This is part of two post around ethnic TV channel & content distribution. This first part explores the growing demand for ethnic TV channels and content. The second part will focus on some of the obstacles around ethnic content distribution.
There has never been a better time to distribute ethnic content across the globe than now. In particular, ethnic TV channels are in high demand with various platforms. It is only the beginning of a blooming ethnic content distribution era.
Here are the reasons for this new demand for ethnic content and TV channels:
1) Diverse Audiences around the World through Travel & Migration
People never moved and migrated around like nowadays. From the occassional traveller to the expatriate worked. From migrants to diaspora communities almost any country and market in the world has now its fair share of international people living within their walls. Naturally, these foreign people want to have access to news from home, want to still keep in touch with their culture of origin and maybe also want to expose their children to their own roots – even if this is already the 2nd or 3rd generation of immigrants.
2) Old Operators want fresh, diverse Content
In the past, the main distribution infrastructures for TV channels were Cable and DTH. Capacity was typically a scare commodity on these systems. They selected the content, that was carried, very carefully in order to maximize impact. Impact was defined by reaching the most attractive audience – be it in terms of wide reach (meaning a very large demographic to deliver eyeballs) or great revenue potential (meaning an audience that is willing to pay good money for access to content: i.e. porn, sports, blockbuster movies, etc.). Now, since then two developments changed this approach: The ‘old’ market and audience is saturated and operators need to address newer audiences – and these are typically in niche markets (such as ethnic communities). Secondly, the technology advancement in terms of distribution help operators to expand capacity and deliver a larger number of channels and content (best example is, that large MSOs add their own IPTV service now with up to 1.000 channels).
3) New Distribution Systems emerge
Over the past year, we have seen multiple new distribution systems emerge next to the traditional systems like Cable and DTH. They are plenty of OTT, IPTV, Mobile, Webstreaming offers in the market nowadays and every day a new one is announced. These new operators often focus right from start on certain target audiences (for instance, niche sports) and quite many of them have identified ethnic communities as their prime target. In particular, quite a few telecommunication operators and service companies are entering the OTT and IPTV market. Their interest is in selling extra bandwidth and data plans: and what better product to make this happen than selling TV channels, that need to be streamed constantly.
4) Everyone is looking for extra income
Distribution of ethnic content proves to be a good source of extra, incremental income for both distribution platforms and channel/ content providers. Usually, the content / tV channel does already exist anyways and opening an additional market outlet via foreign distribution for it, does generate an extra revenue stream. Often the extra cost for proper copyrights to purchased content is reasonable in relation to the income potential. And the distribution platforms need to avoid churn and any cord-cutters. Creating ethnic packages does often help them exactly with that and does also open up new revenue.
The era of ethnic TV channel and content distribution has only started yet. It will grow tremendeously over the next few year as more channels and platforms participate in it. So far, we address only a fraction of the market. Make now sure that you are also part of this growth story.
Contact us, if you want to add ethnic content to your platform or interested in distribution of your TV channel / content.
