Choice Words

The TV of Babel

Happy Monday Peaceniks. Ready for a new language?

As an industry, we love to confuse ourselves. We bundle. We unbundle. Then we re-bundle. We invent a medium for ads. We remove the ads. Then we add the ads back again. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it and the professional television community gives itself recurring amnesia by bonking ourselves in the head with our own massive, swinging pendulum.

In my relatively studied opinion, a major cause for our collective selective memory is the labyrinth of lexicon we constantly compound to describe the voluminous variations of models, measurement, devices, delivery, and audience that we continue to invent, reinvent, wind up, and unwind. To demonstrate this, I created the TV Taxonomy lexigraph above.

Before, during, and after I crafted this textogram, I knew it would spark debate, disagreement, even derision. Ask one hundred TV professionals to classify our compendium of terminology and you’ll get a thousand answers. So, before you ask: No, I do not consider these terms and categories to be complete, conclusive, or official. The intention of this visualization is conversation – to incite a community confabulation about the nomenclature we use to characterize what we do and why.

How should we define our audience? Should we consider them subscribers, viewers, monthly and/or daily average users, in demos, households, as unique or perhaps unduplicated? Is programmatic truly programmatic if the ultimate value of an ad is still determined by human bias? If 90% of US homes now have connected televisions, isn’t all TV now CTV – and, correspondingly, isn’t CTV now just TV?

To some this may seem superficial or inconsequential. But as someone who writes about our business for a living and constantly receives complaints, corrections, and contradictions about his word choice (my recent report on Share of Ad Voice generated hundreds of “well, actually’s”), I hope you’ll pardon me for taking this shit serious.

So, I lay this topic at the feet of you, the TV community, and humbly request your considerate consideration. Assess my assemblage. Grade my classifications. Take on my taxonomy. Our industry’s glossary should be a work in progress, so your feedback is not just welcome, it’s expected and appreciated!

But before you do, consider this: Is there not a way to simplify and clarify our industry’s jargon? Can we strive to combine and/or eliminate our duplicative and/or anachronistic and/or fatuous phraseology? As I compiled that lexiconic visualization, I became convinced: Yes we can, we should, and we must.

Prior to setting you free to roam the comments section, let me first present some proposed vocabulary revamps, intended to economize, elucidate, and unify the language of our business:

AVOD/FAST/SVOD/SVOD w ADS

I asked Alan Wolk, inventor of the phrase FAST, what he would change about TV’s terminology. His answer:

“Whenever someone says ‘AVOD’ to me, it could mean ‘the on-demand part of a FAST service,’ or ‘an on-demand only O&O app from a company that may also have FAST and SVOD services,’ or ‘any sort of ad-supported on demand content, regardless of whether it is on a free or subscription-based app.’ Worse yet, any random combination of the above. Calling out ‘AVOD’ is even more confusing given that advertising is not sold that way. You buy your audience or contextual target wherever they appear on the app, regardless of whether it is linear or on-demand. This is more confusing still, because all the FAST services and many of the subscription services have both linear and on-demand content available. So, I would eliminate ‘AVOD’ and just call free services ‘FAST’ and subscription services ‘SVOD.’”

I agree with Alan. But I would take it much further. I know we love our acronyms, but with SVOD, FAST, AVOD, and SVOD AD TIERS, the alphabet soup has become muddy. At the risk of sacrilege, and with the deep desire to have everyone understand what we’re talking about when we speak about TV, I propose we simply say what the fuck we mean:

PAID STREAMING & FREE STREAMING

We all know that all free streaming is ad supported. And, with very rare exception, all paid streaming will also soon, and forever, be ad supported. I guess that some people will care about which streaming is linear and how much is on demand, but I really do not care that they care. We call cable television Pay TV, whether it’s linear, live, or on demand. It’s time we clean up and update the lexicon of streaming and rid ourselves of all the confusing initials. Sure, Paid Streaming is three times as long as SVOD, but it’s 1000% more clear. Furthermore, Free Streaming requires far less CAPS LOCK than AVOD/FAST.

BUNDLING & REBUNDLING

When I asked Marion Ranchet, author of Streaming Made Easy, for her feedback, she said:

“I look at your graphic and it screams complexity and fragmentation. As an industry, we have a need to put a name on everything. It helps us make sense of things, at first. But we end up getting caught up or lost in this taxonomy. We must get back to basics - for the viewers’ benefit. In the end, we’re making great video content available to audiences, that’s it.”

Again, I concur with Marion completely. And I think her frustration is perfectly embodied by our compulsive obsession with the term Bundling.

Cable TV is an actual bundle: One interface, one bill, thousands of channels, with one login. The triple play advances this concept further, bundling utility with entertainment. By this measure isn’t Netflix – which includes shows and movies from other studios around the world, as well as its own originals, offering kids content, cooking shows and true crime documentaries, all with one login – ultimately in-and-of-itself a new brand of bundle? Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation+ are also clearly defined as bundles - catalogs of hundreds of games on any device, anywhere, with one login and on one bill each month.

Now compare those to what some companies today describe as a bundle.

While the Disney Bundle offers three different services at one, more economical price, it still exists on three different interfaces, with three different logins. While Mickey’s “bundle” does save users money, it’s hardly an all-in-one mousetrap. The same is true for Verizon’s myPlan bundles of Netflix and MAX or the Disney services. Yes, you can get discounts for various streaming services which Verizon often calls “bundles.” But at the end of the day, as Verizon’s own website says, these are nothing more than “perks” offered for signing up for one of their mobile or broadband plans. These are not bundles, they are packaging.

Contrast those plans with Amazon Prime, Apple One, or even YouTube’s suite of services. One login, one bill, a lifestyle suite of entertainment and utility. As much as it will pain the Media community to hear it, these are entertainment’s true modern-day bundles. This is why Prime has almost no cancellations, why Apple One’s churn is as low as Netflix’s, and why YouTube has America’s only growing Pay TV bundle.

Media’s chattering class loves the hype around “rebundling.” But if we want to truly understand the implications of what we’re up to, we need to be honest and clear about what’s actually happening. Marketing a sale price is not reinventing the bundle, it’s just an old-school packaging plan – and a complicated one at that. If we want to talk about The Bundle, for the sake of our expectations and our consumers, let’s make sure it genuinely is one. Otherwise call a “sale” a “sale.”

THE TV OF BABEL vs A COMMON LANGUAGE

The myth of The Tower of Babel tells of a united humanity that attempts to build a city so high, it reaches the Heavens. Fearful of the humans’ unified power, an angry god changes the languages of fractions of the collective, so they no longer can understand each other. Confused and irritated, the people disperse to different lands, and their towering city is never completed.

To me, this is the story of the Television Industrial Complex since the advent of streaming. Everyone thinks they know what they’re doing, and yet, in the face of powerful Big Tech, we have so complicated our business, we wind up competing with each other when we could be working together to make the ecosystem better. This is epitomized by our lack of a decipherable common language and the absence of a sorely needed universal source of truth.

Yes, this exercise in TV Taxonomy is cosmetic, perhaps even frivolous. But the motivation behind it is authentic: An attempt to create one common-sense conversation among our community, to eliminate what’s superfluous, and to focus us on what’s truly important.

Please do weigh in: What language should we keep? Which terminology should we kill? What acronyms can we combine? Let’s spend some time clarifying what we do, so we can better see where we should be going.

Comment below and enjoy your week!

ESHAP