Two market experiences

Readings about the information surplus and the competition for audience’s attention on the Web bring me some memories from media companies:

1.

 When I was working for Univision as an online editor –basically ensuring synergy between the online platforms and local television networks—one of the most difficult tasks was to convince TV news reporters and news directors to use their website to promote their own content.

 “By promoting on-air any other product different to television news we could take away our TV viewers’ attention,” they said,  "so even our own website would become an open competition/distraction that might lead to a reduction of our audience.”

I was amazed by that logic and always wondered whether it was possible to understand the web not as a substitute but as a complement of traditional media.

If traditional TV news decided not to be on the Web, could that lack of presence facilitate competitors to take over potential markets and cannibalize the same audience they ignore from the bottom?

Some trending users’ activities such as second screening could open the way towards that direction. The relationship between social networks and television would provide new ways to engage audiences during braking news, political debates and live coverage.

2.

Terra Networks, an online branch of the Spanish company Telefonica, launched its online video product Terra TV on February 2006. I was selected as the director of the project for Colombia and Venezuela. The headquarters of the operation were located in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The idea was to implement little teams of producers in each Latin American country and provide generic content to feed the local websites from Brazil. Terra bought Grey's Anatomy, Lost, iCarly’s old seasons, among other TV shows. All episodes were in HD.

The massive audience of these TV programs and people who didn’t have access to cable in Latin America were expected to visit Terra TV to consume those old episodes of famous series. They never did.

As a reaction to that costly failure, we started to produce short local videos (1’:30”) with our small team in Colombia (culture, news and sports). Soon we reached more audience than those foreign shows. As Hoskins, McFadyen and Finn have stated, the demand is greater for TV domestic products than for foreign programs. Therefore, the dream of Terra Tv to maintain a low profile local operation in Latin America and substitute local content with foreign high quality episodes published from Brazil did not come true.