It’s Time to Go Beyond the TV in CTV

If you cast your mind back to when you were a child at school you may recall a classmate that grew more rapidly than other kids in the class, almost as if they’d grown overnight. Growth spurts are common enough and a child that suddenly grows a few inches in height before their peers may tower over them for a time, but within a few years, they may no longer find themselves to be the tallest in the class.

Growth is crucial to success in business, but growing too fast may leave your business in a bind.

There is no doubt that the explosive growth of connected television (CTV) has been exciting, but the speed at which it has grown has resulted in problems. Our clothes are hanging loosely, tripping us up and hindering the forward progress and development of the industry.

But this needn’t be the case, and like with every gangly awkward youth, the answer lies in experimenting, taking risks, and understanding what CTV is truly all about.

A Queen’s Length Legacy of Perception

One of the major problems that we face in CTV is perception, as most members of the public have a very limited view of what it represents, and that’s not surprising. CTV stands for connected television after all, not connected programming or connected multimedia etc.  Сonsumers view CTV as a platform solely for consuming TV shows and films, just like conventional TV.

The CTV industry has been around for nearly a decade and only became popular with the mainstream within the last few years. The television itself was invented by Scotsman John Logie Baird in 1926, that’s 96 years (the whole of Queen Elizabeth II’s lifetime) where the fundamental nature of television barely changed.

The TVs of today are far more than what Baird could have ever envisioned back in 1926. They have become multifaceted with more options than just watching. They can be used to play games, consume news, and learn new skills and hobbies. To make the average consumer understand this, there needs to be a dynamic shift in how companies create channels and apps for CTV, to provide transformative offerings for audiences and drive the development of our industry.

For example, many still consider gaming and CTV to be like ships in the night, never intersecting, and that is not the case. In fact, gaming offers CTV the greatest potential for development.

We’ve Got Problems (But Not Quite 99)

Sadly there are considerable obstacles to the development of gaming content for CTV and it can be tough to develop content. As the mobile, desktop, console markets, etc are much bigger markets for developers right now, it is difficult to compete for attention. There are also CTV-specific issues including:

Computer hardware: Every major player on the CTV market that hosts gaming apps, whether that be Apple, Google, Roku, etc, has its own hardware and operating power requirements. This can place serious limitations on game developers by forcing them to create lower-quality content to ensure that it runs on as many platforms as possible.

Computer software:This issue is convoluted as different developers use different programming languages. For example, Apple uses Xcode IDE, as well as Swift, Objective-C, TVML, and JavaScript. Roku requires you to use its exclusive language BrightScript. As you can imagine, this makes things rather complicated.

Controller issues:CTV gaming differs from other platforms as its controllers are not designed for gaming. There are also platform-specific restrictions, i.e., games on Roku can only be played with Roku’s own remote, whereas Google TV requires users to buy third-party devices. Again, this complicates matters.

Original thinking is required to find solutions to these problems. The good news is that the rewards for doing so are considerable and we can already see the results of pioneers in the industry.

Examples to Follow

Some of the leading drivers of growth in the CTV gaming sphere are of course the big tech giants that can afford to devote considerable resources to research and development. Apple has its Arcade, then there’s Amazon Luna, Google Stadia, etc, which are all expanding the sizes of their audiences and looking to enter new markets. To understand the true potential of CTV gaming, however, it’s best to look at Roku, which is relatively small in comparison to the other giants of CTV. Looking at Roku, we are able to get a more balanced view of CTV gaming’s potential.

At the moment, gaming apps on Roku’s platform represent 1.6% of all apps, which places games at No. 15 in the rankings of its most popular categories. However, there’s much more to consider. For example, those consumers who actually play CTV-based games are much more frequent users.

In fact,  Roku ‘games’ represent the second most used category of genre, far ahead of more heavy-hitting types like ‘lifestyle’ and ‘religion.’ Many of the most popular games on Roku’s platform are also easy to play and create, like SNAKE and Rainbow Dash, lowering the bar for entry for game developers.

Combine simple-to-create content with engaged, frequent users and you have a solid foundation for CTV success. Small wonder then that Netflix, in the popular mind, the ultimate CTV platform as it’s been around for so long, now plans to increase the number of its games from 24 to 50 by the end of this year.

We Can Get a Happy Ending

There’s nothing wrong with being an awkward gangly kid. They often grow from ugly ducklings to graceful swans, proving their doubters wrong. The awkward development of CTV will follow the same path if we can address the problems it currently experiences.

Major industry players like Roku and Netflix have recognized the potential of gaming. But it is for the smaller industry players, the awkward kids, to take risks, experiment with new forms of content, and bring high-quality offerings to the market. Playcent is playing a major role in this process as the company continues to drive the development of CTV-based gaming forward.

But we can only achieve this as an industry if we change the perception of the audience and awaken them to the full potential of CTV. We must experiment with new gaming formats to capture the attention of the paying public, disrupt their assumptions about what CTV gaming offers, and create an alternative to mobile and desktop-based games.

As the saying goes, fortune favors the bold, and the time has come for a bold reimaging of the CTV sphere.