“Alexa, what’s the temperature going to be today?”
“Siri, what are the showtimes for the new Spiderman movie?”
“Ok Google, give me directions to the nearest gas station.”
Whether you’re out or at home, many of you are talking to digital assistants. eMarketer forecasts an astounding 128.9 percent increase in the number of Americans using digital assistant devices in 2017. Amazon Echo owns this market, which also includes Google Home, and will soon add Apple’s entry, the HomePod, which was introduced at WWDC in June.
The Amazon Echo is the definitive leader in the market, however, with that same eMarketer report forecasting it will have 70.6 percent of the users this year. It should come as little surprise then that Amazon reported it had sold three times as many Echo devices on Prime Day than it did last year - halfway through the day. With an already well-established lead over other entries in the market, Amazon upped the game in the digital assistant market again in June when it announced the Amazon Echo Show, which enables media organizations to deliver flash video briefings to its users as well as video calls, visual search, and movie playback.
For broadcasters and publishers, the opportunity is clear: reaching their audience wherever they consume content. Media organizations have already extended their reach from web video to mobile web and apps to streaming devices like Roku, AppleTV, Fire TV, and Chromecast. Reaching their audience on digital assistants is just an extension of the strategy already in place to reach consumers anywhere, anytime. Bloomberg, CNN, CNET, and Time, Inc. are just a handful of the broadcasters that have announced video-centric skills for the Echo Show, aiming to reach early adopters of the technology. And, for an industry starving for monetization opportunities, Amazon has allowed for experimentation on that front, with both Bloomberg and CNN already having experimented with voice advertisements on the Amazon Echo.
But what about brands? We recently wrote about a trend we’re seeing with brands developing over-the-top OTT services, something that only a short time ago was exclusively being done by media organizations. Increasingly, brands are realizing they too can be media companies - or use media strategies to drive customer engagement throughout the customer lifecycle. Companies like Campbell’s and the Starbucks are among the first brands experimenting, but the possibilities are limitless.
To make it easier for media organizations and brands to create high quality, engaging video for the Echo Show, Brightcove today announced Brightcove Jump Start for Echo Show to accelerate video skills across Echo Show devices. You can read more about it here.
Read the Press Release