The search for the lost audience
Discover why today’s Unified Content Platforms – like Media Backbone Hive – are giving news makers a helping hand.
If you’re working in TV news, you’ll have spotted one pretty indisputable trend: your audience is declining.
Nightly TV bulletins or hourly radio reports traditionally offered the only source of current affairs. But now information is available every second of the day from a myriad of sources, platforms and devices – from live video reports and tweets to constantly updated text. And more often than not, a story breaks online before television broadcasters furnish more context, detail and often, it must be said, accuracy.
Internet first
Today’s millennials look first to the internet and apps for their news fix – more than 60% of 16-24 year-olds according to UK communications regulator Ofcom. But despite this shift, nearly 90% of British people aged 55 and over still get their news from the TV. So we’re seeing a dispersion of audiences across the different platforms, with Ofcom suggesting that average consumers now use 3.5 different sources for their news.
This democratisation of news is great for those of us keen to know what’s happening in the world, and hungry for an alternative point of view. But it’s become a real headache for broadcasters who are competing not only with each other, but also with these newer and often quicker sources of news. The bottom line? A general reduction in viewership, with those who’ve moved away now considered the ‘lost audience’.
Attempt to entice them back, broadcasters have refreshed their newsroom systems and invested in dedicated online/social teams and tools reach more platforms, faster.
While this has plugged the gap, it’s also led to an inefficient siloed news operation. Different teams use different systems and resources to produce variations of the same content – with effort and technology being unnecessarily duplicated. It’s expensive, too. Faced with these hurdles, broadcasters face two options: keep shedding audiences or spend more money trying to keep them.
Fortunately, there is another way. It’s possible to entice back that lost audience – with a lower cost base and fewer silos. The key is a Unified Content Platform (UCP), linking everything and everyone within a news organisation.
Imagine this. A TV station needs to cover a fast-breaking story throughout Europe. Without a UCP, with news teams and journalists working in isolation, it would be complex, time-consuming and costly. But with a UCP, the station can share content and allow regional teams to tailor it for their audience, across all platforms, evolving the story as it develops. And this includes mobile journalists, out in the field, who can collaborate with the rest of the team using the same resources and tools.
At Sony, that solution is Media Backbone Hive – our network production system built on a future-ready UCP. Customisable, cloud-native and scalable, it can be deployed on-premise, in the cloud or in a combination of the two. With a host of built-in tools and compatible with third-party ones, it lets journalists, producers and editors collaborate from wherever they are in the world, delivering stories rapidly across online, TV and radio. No more silos. No more duplication. And lots more flexibility.
Growing your brand and increasing audience share simply means having access to the right tools. And in today’s fast-paced world, this agile approach to news production could be the difference between locating that lost audience and losing it forever.
