So I’m still thinking about the possibility of dumping cable television and going all-Internet for our video watching. The poll I posted last week is open until the 15th if you care to add your vote, and the results so far are identical to that 1-in-8 statistic I cited, so it’s clear that the early-adopter penalty is still in effect if I go down that road, but the path seems clearer all the time.
I came across this article in The Economist that considers the difference between the way people say they watch television and the way they actually watch television, and concludes that sixty years of plopping your butt down and watching whatever is on continues to be everyone’s preferred method, regardless of how much you might honestly think you do it differently. The reason, say the various experts in the story, is not our unwillingness to learn how to program the VCR/TiVo/BitTorrent software but rather because we’ve adopted television viewing as the canvas for our interpersonal interaction with family members. The programming isn’t even the point, it’s the opportunity to spend time with the wife and kids. While the implication here is that people won’t change the way the interact with video content, I’m not so sure that’s true. If the delivery mechanism is not the most important element in that system, it shouldn’t take much to make a change to the delivery mechanism, as long as it is not too disruptive of the real desired outcome (the human interaction). Drawing again on the example of our experience with Netflix streaming, on many Saturday mornings, I sit with Charlotte in the living room and spend time with her while she watches cartoons. Last Saturday, we sat together as usual, but instead of watching whatever was on Disney Channel at the moment, Charlotte watched a couple of movies via Netflix, and when she got bored with that we moved on to some things I had recorded on the DVR. We were still watching the television and using the time to be together, but the delivery mechanism had been completely supplanted by the on-demand model.
This BoingBoing post by guest author Craig Engler (who is an executive at the SyFy Channel), argues that prognosticators who say television is being killed by the Internet have several key points wrong, the biggest one being that most (but not all) online video content is still the sole purview of the traditional television model: without the broadcast and cable networks, there is no content, and to this point nobody has developed a business model that can sustain the cost of producing content without the well-established business of ad-supported traditional television. Unlike the Economist article, Engler’s article says that the mechanism is very important, but it’s at a level of remove from the viewer. However, both articles basically make the same point that the overall system is nowhere near as transformed as the people at the top end of the J-curve would like us to think.
But maybe ten years from now, the generational shift alone might swing the balance of that equation. This short article by analyst Henry Blodget links to a much more detailed analysis of the media consumption of children aged 8-18, which paints a picture of a near future with a new generation of young adults so thoroughly media-saturated that they could very well transcend all of the media behaviors that have come before.
