She was talking about Africa and South Africa's biggest challenge to bring true "television everywhere on all devices" and on-demand content to TV viewers.
Aletta Alberts as a highly respected TV executive within South Africa's fast-changing TV industry was one of the key panelists at the unveiling of a brand-new 60 page research report by Discovery Networks for the Central Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEEMEA) region entitled The Rise of the TV Everywhere Audience.
The report contains remarkable, insightful, and very specific trends, analysis and data concerning South Africa and South African TV viewers, as well as for specific TV markets stretching across several continents, on how the behaviour of TV viewers is changing and is being impacted by broadband access, digitally connected devices and the use of social media.
"With the new undersea cables and everything that is happening at the moment, I think many people in management in the TV industry think [the big broadband revolution with much faster broadband] is 5 to 7 years away; I think it's 2 years away," says Aletta Alberts. "So, just knowing first of all South Africans, they are always looking for TV content. Many people, apart from the services that we offer, download stuff illegally and watch it. So it's not something new."
"In the rest of Africa there is even less connectivity. What's fascinating is when we look at something like Big Brother Africa and the the millions of people who do interact with that content online, because we only show the shower sequences online. So we offer those things online and it is not a few hundred thousands it's millions. Obviously the biggest chunk of that viewing is currently coming from Nigeria."
"If you look at our current transactional video-on-demand (VOD) service and catch-up services, there are now subscribers who only use those services and hardly watch in a linear form anymore," says Aletta Alberts. "We can see trends on some TV channels - especially the fiction channels, where people can only watch one thing at a time, and how they time-shift or use catch-up. A channel like M-Net Series might have a lower rating, but when you actually look at what they deliver on time-shifted, it's almost like a new channel - more than 70% of that channel is time-shifted."
"In terms of the social media stuff, I think there's really, really things that's happening in that space. Social media has actually become the new electronic programming guide (EPG) rather than where the broadcasters would recommend what to watch."
"They will still continue doing that, but it's much more important to let your content do it for itself on social media, because that network is just so much vaster. That's the one thing. Then if you look at how audiences behave today, they have bigger trust in their friends that trust in a broadcaster telling me what to watch. So I think that is becoming more and more evident," says Aletta Alberts.
"With all of our services that we offer we can clearly see that. People are not just watching linear, they're watching everywhere. With more the interaction there is, the more they feel that they're part of the experience, the more they watch.
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ALSO READ: The Rise of the TV Everywhere Audience: Discovery Networks releases a massive and fascinating new TV behaviour report.
