 1000 for internet VOD services - ever.

But if advertising is sold as a VOD 'package', including Canvas, then the situation is very different. I don't know how much you've seen of VOD in the real world, but it's not unheard of for students to sit around a laptop and watch a programme, and chat through the ad breaks just the same as if it was a TV broadcast.