Apps Under Gun In Hotly Competitive Market

This is part two of a special report. For part one, please click here.

The biggest trend in news apps for 2012 might be framed as more of a warning: Ignore the user’s high expectations and preferences at your own peril.

These users, inundated by options, have little patience for a dull interface and clunky functionality, experts said, but they do have a ravenous appetite for relevant content developed around their tastes, more social media in their apps, more live streaming video and smart aggregation. And they want their content wherever they want it, which means local media better step up their cross-platform content distribution.

Users also have a yen to see how far their tablet apps can take things into a new frontier, and they’re bringing their headphones along for the trip, so radio stations better get on board with their own apps or they’ll be left behind.

As for the innovators, insiders said that smaller, more agile new companies are more likely to dictate the trends in app development then slower moving legacy media companies, which some worry remain in a more reactive posture.

As local media apps continue to roll out, nothing is more important than user experience said Wade Beavers, CEO of Rochester, Minn.-based DoApp, which develops apps for television, radio and newspaper sites. “It needs to be delightful,” Beavers said. “Users have high expectations of what their experiences should be, and the problem is most news properties have invested little to no money in mobile in comparison to their Web, but the traffic is rising on mobile way faster.”

Relevance is paramount for app users, said Doug Bennett, president of Freedom Interactive in Santa Ana, Calif., whose highly differentiated Orange County Register tablet app has made an aggressive play for newspapers’ elusive 35-45-year-old demographic. Bennett said that many legacy media companies have set their app aspirations in the wrong place.

“Unfortunately, I think it tends to be more of how are we going to take our database of information we create each day and push it out to all the different devices,” Bennett said. “The trend should be more around what you’re going to do to develop content around the audience or what you’re going to do about original content for that audience.”

Bennett said too many media companies fixate on the mobile platform itself rather than how it’s utilized and what’s unique about it. “The platforms themselves are only platforms,” he said. “If you’re not doing something with the content also, you’re going to fail.”

For Beavers, the bar on user experience has been set high by news aggregators such as Flipboard and Zite, which have been hugely positive among smartphone and tablet users alike. And he said they point the way to another trend in apps — a ramping up of quality aggregation that’s cross-pollinated with a social component. “News is becoming more and more social, so the integration of social components is highly important,” Beavers said. “I believe news aggregation, relying more and more on a community of aggregators, will become a huge requirement.”

On the aggregation front, there’s also a possible meta-trend afoot with regards to competition, as aggregators have always had a kind of “frenemies” role with original content providers, according to BIA/Kelsey senior analyst and program director Mike Boland. For the content originators, Boland said, “They’re getting distribution for their content, but it could also be seen as competition because they could be pulling eyeballs away from the other owned-and-operated apps that a media company is trying to push on its own.”

(Exhibit A for the more competitive aggregation space: Beavers is developing aggregation software that can filter out competitors’ content for his news apps.)

Increased and improved social sharing and publishing will also be a priority according to Jason Gould, senior VP and GM of Bloomington, Minn.-based Inergize Digital, who added that users will be looking for more video, as well. “Live streaming is going to be a bigger and bigger part of the industry,” he said, noting that alerts and commercial insertion will also be a bigger part of that picture.

Gould added that media companies will be looking for more streamlining on the back end, as well as many taking more of a cloud approach to their content, rolling it out across multiple platforms at once. He said companies will increasingly be looking for one touch publishing between CMS, SMS, mobile apps, mobile websites and email.

But when it comes to the implications of tablets on the app market, the outlook is hazier. Boland, echoing many in the industry, isn’t even sure tablets fully belong in the mobile category given numerous studies that point to their lean back usage and where consumers seem to be using them. “A lot of us analysts were surprised by seeing the mode of connectivity of tablets being mostly WiFi rather than over a 3G or 4G network,” he said, suggesting more home usage.