Emmy Advanced Media – Television Business News: E! Entertainment Ratings Solution Shelly Palmer is out with a post today regarding the dilema over at E! Entertainment television where their ratings are apparently in a free fall.
E! is watched by about 300,000 viewers each day. I would guess that E! is the type of channel that could not survive a cable company move to an a la carte pricing model. I know I wouldn’t subscribe to it. Their situation is further complicated by the fact that much of their programming is of the news variety which is highly disposable and expensive to continually produce.
Palmer makes the point that rather than change the profile and message of their brand, that E! might want to consider better how they engage the loyal 300,000 viewers that they do have. Palmer suggests that re-examining the metrics of how you can advertise to your existing base makes some sense.
Certainly ultra targeted advertising is coming and is on it’s way. Internet television will make much of this type of thing possible in the future. Palmer’s thought is that rather than change your content, that content providers in the future might want to rather consider how to extract more value from the existing audience through better measurement, and I’d assume subsequent marketing and advertising.
Palmer concludes with, “Does this sound like a fantasy? It shouldn’t. All of the technology required to make this possible is fully deployed and available right now. And aggregating 300,000 viewers each day is more than attainable.
So, how long will it take before cable and TV management truly understands that the form factor is not the product? There is a new paradigm just around the corner it’s the age of true multicasting and, if you think about it, it’s already here.”
E! has an interesting website up right now but to be honest it’s not that compelling to me. I wonder how much traffic they get and if they couldn’t be using this to better engage their 300,000 viewers. Take a look at what the folks over at CourtTV are doing with video etc. and you will see some interesting things. CourtTV actually has a service where they are requiring people to register but where they have all kinds of extra video content available up for viewing. You can watch whole trials, stuff like that. Part of CourtTV’s model involves getting you to subscribe to “CourtTV Extra” where I assume the kind of registration data they are collecting might be part of what Palmer means by measurement.
And then there are some very cool things going on over at places like Brightcove (this is my teaser for an interview with Brightcove Founder and President Jeremy Allaire that you will be able to read here at thomashawk.com tomorrow).
So perhaps Palmer is right. Maybe there are better ways to squeeze revenue from E!’s niche audience that they should consider. Or then again, maybe they just need to find their next Anna Nicole Smith — but one whose promise works this time and doesn’t involve a lame decorator.