Take over TV

When I first joined the media industry a few years ago, the big buzz was around “converging media.” What began as a vision of a brave new world in which magazines would be mobile (imagine that!) and toasters would read out the morning headlines, was quickly hijacked as a fashionable euphemism for the migration of content online. The Internet it was feared, would become something of a “threat” to traditional media…the big black hole in the corner swallowing up everything and anything that it could.

And so we come to the present day. And a world in which 57% of the U.K.’s total population is watching videos online…a world in which the BBC, the godfather of the “traditional television” industry as we have come to think of it today, is beginning to build upon an already formidable online presence, with the launch of the BBC iPlayer. Significantly, the broadcaster has just signed a deal that will allow this service to be accessed through the Nintendo Wii – that’s the BBC, being broadcast over the Internet, soon to be appearing on your TV screen.

According to Comscore Video Metrix, which was launched outside the U.S. this month, over 5 million people watched over 2 million hours worth of video content on BBC Sites in December. This audience accounted for just over 10% of the total U.K. country population and (just for the record) 15% of the total U.K. online population – which of course, is an ever decreasing void. What I like about this statistic is that the iPlayer wasn’t even officially launched until Christmas, so expect to see these numbers rise even further over the course of 2008, especially given that the iPlayer brings with it full length BBC shows!

And when you consider that the iPlayer is still a U.K. specific product, in a company that derives around 60% of its online traffic from overseas –- the potential for the iPlayer is – to go a little bit “TV drama” on you for this one – monumental! Let’s also not forget, that unlike the traditional publically funded model that the BBC runs on in the U.K., overseas the company is allowed to sell online advertising, and it does so, very successfully.

But what this all really symbolizes is the change in attitude that the industry has privately been undergoing for some time now. While the spotlight was focused on social networking in 2007, online TV was quietly making its mark. And while all that was going on, data from my U.S. Comscore colleagues recently showed that the Internet now delivers 40% more Gross Ratings Points of advertising than television. The fact that the CPM’s are so much lower on the Internet is what holds down the total advertising dollars spent online.

Being able to increase CPMs for online advertising might just be the catalyst that turns these two households’ rancor to pure love, because if television broadcasters can demonstrate that they can create even more ROI for advertisers by delivering their programming content online, then a marriage between these two mediums makes for an irresistible development. If that happens, we could soon find ourselves living in a world that asks: Is this Internet television? Or television online? But in the end, what’s in a name?