Me TV: Nascar pulls away in content
Nike, Nascar and the BBC are blazing trails in advertising, content and distribution for next-generation television.
Nascar's interactive content
Defending-champion Dale Earnhardt Jr. took the lead late in this year's Daytona 500 but lost it in the final minutes. The heartbreaking ending was one of the wildest finishes in the 47-year history of the race, the Super Bowl of U.S. motor sports.
And for all 200 laps, fans were right in the front seat with Junior and six of his rivals, flipping between seven respective channels displaying live driver's-eye views fed straight from the cars' roll bars. Others followed the race on the XM Satellite Radio service, the HDNet high-definition TV network, multiple sports cable outlets and even at two movie theaters showing the race.
All that might seem like overkill, but Nascar is determined to maintain its lead in interactive services over other sports associations, which have largely settled for real-time stats and scores as they try to figure out how and what to offer. So advanced are Nascar's experiments that they have become important well beyond professional sports, to studios and practically any other company that produces shows that go on the air.
It makes perfect sense for Nascar to be a pioneer for advanced digital content. An estimated 30 million of its 75 million fans are considered hard-core, spending up to nine hours a week consuming related media, much of it online.
"Nascar has been pushing the envelope--packaging content to offer a much fuller way of watching a race," said David Asch, senior vice president of programming at cable service In Demand, which developed Nascar's in-car cameras and other interactive-TV features.
The aggressive interactive strategy stems at least partly from necessity. While other sports have multiple
games occurring simultaneously, Nascar has one event per weekend. To make the most of it, the racing body has been providing fans new ways to get related information and deepen their interest.
Its services are a far cry from the original promises of interactive television--such as technology that would enable viewers to click on and a buy a product as they saw it used in a TV show--but their relative simplicity may be a key reason for their success. "The early problem with interactive television was that it was complex, leading consumers to be intimidated or not interested in them," said Aditya Kishore, an analyst at research firm The Yankee Group.
Still, he and others say the demand for Nascar's interactive services is not abundant enough to justify additional operational costs. That may be one reason that Nascar, while touting a spike in demand for its in-car TV service after the Daytona 500, refused to divulge the specific number of subscribers.
Nascar's interactive content
Defending-champion Dale Earnhardt Jr. took the lead late in this year's Daytona 500 but lost it in the final minutes. The heartbreaking ending was one of the wildest finishes in the 47-year history of the race, the Super Bowl of U.S. motor sports.
And for all 200 laps, fans were right in the front seat with Junior and six of his rivals, flipping between seven respective channels displaying live driver's-eye views fed straight from the cars' roll bars. Others followed the race on the XM Satellite Radio service, the HDNet high-definition TV network, multiple sports cable outlets and even at two movie theaters showing the race.
All that might seem like overkill, but Nascar is determined to maintain its lead in interactive services over other sports associations, which have largely settled for real-time stats and scores as they try to figure out how and what to offer. So advanced are Nascar's experiments that they have become important well beyond professional sports, to studios and practically any other company that produces shows that go on the air.
It makes perfect sense for Nascar to be a pioneer for advanced digital content. An estimated 30 million of its 75 million fans are considered hard-core, spending up to nine hours a week consuming related media, much of it online.
"Nascar has been pushing the envelope--packaging content to offer a much fuller way of watching a race," said David Asch, senior vice president of programming at cable service In Demand, which developed Nascar's in-car cameras and other interactive-TV features.
The aggressive interactive strategy stems at least partly from necessity. While other sports have multiple
games occurring simultaneously, Nascar has one event per weekend. To make the most of it, the racing body has been providing fans new ways to get related information and deepen their interest.
Its services are a far cry from the original promises of interactive television--such as technology that would enable viewers to click on and a buy a product as they saw it used in a TV show--but their relative simplicity may be a key reason for their success. "The early problem with interactive television was that it was complex, leading consumers to be intimidated or not interested in them," said Aditya Kishore, an analyst at research firm The Yankee Group.
Still, he and others say the demand for Nascar's interactive services is not abundant enough to justify additional operational costs. That may be one reason that Nascar, while touting a spike in demand for its in-car TV service after the Daytona 500, refused to divulge the specific number of subscribers.
BBC's model for broadcast
Sometime this spring, about 5,000 BBC viewers will get the green light to do what triggers lawsuits in other parts of the world: download popular TV shows from their neighbors' computers.
The experiment is called IMP, for Internet media player, and is one of the boldest flirtations with peer-to-peer technology that any television organization has yet attempted. Although its initial version stops short of allowing viewers to swap older shows, the software will let them download and watch current BBC programs for about a week after their air date.
Programming breakthroughs have long been associated with American television, but today, the 83-year-old British broadcasting institution is leading the medium into the future with technology, if not content. "It's obviously something that people want," said Ben Lavender, the head of the IMP project. "Rather than being like King Canute and hoping the water won't come in over our feet, it's better to get out in front."
The BBC decided that it needs to adapt because the explosion in computer and Net technologies is
fundamentally changing the concept of television: TiVo subscribers skip advertising; TV shows are regularly downloaded online; cable networks have decimated network ratings and have already built successful models for on-demand programming.
The trends are equally familiar across the Atlantic. "We're asking ourselves, 'How do we take the best of ABC News content and make it available to anybody, anywhere, on any device?'" ABC News digital-media chief Bernard Gershon said. That has meant getting news clips online and on mobile phones, and launching a 24-hour news service aimed at broadband networks. But the BBC is going further.
Even more ambitious than its peer-to-peer project, the BBC is planning
to open up much of its 600,000-hour video archive online, a treasure trove that could include everything from "Monty Python's Flying Circus" to a documentary on "Tetris." Organizers want to let people download video with few restrictions so that viewers can reuse it in their own creative projects.
Because the "Creative Archive," launching in trial form today, could broadly transform consumers' expectations for media, the BBC is moving slowly before making large amounts of content available. Some shows, for example, might not be archived so that the network's DVD sales would not be diluted.
U.S. broadcasters have balked at the on-demand concept, partly because it would be vastly expensive to offer millions of video downloads directly on the Web. But the BBC's use of peer-to-peer technology could make the idea financially feasible.
"We're hopeful that the archive will be much more than the BBC," said Paula Le Dieu, the project's co-director. "But we are pragmatic. We need to understand the commercial impact it will have."
Nike's ad race
It's tough for Nike to outdo itself in marketing, but it may have come close with its 2002 multimedia campaign for the World Cup.
The sporting-goods giant hired film director and "Monty Python" alumnus Terry Gilliam to create an elaborate commercial called "The Secret Tournament." Then, in partnership with WildTangent, it also built an online game at Nikefootball.com to coincide with the ad, and teased the whole campaign with billboard and Web promotions.
"With a lot of companies, Web advertising is an afterthought. Nike spends as much time thinking about their online campaigns as their offline ads," said Alex Pineda, creative director of design firm The Retina. This is how Nike has become a case study for major advertising in the digital era, regularly pioneering new forms of consumer interactivity and blurring the lines between information, entertainment and advertising.
Many large advertisers have viewed technology with disdain, in some cases seeking legal safeguards
against ad-skipping features in digital video recorders and other services. But Nike has taken the opposite approach, immersing itself in the digital realm to heighten consumer interaction with its product campaigns and to extend its image, becoming a quasi-direct marketer of its brand through various online channels.
The Oregon-based conglomerate has invested heavily in Web site sponsorship, games, new technology and alternative TV commercials. And the company says it is paying off: For the last two years, it has been among the top three online advertisers in the consumer goods arena, according to research firm Nielsen/NetRatings.
Nike's involvement with technology has gone well beyond innovations in online ads. During the dot-com boom, it even partnered with Sonicblue and then with Royal Philips Electronics to introduce its own MP3 player for sports buffs.
The company has also hired cutting-edge designers to build immersive Web sites, videos or games for its sports-centric audience. A few years ago, it hired experimental designer Yugo Nakamura and others to create an interactive-art installation for Nike's new Yoga shoe. The project included an online film, "The Art of Speed," with a simultaneous TV ad campaign for Nikelab.com.
Michael Gough, former chief creative of brands at Nike and now chief creative officer at Macromedia, said the sporting company owes its success to a unique philosophy toward marketing and consumers that transcends individual media. "They don't really care about digital technology. They care about the experience it brings."