The massive viewership of period soap opera <i>Buppe San Nivas</i> (Love Destiny) offered a beacon to troubled TV operators, by showing consumers will not abandon their old TV screens as long as the content is good enough to keep them glued to the sofa.
Operators have been asking themselves why the younger generation have shunned TV at home, and why consumers in general are moving away from this entertainment platform.
As the Buppe San Nivas case may suggest, operators can still prevail if they stay close to their audience, and take a more proactive approach to the competition. Content is still king, and powerful enough to help them win over the lower-budget offerings of most over-the-top content producers.
Srisamorn Phoosuphanusorn is Business Editor, Bangkok Post.
A quick scroll through our current prime-time offerings will reveal a menu chock-full of reality game shows and singing contests. Some operators, enamoured with enormous-yet-brief success, have produced these shows -- once a massive asset for their networks -- beyond the point of exhaustion.
Strangely, some operators reacted to the industry's falling ratings by emulating the losing strategies of their ailing competitors.
Whatever its merits, the period drama has stimulated Thais out of the intellectual torpor induced by an excess of game shows, which promote an overly simplistic, black-and-white worldview.
Singing shows and their genre typically revolve around finding a singular talent and crowning that winner in a lavish ceremony. Love Destiny, in contrast, evokes suggestive parallels between the new political and economic order and the old world by playing on the dynamics of Thailand's history and cultural heritage.
According to Nielsen and the the Stock Exchange of Thailand, BEC World's Channel 3 (33 HD) filled all of its advertisement slots during February and March, including during the time the series aired. Love Destiny averaged 8.005 from its first to its sixth episode, higher than the advertisement viewership rating for the whole of last year.
Channel 3's ad revenue dropped more than 95% from 1.2 billion in 2015 to 61 million last year. Love Destiny, which generates more than 113,740 baht every 15 minutes, could be the magic sauce that turns around the channel's moribund ad revenue.
Singing contests are starting to sound a little raspy, as Thais move away from the overused format. Some contestants and referees are merely old faces, and the audience is turning away from these shows because of cheating tactics, disguising a pro singer or trainer as a budding artist. The declines in the ratings are alarming for singing contests, and much larger than what you would expect for a big, buzz-worthy hit that is barely two years old.
Operators have driven themselves to the wall through a series of strategic blunders. Companies may have a window of opportunity to rehash the concepts that made Love Destiny successful into new shows. The greatest lesson to be learned, however, is companies must remain receptive to the rapidly changing preferences of their consumers, and react as speedily to their viewers' boredom as they would to any changes in their balance sheets. Momentum is great for quarterly results, not in product design.
- Series fallout: Fans wearing down historic Ayutthaya temple
The government will tentatively invoke its sweeping Section 44 powers this month to tackle the legal mess affecting digital TV operators, and help ease their financial burdens. The National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission has pledged to subsidise half of the broadcasting networks' rental fees for 24 months.
The aid measures will help digital TV operators reallocate their capital to content creation and human resource development. It is hoped this change will increase ratings and thus advertising fees, in turn strengthening operators' cash flows.
TV, traditionally a sleepy cash cow, is now a sector in need of heavy investment. The industry may never return to the glory days of analogue TV, but digital TV operators might take advantage of the break they're getting on licence fee payments to produce quality content to generate the cash to stay afloat.
In today's media market, linear TV operators that pretend to dictate what consumers watch may be the losers. Distribution models have been reformed, and new programming models are beginning to evolve.
We are approaching a tipping point: What we used to call TV is morphing into something else entirely, and what we call TV operators will also have to morph beyond the point of recognition if they are to survive.