The explosion of content and innovation are the key factors influencing broadcast businesses today, and businesses need to adapt to survive.

Speaking at the Broadcast Asia 2017 Conference in Singapore, Eric Bruzek and Brendan O’Shaughnessy outlined the trends broadcasters must face and key points they should be aware of when responding to those trends.

Global media disruption and audience fragmentation are the two big trends, as are the coming of Youtube and audio streaming services.

What does this mean for content producers and broadcasters?

Bruzek and O’Shaughnessy listed these important things to consider for broadcasters to stay relevant into the future:

Customers

• Customers want emerging technology that is ’cool,’ make whatever you do with technological advances cool not geeky.
• Customers want a large range of consumer devices to choose from at many price points and with a variety of features to offer.
• Rapid advances in distribution and compression technology will keep driving change.
• Data mining of customer information continue to grow. Advertisers want it to target their message, and consumers (mostly) want you to use it to personalise offerings to them.

Industry

• The Appification of everything: Media industries are moving to deliver more and more services via apps. Consider how your conpany can do so.
• Using turnkey systems not developing them in house: Things are moving so fast that if you develop systems in house it will be hard to keep up, but external suppliers have more focus on R&D to try to keep up with competitors, so their turnkey solutions will be more up to date than anything you can do inhouse.
• Get lots of third party data to understand ‘customer intent.’

Distribution

• Cloud storage and distribution are increasing.
• Content producers will be producing more original content but in many forms. ‘Skinny down’ your content for other social media platforms.
• Interfaces are character and logo driven. From a design perspective the trends are changing form the boring Electronic Program Guide channel focus we have today to more colourful eye catching graphics for your digital radio and app screen interfaces.

Big data is being brought together to learn more about customers and provide better data for advertisers. Get onto this trend.

Moving fast to bring new developments to market matters, but what matters more is working out what direction to move in. Some of the trends are:

• On-demand content is an important trend
• Facebook and Google dominate advertising
• Video and audio services are focused on subscription
• Consumer influencers are positioned to make strong revenue

A lot of the successful change coming is not from technology, but from changing business models. How will the markets change and how will your business deal with it?

To look beyond your business today focus on these areas: innovation, culture, organisation, customers and technology.

How does your company hire? Do you hire innovative, risk taking people?

Once hired, tell your staff it’s ok to fail if the company can learn something from that failure.

Successful companies are driven by ‘customer obsession’ in everything they do. They think big and take a long term view.

Profit is a derivative of customer satisfaction. Profit focused decisions within a short term time horizon are not the main decision driver for modern successful companies.

The conference and exhibition continues in Singapore this week. Check back here on AsiaRadioToday during the week for more reports.