Industry insights: It was a successful IBC2024 in Amsterdam with more people attending than in 2023, while the importance of children’s TV to streamers is made clear and Netflix reveals its top shows.
IBC visitors increase over 2023
[IBC]
There was plenty of nervousness across the TV industry in the run up to IBC2024. NAB in April had been smaller than the year before just when people were expecting it to bounce back strongly in the post-Covid era. And over the summer there were several challenging months in terms of macro-economic environment, which meant that companies across the board, including those targeting the booming creator economy, were talking about smaller teams and smaller stands.
But all that doesn’t seem to have affected the overall picture eventually. IBC2024 had 2000+ more visitors more than IBC2023. These attendees also visited 100 more exhibitors than last year who had booked 1500 more square meters of stand space. The final numbers were:
Visitors: 45,085 - up 5%
Exhibitors: 1350 - up 8%
Exhibition space: 46,000m² - up 3%
“In a year marked by major events such as the Olympics and national elections, there was an extremely positive buzz at IBC2024,” commented Michael Crimp, IBC’s Chief Executive Officer. “This year’s show addressed soaring interest in trends such as AI’s leap from theory to real-world applications, how the industry is fighting disinformation in news, and the need to foster talent and diversity across media, entertainment and technology.”
AI was indeed everywhere on the show floor and was a topic that dominated many discussions at the Conference. Crimp had said prior to the event that this was going to be the year “that AI grew up.” Certainly IBC2024 saw more practical applications of the technology. If last year’s show talked the talk about AI, this year it walked the walk.
Of course, beyond the sheer noise about AI, there were some other important trends that could be detected. It was good to see sustainability back on the agenda, while the move towards the cloud is accelerating, AdTech is becoming more sophisticated (and necessary — monetisation was a key theme of many customer conversations at the show), 5G is maturing and expanding the real world use cases (those from the Olympics were particularly interesting), and many more.
Two quotes from IBC2024’s opening keynote speaker, the internationally renowned media and technology analyst Benedict Evans, probably sum the experience up though, especially when it comes to AI.
The first pointed out that we are only two years into the whole generative AI rollout. “We are getting to the point that we know what some of the questions are and what some of the implications might be for e-commerce, or advertising, or finance, or television,” he said. “But it also still feels like looking at streaming in 2000 or mobile in 2010. ‘Okay, there’s something enormous here.’ But it’s quite hard to work out tangibly what that will mean. And so, we’re still looking to find the right questions.”
And the second quote is aimed at all those who are starting to feel comfortable with genAI. Or, indeed, any other new technology being adopted by the industry
“In technology, the moment that you feel you completely understand something is probably the moment that you should be paying attention to something else. Everything is always changing.”
How young viewers can reduce churn for streamers
Some fascinating data insight from Ampere Analysis points to the fact that households with children are less likely to cancel streaming services than those without them.
The difference is quite large too. In its survey data only 28% of customers with children can be thought of as at risk of churn. That number jumps to 36% when you look at households without children.
Children’s content is famously ‘sticky’ and children can be powerful voices in dictating consumer choice. Cancelling a service can mean cancelling access to exclusive content. However, it seems the solution to making sure that the younger members of families have enough to watch is not just to commission more children’s content.
Ampere says that Children & Family titles have been significantly affected by the recent downturn in commissioning. In terms of a decline in commissions the category is the third most-affected, only being beaten by the famously expensive genres of Drama and Crime & Thriller. The consequence is that VOD Original Children’s TV titles decreased by 18% between 2022 and 2023. And of the shows that were green lit, half of all children’s titles announced in the first half of 2024 were renewals.
(Again, this ties into what we know about children as consumers: they know what they like and want more of what is familiar rather than the excitement of something new.)
Balancing this is a growth in the number of non-original or acquired titles available to stream. These grew by 4% in the same period. Potentially this could lead to a busy acquisitions market and inflationary pressure on prices even of library content. But for now streamers should look to their libraries and the technologies they can use to surface the right content to the right consumer at the right time. If they can convince children that their service is indispensable, then the children will make that argument to their parents for them.
Netflix reveals most watched shows of 2024 so far
[Netflix]
Netflix has just published its latest spreadsheet compiling its viewing stats for the first half of the year. It’s a mammoth read encompassing 6800 titles, and there are definitely some interesting data points when sifting through all of them.
- In the first half of 2024, people watched over 94 billion hours on Netflix. That is 1 billion more than in the same period in 2023
- Top performing show was the limited series Fool Me Once (107.5 million views, above)
- Four out of 10 of the biggest shows this year to date have been UK productions: Fool Me Once 107.5m, Baby Reindeer 87.6m, The Gentlemen 75.9m and One Day 39.4m.
- Bridgerton (which doesn’t count as a UK production) remains astonishingly popular. The Bridgerton universe brought in 189m views in the first half of 2024, with Season 3 alone reaching 91.9m views in less than two months
- Non-English stories made up nearly a third of all viewing. Titles from Spain (Society of the Snow 104m, Berlin 49m, The Asunta Case 31m, and Raising Voices 25m) and Korea (Queen of Tears 29m, Parasyte: The Grey 25m, and My Demon 18m led the way.
And with reference to the above story on the stickiness of kids’ content, last year children’s programming made up 15% of Netflix viewing and it looks to be heading towards being a similar amount this year as well. Season 6 of the ubiquitous Peppa Pig was the 15th most viewed show of H1 2024, but add all of Peppa’s series together and you reach 117.4 million views; more than Fool Me Once got at the top of the Netflix table.
