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IBC, the International Broadcasting Convention, aka Europe’s largest industry trade show, is this week and it’s not going out on too much of a limb after looking at panel titles and pre-convention conversations, to say that various forms of fragmentation are going to be the key issues of the day.
It is also, tangentially, one of the key issues driving the two panels I am hosting, one on the growth of European FAST at Marion Ranchet’s Streaming Made Easy and the other on the use of AI in helping to scale content globally.
So pretty all-encompassing as a theme.
And by the way, did I mention that I have a book coming out later this month that also touches on fragmentation. The newly renamed Welcome To The Age Of Feudal Media: What Happens Once The Monoculture Collapses. You can sign up to be notified about pre-orders here.
But now back to IBC.
Why It Matters
Release a TV series or movie in the U.S. and you really only have to worry about English. Maybe Spanish if you want to hit a recent Latino immigrant audience.
Whereas in Europe, you’ve got as many as 42 different languages.
Which is its own form of fragmentation.
Because so many European markets are small to begin with—how many people speak Dutch?—the fragmentation that is hitting media hits them even harder, making television audiences even smaller as viewers, younger viewers in particular, depart for YouTube, TikTok and points beyond.
That’s where AI comes in, AI dubbing in particular.
Because rather than the old school attempts where someone’s mouth kept moving a good 30 seconds after the dubbed voiceover stopped, new AI-powered dubbing is able to adjust the actor’s mouth so that the dialog seems natural.
More than that though, it’s able to take the original actor’s voice and render it in Flemish or Romanian or Dutch. So that it avoids situations where a gruff 50-year old actor is dubbed by someone who sounds like they’re 22.
Better still, the AI can even give the actor an accent. So, for instance, Gérard Depardieu can be rendered into French-accented English so that the essential Frenchness of a Parisian detective does not devolve into some sort of warped Brooklynese.
And while on the one hand, all that is a nice party trick, what it does do is allow content to travel way beyond borders and reach global audiences—not just on TV, but on TikTok and Instagram and all sorts of other platforms, because AI can slice and dice and verticalize content for a range of situations.
Which is increasingly becoming table stakes in a world where audiences are divided into small disconnected bubbles. (If only someone were to write a book about that.)
FAST is the topic of my other panel, and here we can see the impact of fragmentation again: FAST is not the monoculture of “it’s primetime and look what we’ve got for you!”
It’s “what do I want to watch and who can get me there fastest?”
Meaning that discovery and discoverability (two different things) are both huge drivers in which services get adopted.
It also means that FAST services, which are trying to be all things to all people, need to start trimming what they have on offer in order to make things like discovery and discoverability easier. Finding what you want from 300 channels and 800 on-demand titles is much easier than finding what you want from 600 channels and 1600 on-demand titles.
And that’s before you even get into the unsold inventory from all those unpopular channels and shows.
Fragmentation also plays into all of the various solutions on offer for how to transform your TV content so that it works on other platforms. Vertical platforms in particular. It’s a fact of life now that audiences don’t always move between platforms and while your ultimate goal should be driving people back to your main platform (the TV set) you still need to be out there promoting on other channels.
It’s a lesson that influencers know well—traffic to your YouTube channel can rely heavily on how effective your TikTok and Instagram feeds are at driving them there.
And one that TV content owners would do well to embrace.
What You Need To Do About It
If there's one thing I’d urge people in the TV space to do is to accept that the old world is gone and there are no magic tricks that will bring it back.
That means adapting yourself to the new world, which is admittedly much more complex, especially given that it keeps changing.
But embracing new technologies and new ways of thinking about areas like distribution are going to be the key to your success.
AI can seem scary and inauthentic and all that, but it can prove to be a real boon. There are so many things it can do in terms of production, distribution and even monetization.
So don’t be afraid to experiment. Fortune, as the cliche goes, favors the bold, and there is no prize for being timid and overly cautious.
For many in the industry, for whom caution was a lifestyle, that will require stepping far, far, far outside your comfort zone.
But in reality, do you have any other choice?
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