Why Meerkat, Twitter's Periscope, other smartphone streaming video won't kill TV
"The big thing... is 4-screen accessibility." Or 5.
When anyone (like DreamIt-backed, latest-big-thing Meerkat, or Twitter's newly-acquired Periscope) can produce and distribute smartphone video, pushing it out free to vast audiences, what does that do to Comcast and Verizon and HBO, TV networks and pay video providers and advertisers?
"It's good buzz, but it's incremental," says Jeff Dittus, chairman of Audience Partners, a 62-person electronic ad platform with offices in Fort Washington and Washington that specializes in targeting voters for political campaigns. "The big thing coming down the road is four-screen accessibility," the art of pumping messages, not just through TV, but also through "computers, mobile phones, tablets, and gaming systems," he told me.
Video live-streaming services like Meerkat may prove well-suited for reaching people in their 20s raised on smartphones, he added. But reaching the mass of Americans now means surrounding them on all screens. And advertisers, retailers, pro sports, video makers, and the operatives organizing the 2016 Presidential campaigns are already hard at work making it happen. (More in my column in today's Philadelphia Inquirer here)