by Thinus Ferreira
As MultiChoice’s content boss, Aletta Alberts
lives, breathes and watches a lot of TV.
MultiChoice’s head of content strategy
and third-party channels sat down for a wide-ranging interview
to talk television and to help you make sense of all of the seismic changes.
Why does DStv remove certain TV channels and are
actual TV channels still important? How are new streaming services like Disney+
influencing what DStv does?
And since there wasn’t a physical LA Screenings
this year as the annual market in America where the world buy their TV content
from, how will the new TV season look?
South Africa’s ultimate TV insider reveals a very
big change coming at the end of this year in the playout of the new seasons of
all of your favourite shows like Grey’s Anatomy.
Find out why she says that “I’ve not seen
a content slate that strong in all my years at DStv” and with cinemas that were closed for 5 months, is
M-Net going to run out of movies to show?
What lies behind the massive surge in
DStv ratings because of Covid-19 and why was the latest season of Big Brother
Naija so successful across the entire Africa?
Find out as Aletta Alberts reveals who’s
kicking things up behind the new martial arts channel KIX and why they’re
absolutely fabulous, and also why you just might fall in love with the new
Korean “K-dramas” taking over the world.
If you love television, you’ll want to
know everything as South Africa’s ultimate TV insider shares all her latest
scoop.
Not a week goes by without viewers asking "What TV channel is DStv going to be adding next?" I'm getting the sense that MultiChoice and the TV industry at large have been moving on from the linear TV channels business where it's not about specific channels but about a collection of content.
Can you explain how the content acquisition and the process of getting the content and getting it to the viewer as consumer is evolving? People are about "How many channels am I going to get?" whereas it's now more about the content.
Aletta Alberts: It's not the one or the other, it's more a hybrid. There will always be linear channels because there is content that people want to see live, and things that we see that people still prefer to watch on a linear channel more so than on-demand.
People show much more tolerance for shorter, "event-like" series on-demand because the experience is like binge-watching, compared to say sitting through a 22-episode anything, unless you're very committed or you watch it in intervals.
Yes, the world has changed but the channels is still very, very strong and on a daily basis, we still get pitched hundreds of new TV channels every week. But the world is shifting in the sense that there are other genres coming to the foreground.
Also, as the base of viewers grows, the mix of the base is changing, so you are looking for different content. So we know that the top-end for instance in South Africa where it's not a homogenous market here and they've got a lot of access to Wifi, they're more moving towards streaming services and over-the-top services and watching content that is maybe slightly more discerning or niche genres that are more about personal taste than watching things in groups.
Then when you get to the middle market and lower, those viewers still want to see content that they can watch together and they also don't have hours and hours and gigabytes of data to view with. Having said that, there are still genres that people want to watch live.
People want to watch reality TV live because if they don't watch it live, they can't take part in the social conversation. You don't, for instance, want to watch MasterChef on OTT or something like Our Perfect Wedding or My Kitchen Rules or those types of shows because everybody wants to comment on the dress or what people are doing wrong. People do still want to watch that live because of social media.
I think the reason why we are taking channels off- we're taking content off that we believe can go sit on OTT because audiences are so small now on those channels that it doesn't warrant it to have actual linear channels anymore; and only look at those channels that are really mass-market channels over time, as the base keeps on changing.
In Africa, the channels business is still very, very, very big and will be for the foreseeable future. I don't think that's something that's going to change overnight.
Now MultiChoice is bringing out the new DStv Explora Ultra decoder and the DStv Streama decoder towards the end of 2020 on which MultiChoice will add third-party apps. What are the challenges behind when you might add a streaming service as an app and where you might get those relationships and content?
Aletta Alberts: I can't talk specifically because that's more in the product group sphere and I can't talk on behalf of them, but from a content perspective and in my simplistic way of thinking about it, we are moving into the world of "catalogue".
So we're a catalogue, SuperSport is a catalogue, Disney+ is a catalogue of content - all of the OTT players are pretty much and when the studios go direct-to-home are basically catalogues of content. I think over time you will start focusing much more on that what you can control in the value-chain. So we are two things: We are a content supplier but we're also a platform.
And because we're a platform, we will always carry people's catalogues. And in the same way that we're currently licensing TV channels, we will be licensing those catalogues, or we will have a subscriber-management relationship with a catalogue.
It will be the same way that we do today where we go: "I want Channel X" and now we can start negotiating. Or a channel gets pitched to you and you go "I don't want that part of this content provider's catalogue".
Let's use an example. Say for instance today I'm buying all the National Geographics, maybe in 10 years' time we'll decide that content is all on Disney+, so now we're just going to carry the Disney+ catalogue. And that's how you've have to think.
But in the world that we're currently still in, we have this tension between that catalogues and for us still having channels. If you think about Disney for instance, you might have read that in the United Kingdom with Sky, for instance, there won't be any more Disney channels it's just going to be the Disney+ catalogue - that kind of thing.
Because we can't in our markets offer in every market 100% streaming services because of the infrastructure that are in all of the countries, we can't move that fast on it. You'll read in most of the press releases that Africa is almost always last on the list of where they are going to roll these services out to, or where they are actually going to roll it out at all.
This is because it simply doesn't make if there are not hundreds of thousands of people that actually have Wifi connectivity to actually consume content like that.
You couldn't go to the LA Screenings this year that is a TV buyers' market. M-Net executives didn't go, and others didn't go because it simply didn't take place physically because of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.
The new "2020 Fall TV season" is starting between now and November. The pink cleaning product Vanish is the first local South African TV commercial that is out now and uses the concept of a talk show set, and shows plastic screen dividers between the hosts and the seated studio audience members.
How do you think the new television that we're going to see from out of Hollywood will look different because of Covid?
Aletta Alberts: I don't think the content will be that different. You'll still get fiction and scripted and all of those things. I actually had a long conversation with somebody a few days ago around the question of "What was the previous big watershed event that changed content?" Which is pretty much 9/11, and then the Hollywood writers' strike.
You know, after 9/11 there was a very different feel in the world; content changed, you saw things like the NCIS series being born.
First of all, let's just talk about LA. So, last year when we were in Los Angeles I was saying "I think this is the last LA Screening. I don't think we're going to see LA Screenings every again" because of how the studios merged and also the product.
It was very interesting, when you went to NBC's screening for instance, a research person there was telling me that last year was the first year where they didn't test with audiences in cinemas which is the way they normally do the pre-testing. They just sent out links to people.
They also made the distinction that previously they used to bring viewers into cinemas, they watch it on big screens, but that's ultimately not how the consumer is going to do it - they're going to watch it on a TV. So they thought: "We'll send it to you. You watch it on what you want to watch it." But what was more important was that they could actually monitor the exact behaviour of what people were doing.
So they could track that people would stop, or would stop and go back to watch a series, or pause for so long, or pause where it's a specific character or storyline.
So they get a whole new depth of insight into storylines and how it's received and where people tolerate long opening sequences or not and things like that.
This year, just like with the virtual meetings we have in our world now, they were sending out the links and you would watch in your own time. Every day there would be an email to say "Okay the showroom has now uploaded X, Y and Z" so I do think that's definitely not going to change.
I think you probably will still have markets but I don't think it will be to the extent that we used to go to markets prevously.
Then, the second thing is I think last year the studios were already saying they can't work in the seasonality. The seasonality will probably go. First of all the OTT operators are all year round and they don't take a break. The old days of "now your schedule comes to a standstill because its Superbowl" isn't happening anymore. So you're going to get a constant flow of content.
I do however think that you're going to find that in terms of the volume of content it will become less because where it simply exploded before, there is a very big economic impact now and with a lot of production houses or people who have gone under, there might be less spend.
If you think about the studio system, it was all about opulence. But when AT&T bought Warner you could already see things changing. Where there were huge parties every year with LA Screenings - if I think when I started going to LA Screenings ... every studio was trying to outdo one another with gift bags for the buyers.
The last few years you didn't see that anymore. You'd be lucky if you get a pen. And everything is on an app and there's no place for you to write unless you're taking notes on the app.
Where you had 10 days for screenings, all of a sudden it's 4 days for screenings because that's how the studios have now merged. The output of the studios are now also very different - you start seeing British content at NBCUniversal because they own Sky.
I think there are big changes but one thing from a content perspective is that there's a big move towards nostalgia and people saying they want to see less of the "skop, skiet and donder" and they want more "epic, family stories". It's all a blowback from this time now - people's lives have been severely uprooted. It's just a different time.
It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, nobody could go anywhere. People watched more and started watching things that they wouldn't traditionally watch. I also think that sport wasn't around, also exposed people to more genres.
We were very lucky in that MultiChoice had an incredibly full content slate during Covid. In general the content out was just much more because everybody endeavoured to try and schedule better or to put more content into their schedules because they know people are stuck at home.
There is really excessive TV viewing times in our territories and it even went higher and it even doubled in some cases.
It's amazing the record ratings during Covid-19 lockdown in South Africa. What learnings did MultiChoice make from the surge in viewing and time spent in front of television?
Aletta Alberts: People watched a lot! Up to 12 hours a day, so that tells you a lot. And you know, we employ algorithms so it doesn't mean that people actually walked away. We would know if people walked away (and left the TV on).
What was interesting is that people watched genres that they wouldn't watch in big numbers traditionally, so news showed a huge, huge increase. Then people watched a lot more fiction, and then really families watched together, and especially local content.
Normally it's only later on when you start the eviction process that the ratings actually spike but this year the numbers are extraordinary for Big Brother Naija. Everywhere people are just watching. That can be a combination of various things.
This year I think we did get a better quality of entries for Big Brother Naija because we didn't do live auditions; people had to send in videos of themselves. So they were actually "available" for the audition process as opposed to thinking "I have to work I can't do it". So I think you have some of those people in there.
Then, pre the actual show - because we had to put them in quarantine for 21 days and we put more people in, in case someone fell ill during that time - but by the time they actually went onto the Big Brother Naija house there was already such a chemistry.
Then the people that they chose to actually go into the house were already in lockdown for Covid, then they were together for 21 days, and now they're in "lockdown" for 3 months - there's just a "magic potion" this year with Big Brother and it's electric. It's absolutely amazing how well it's doing.
Cinemas in South Africa reopened at the end of August, so the release "window" has returned somewhat for films to get their theatre release before going to pay-TV.
It's been 5 months without new films going through the cinema release process. Has it been a concern that you might run out of films?
When might M-Net no longer be able to show a new film premiere in the 20:00 timeslot on a Sunday night? Are you scared that there might be a gap period where there are no new movies to schedule on television?
Aletta Alberts: No, we have enough. We have enough. I think if they don't release anything from now until February next year we will start running into problems probably towards the end of the year but there are still enough coming through.
You also would have seen that the studios are not all going to cinema anymore, there are a lot of movies that go straight to the streaming services, especially in the case of NBCUniversal that's taking it directly to their streaming service Peacock in the United States.
So that's very interesting. You might think that movies are over in cinemas but you don't keep in mind the size of the Asian market and even in the United States.
Cinemas do still get high patronage, it's still a big part of what they do, although I do think that the players like Netflix have started changing that because they take films direct instead of first to cinema.
But then it's also a different type of movie - it's much more of a made-for-TV type of movie, and it seems like those types of movies have done extremely well over this period because it is almost a kind of Mills & Boons-ey and it speaks yet again to that "love conquers all" and "hero winning in the end" story. It's not about death, doom and destruction all the time.
We do still have enough film content and where we have local content like the M-Net series Trackers - it actually outperformed the biggest movies that we've had. So a combination of that and the local content - the pipeline we have is really strong and I think that with all of the co-productions that we are busy with at the moment, we are in a good space.
With the world in flux, the same is happening with the TV industry, with such a lot of uncertainty everywhere. What makes you excited to be in this space in the short-term future, and also longterm?
Aletta Alberts: Our audiences are just growing and what makes me really excited is the more local we show, the more local they watch.
Obviously that means that the balance is shifting more towards local than international content. That's the one thing that's very exciting.
Then the other thing that's really, really exciting is all of the new content that we're bringing in and test now like the Korean telenovela content with tvN. I'm really looking forward to working with these people, and also KIX - I think it's a fantastic channel.
It comes out of Asia, from Hong Kong, it's really the best of martial arts and run by these women who could have been in Crazy Rich Asians. They're passionate, fabulously outgoing, slightly campy but absolutely experts at what they do. When you talk to them you almost just want to climb through the screen to go and spend some time with them because they're so absolutely fantastic.
tvN on the other hand is made by the multi-award winning producers of Parasite, the South Korean movie that won the Academy Award for best international film. So it is fantastic, you're going to love it! They've even got a local Korean version of Entourage and things like that. It's really, really beautiful and so beautifully filmed and amazing.
At the same time we just now got our content slate now for until the end of March 2021. Normally we don't work that far out - 6, 7 months out. But we've got to do now for 6, 7 months out. And I promise you, I've not seen a slate that strong in all my years at DStv.
Also our 2020 Christmas content slate is looking incredibly strong. There's just so much content that we can talk about it for hours and hours and hours. Mrs America is amazing. The new FBI: Most Wanted is fantastic. There's a new Law & Order franchise. It just doesn't stop. Queen Latifah in a series. Then Nicole Kidman is coming in a series.
Then there's everything returning for new seasons like Grey's Anatomy to M-Net. And this year we don't have a "switch-off" strategy. Normally we go lighter over December, we don't show new series starting.
But this year we're going full-out. We're going to be showing the new seasons of all of the returning series that usually come back in October. It's all coming over December, January, March - just an unbelievable slate this year!
