You Can't Do That On Television

Online video has hit prime time. YouTube now claims to be streaming 100 million clips per day. Viacom and Google are experimenting with delivering short TV clips through online ad inventory space. Most of the major US networks are delivering traditional programming via iTunes or their own download service. And social networks like MySpace are adding rocketfuel to the explosion in viral video distribution. Is this TV 2.0? I don't think so.

Ask yourself this. How much does a medium have to change before it becomes a new one? Although tech retentives might argue the point - moving from black and white, through colour and then high definition is a big change but not a profound one. Lets face it. Despite the evolutions, people are still sitting down on a couch, flipping channels, and tuning out to a scheduled broadcast. In other words - its still TV.

In my view - new mediums are born when consumer behaviour, not technology, changes. Controversial as this may be - nothing about the current rise in video streaming is being driven by radical technical innovation. Faster and more prevalent broadband makes a difference. A big one. But the basic delivery technologies - Quicktime, Flash, Windows Media - have been with us for years. What has really changed is the way audiences are consuming content.

If you look at what people are actually watching on YouTube, you might be in for a surprise. In fact a lot of it, as Hobbes might have quipped, is nasty, brutish and short. Aside from 'funniest home video' style clips, also popular are cult TV shows, unscreened pilots, remixed animation clips, and viral advertisements. But although demand is growing faster than anyone expected, don't assume that people are trading normal TV viewing for a night of 30 second clips. Its true that there are limited hours in the day, and if you spend two hours on Myspace, that probably means less of everything else. But time spent interacting with new web based media is a new kind of social activity. Its not just Desperate Housewives on your iPod. People are using the web to discover TV content that isn't normally programmed, hasn't yet made it to their domestic market, was recently axed or never given a greenlight for full production.

The key to this is discovery. The really cool thing about social networks is not just showing off to your friends, but using qualified connections to discover new people, new products, and new entertainment media content that you might not have otherwise known about. Someone in your MySpace networks finds a hilarious new viral video featuring David Hasselhoff (again!), and uploads it too a YouTube stream on their profile page. Then they tell their friends via a MySpace user bulletin, and suddenly there are hundreds more people who find it, laugh and add it to their profile pages. The videos are tagged, commented on, and then turn up in search results and syndicated feeds on thousands of other content sites. Its a radically more connected form of media consumption. In other words - this is not TV.

Truth is, TV will continue to develop in parallel to this new medium which i have come to call 'networked media'. Display screens will get bigger and better, visuals and sound will dramatically increase in resolution, and devices will allow for greater flexibility in storage and personalisation. Networked media, on the other hand, which includes all kinds of media content (music, video, podcasts, articles) will evolve along a different path - more flexible distribution, device portability and playback, better tagging and discoverability, and smarter ways to target and commercialise audiences. Two seperate destinies. Lots of crossover.

Of course, its easy to fall into the trap of looking at new mediums and assuming immediate cannibalisation. TV kills radio, Video kills TV and then cinema for good measure. iPod kills radio. Web sites kill newspapers. And then, before you know it - everything bounces back. Actually - when you look at the long term patterns - mediums don't die, but the economics do change.

Sure, technology will change the TV landscape. With enough bandwidth, all TV content as we know we be delivered by an IP based network. But even when that happens, its a bit like when Telco's swap out copper for fibre in their exchanges. If you pick up a phone, and there is a dial tone has anything really changed? New technology, same consumer behaviour. The real magic happens when people change.

Comments

[Gary Hayes]

Yes indeed Mike, nothing new under the sun. I refer you to a hundred posts I have written on the subject of media evolution, changes in form and shifts in distribution channels on Personalizmedia.com - a good start is one I did referring to Gary Carter from Freemantle who made the important development of form, where TV simply becomes disassociated from its delivery screen, that the form "game show, news programme, reality TV" etc remain on a multitude of screens - http://www.personalizemedia.com/index.php/2006/04/10/milia-6-the-media-tidal-wave/

You then talk around the fringes of cross-media, personalisation and changing business models - of course very little dies (I think the only thing that has in media since the dawn of time has been the telegram - and that only in the last few months) - no nothing dies it evolves, morphs, merges and like the audience itself transforms.

Another of my posts on that subject from last Sep on the Robin Sloan EPIC film included this relevant quote echoing yours:

"I have grown to hate those long languid deliveries by media types predicting the end of old media models and introducing new ones as if they have discovered the secret of eternal youth! It’s called change. Embrace it, enjoy it, getting brownie points from saying ‘The New York Times” or TV is doomed gets us nowhere fast - mediums are EVOLVING, content is EVOLVING, our vocabulary is changing (radio sprouts podcast, tv sprouts vod, news sprouts people news)- very little is dying , thank goodness, layer upon layer - “EVOLUTION is good, DIVERSITY is good”. Lets paint a bright, diverse media future and aim for it and stop looking back - “we put a man on the moon yet we still carry on walking to the corner shop”
http://www.personalizemedia.com/index.php/2005/09/19/evolving-personalized-information-construct-way-of-the-future/

BTW - Just saw your AFTRS graduation keynote - spot on, just wished more folk in Oz would 'break those rules" ;-)

[Tim Kennedy]

Disappointed that this is not an article about the great Canadian TV Show, with the same name as the title.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078714/

Proving that you could do that on television!

[David Koopmans]

Mike, I agree with the fact that only consumer behaviour changes the media but behaviour can't necessarily change without the technology to enable it. The real (or mainstream)change will come when we can get a broadband cable plugged into a television set so we can all sit around it, eat our snacks and argue over what we are going to watch...and that will be a lot harder than it is now.

PS: And by the look of things we shouldn't hold our breath in Australia for the day that we'll have that real broadband to the home; could be years away thanks to the bizarre telco environment we have.

[Tim Parsons]

In related news, "Fosters moving all its TV ad dollars online"

http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623075

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1212768.ece

http://www.fosters.com.au/enjoy/beer.htm

[Hans de Kraker]

I could not agree more. Media has changed and will continue to change as part of an evolutionary process.

In 2006 there still is someone chisseling away at a marble rock in their spare time out of desire to manifest and express themselves. The same person may go into the office during the week and create something in photoshop for a corporate client. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Give a pen and paper(media) to Pablo Neruda or to 17 year old Johnno who has just come back from a binge drinking session with his mates - the creative outcomes these two produce will be dramatically different. It never is about the media - it is about what you do with it - either as a participant or a spectator.

[Robert Salisbury]

I liked the general thrust of your arguement but I would not want to underestimate the impact of the likes of Google and YouTube.

TV may not be replaced by new media, but I believe it will be massively diminsihed in importance by it.

TV used to BE the Media. Think of the 'Man on the Moon', 'Vietnam war'. In those days the newspaper and radio were seen as poor relations to the TV, why?, because they weren't in colour for a start.

But more importantly TV in its heyday, the 70's was almost universally, throughout the western world, the singular vehicle for mass communication. If it happened on TV that was it.

This had socialogical impact that is hard to match today. We were all party to similar experience.

The splintering of media means we have a palapable difference in the way the post net generation and the TV generation gain information or receive news. That means that not only does a younger generation gain information differently, but they are gaining different information.

If the TV generation still sit infront of the TV each night watching the news and actually say, 'oh I didn't know that' or "that's news to me", then it is very different from the net generation, who will already know most items of major news before it had aired on TV. You can't switch on your browser without the latest headlines 'advertising' themselves at you.

Lets compare the Man on the Moon with September 11. In the age of TV, the 60 -70's, if you wanted to be apart of history, you sat infront of your TV.

Come September 11, when most people were at work, when the nightmare began, (OK I exclude Australia from this time analogy, but lets say Europe and the Americas) most of us witnessed the events 'live' on computer screens; on the net.

If you want news, forget TV. TV news is scheduled. News doesn't happen at prime time. It is live. There is a reason we switch a TV on. Our computers are on all day. The net is live.

Not a lame difference. But a fundamental shift in the role that TV now plays. TV is now assigned to mind stimulation, escapism, hobbies, therapy.

The cut and thrust of news and contact with the world we live in has left TV behind and jumped onto the net.

If two hundred years ago, the masses attained news from printed word (newspapers), it underwent a speed of light transformation with the Radio appeared. Likewise, the visual nature of TV trasnformed the outlook too, giving the masses the 'seeign is believing' factor that radio could never deliver.

Now the net is the conduit through which Real news and content is put across.

How do you feel about reading last weeks newspaper? Watching last nights news on TV? The stories are all the same; the Middle East, Economy, a murder, Statistics, etc. But it is the FACT that it IS news that makes us want to know it.

Two symbols of the net, Google with its garganuan search plates, which are to marketing, what the invention of the aeroplane was to travel, and increasingly lesser sites such as YouTube, are the staple for media. When the world and his wife wake up to the potential the net offers, it will diminish the TV to a party trick or a soothing escape for an hour or so, when you need to switch off. No longer the vibrant overlord of global communication, but a box to switch on, when at the end of a day of commincating, "I don't want to communicate".

Maybe thats just me. But I feel TV has been relegated by so many other media that it can barely find its way.

Whats wrong with a book! There was a time when it could do everything. A book used to mean education, knownledge, learning, the means to advancement and power; think of the church of the middle ages, the Roman Empire.

But now of course the book is full of stories to entertain. When we think of a book we are more likely to picture someone ignoring the world and curling up on the sofa or in bed.

Who today, would buy the Encyclopedia Britanica? It is probably on disc.

TV, scheduled TV, TV we watch when we switch on in the living room, is becoming the book. It has lost its crown to the infinitley superior, mind bogglingly omnificent Net.

As one dreary punk sang in the 70's "Televisions Over".

But I like to switch it on sometimes, when I want to switch off.

[Natia English]

I completely agree with your last statement, Mike ("The real magic happens when people change").

When a new medium is introduced to the market place, advertisers and users don't really know what to do with it yet. When TV was first introduced, people created radio ads for a television medium. The quality of visuals was low and focus was heavily on voice and sounds. Similarly when the web world was introduced, people mostly used it as "brochure sites" (flat one-way websites with email as the only hyperlink produced) or flat one way television ads. Now, after over a decade, advertisers are making ads, websites and online promotions much more interactive.

So, enough with the history lesson.

The point is that advertisers are still figuring out how to make the most of the YouTube/short video medium. People need to change the way they think, understand all the new capabilities available, excercise their imaginations and use the full potential of the medium.

I look forward to watching people change, and hopefully being a part of it too.

[dave richards]

Mike, your comments are pretty much spot-on…. Or at least they concur with my own!
The fundamental purpose of Commercial television is to acquire audience and then sub lease that audience to those who wish to pay to expose their own messages.

The reality is that, through a combination of network arrogance and legislative ineptitude, the networks have dropped the ball. There used to be a saying in radio “you don’t attract listeners – you can only send them away” which, if we discount their advertising in other media, remains true. In other words, when a listener tunes into your station, he or she will stay there until you play or say something which encourages them to move to another station, where they stay until that station says or plays something unattractive, hopefully sending them back to you.

Admittedly, television has a more transient audience – remote junkies if you like – but perhaps this is indicative that the TV audience is giving total concentration whereas radio audiences tend to listen in irregular waves with genuine listening triggered by certain words or pieces of music and merely hearing all the rest as a sort of subconscious background.

Today’s generation of TV programmers are a very bright lot, they know very well that it is close to impossible to retain all of the people all of the time and so they carefully manipulate their schedules to maximize the important demographics in each market segment and thus have enough winning content to offer the advertisers – whatever the product or target. Seven and Nine run with this philosophy, Ten put all their money on the black and took the brave (long term foolish?) decision that there is more money in winning one segment constantly. The bottom line of this is that, in the same way as advertisers have to buy Seven and Nine in order to ensure reach and frequency for their campaigns, viewers have to skip back and forth between the two in order to satisfy their interests….. chicken and egg or self fulfilling prophecy?

Despite valiant branding attempts, viewer loyalty is a past luxury, today’s audiences watch programmes, not networks, but is there a route to redemption? Of course; as the networks force viewers away they go in search of alternative sources of entertainment and at moment broadband or IPTV is seen as that solution. Briefly look at what the networks are doing …… readily available research shows that the most hated things on TV are “too many ads” (it is important to note that viewers define every interruption to their programme, including promos, as advertising) and “squeezing” (where the picture is diminished in order to run promos or ads on the remaining screen) yet both are easily fixed. Too much advertising really means “too many ads which are not relevant to me” and yet the combined network wisdom was to reject the concept of conditional access as a specification for Australian set top boxes (CA would have provided the ability for three or four ads to be run simultaneously and, just like the web, each TV would then choose the most relevant one for the individual viewer subject to previous viewing habits).

There is no excuse for “squeezing” – the networks who continue to do it are merely showing a total disrespect for their audience. Speaking of disrespect, the major Hollywood Studios conduct their own research in all Australian capital cities forty eight weeks per year and Hugh Grant continues to rate as one of the most popular “Stars” with multi-cultural audiences and yet SBS actually run promos implying that Hugh Grant is a buffoon …… what does that say to the audience? Similarly, they also run anti-American and anti-Hollywood promos yet American movies in general and “big” Hollywood productions enjoy a disproportionately high ‘multicultural’ box office in Australia… SBS obviously enjoy insulting their market.

In more objective terms, how do smokers react to seeing the new crop of confrontational anti-smoking ads? Easy; they have a little remote button which gives them the option of sampling what other channels have to offer….. I certainly wouldn’t pay money to run my ads in the same break.

On the tangent of insulting audiences; why was Kerry Packer a natural TV boss? He was rich and self confident enough to not spend every night of the week maintaining his society profile and actually watched his own channel….. how many senior TV execs do that today?

So as the Networks send viewers away, they gravitate to the web. Nine’s strap line of “still the one” was one of the most effective lines ever conceived because a basic viewer characteristic dictates that everyone wants to watch the winner. No-one wants to be the odd one out when the opinion leaders are chatting at the proverbial water-cooler. Again this is where the web wins. As people establish their individuality and try to impress their peers by being first with something new the web provides the perfect tool. In my office Entourage is the current hot programme, everyone has Foxtel and yet not one person knew that Fox8 had shown series one – they are all watching series three the moment it becomes available on-line. By definition, this makes downloading a typical “fashion” process and therefore as the masses adopt, the leaders will, by necessity, move on to something else - how many people bought iPods in the rush and have already stopped using them?

As an owner of Telstra I would like to think that, at least the infrastructure (or wholesale) component, would remain a part of our, rapidly dwindling, national utility infrastructure and that everyone could have economic broadband and anyone could pay their “access” money and offer a free, advertising funded channel.
As each programme of worth could also be destined to have its own dedicated, advertising funded or PPV site/channel and, since Googling every programme isn’t really a practical option, so the onus will fall on someone to provide a usable one-button channel/site guide (gateway) in much the way Foxtel’s EPG does today. And there lays the catch: Foxtel’s PVR is capable of learning our viewing habits; it is capable of choosing programmes of our selected genres or those which have something relating to our chosen genres. Programme makers will fight to insert the most attractive “key words” in their metadata to ensure their programmes are automatically downloaded. TV Network programmers will still use their expertise to select mixes of programmes and as their selections gain credibility with viewers, their list will also be downloaded (as BskyB have already examined) to the PVR. So we can expect a world where the viewer will come home from work, switch on the PVR, select from the downloaded list of programmes and watch TV….. just as today.

Just like the web, News’ subscription networks such as Foxtel already have the capability of presenting individually targeted advertising and the capability to insert time or viewing history defined real-time ads into our PVRs so that even programmes we recorded months ago will include today’s un-skippable campaign. Presumably those free-to-air networks who reach carriage agreement with Foxtel will be able to have their content carried in full, complete with un-skippable advertising; those who don’t might well find that the alternative carriage replaces all the network-sold commercials with those sold by the carrier – much the same as the original ill-fated TiVo model. Embedded or hard-glued advertising does not offer a solution since on one hand it only works for multi-national brands and on the other, anything which can be replaced for geographic markets can be replaced again at the point of view.

At the moment, Rupert has the front running in the battle of the gateways and Google are busily working on something similar but Google, Microsoft et al are in an “open” web market which means they are possibly restricted in their choices of advertising models. Perhaps the most interesting hint on the future direction was given by News Corp’s Peter Chernin, who earlier this week commented, "Our partnership with Google underscores News Corp's continued evolution to become a powerful force in the digital media marketplace …. This is just the first of many steps we plan to take with Google."

Once the novelty of distribution channels wears off, the audience will expect their content and advertising messages to retain, or improve on, the production qualities of today and that means the current main-stream production houses and ad agencies will retain the business.

This may sound traitorous to the ‘digital’ advertising community but tomorrow’s TV ads will use much of the same targeting capability – refined to use much more accurate audience insights and psychographics than today but where does that leave the web specialists?

The much heralded “convergence” is upon us, but as pregnancy becomes infancy, there is a very strong chance that childhood will see web and (for lack of a better term) TV again diverge.

Web sites will have the colour, movement and big production values of made-for-TV ads but traditional TV audiences will again be sitting in front of their giant screens watching TV and we will continue to use the web for our business, search and esoteric needs, but will we use today’s web advertising experts for anything more adventurous than today?

As Warren Lee so rightly put it, there are some fantastic developments but they are valueless if they are before their time. If Australian TV networks get their act together and think longer term, there could be a long and prosperous future for them, but as long as they continue to maltreat their audiences and as long as they work under the threats of sale or revolving doors, none of the Senior Execs are thinking beyond their current contracts.

[Gareth Powell]

I think the key sentence in your piece may be that last one.
'The real magic happens when people change.'
The question is whether people are changing.
Last night I had drinks with an American film producer.
He told me two things I found somewhat surprising:
1. Younger audiences will not stand for longish scenes where the plot is developed. They want something, anything, happening all the time. Their attention span is now measured in seconds rather than minutes.
2. Digital makes little impact on the cost of making a full-length movie. He said there are less than 100 cinemas in the United States equipped to take digital feeds. So the digital has to be made into film.
His first point, is, I think, the important one.
Young people are changing rapidly. They are not reading newspapers.
They have much shorter attention spans. There are far more diversions open to them.
And, annoying this, they will not sit still through a performance of Anthony and Cleopatra at The Globe in London

Gareth Powell in Bangkok

[SEO Melbourne]

Hi Mike,
Whilst I agree with your basic premise that consumer attitudes are fuelling the consumption of online rich media, I would not discount technological influences. Having produced thousands of hours of online video content over the last eight years I have seen a lot of video technology come and go. However over the last 24 months there have been some subtle yet powerful technological developments that have facilitated consumer adoption.

Obviously the availabilty of bandwidth has had a huge impact. Fibre, ADSL2, ADSL, Cable etc has made it relatively painless not only to consume but also to publish.

RSS2.0 with the ability to embed video and audio into a text feed which then allowed others to subscribe.

General grunt at server side. With the 'tin' becoming so cheap it has become relatively inexpensive to create server side systems that can take a file and re-encode it to standard specification, making it easy for the publisher to simply upload their files and not have to worry about the technical details.

Of video cameras themselves have become incredibly cheap, especially webcams.

The future: 3G is dead long live WiMax. One of the main problems with Podcasting /Vodcasting is the dodgy metrics. HTTP download is not much better. However streaming has always delivered great granularity when it comes to stats. Podcasting is a transient technology. WHen portable devices become fully networked with WiMax chips then we will see a move back to streaming technologies that tell a publisher not only how many downloads they had but more importantly how much of a file was watched. WiMax will kill 3G in it's tracks. With download speeds of 74mbps and a single tower able to service a 50km radius Wimax is a major leapfrog technology. Then publishers will be producing even more content and getting it to "air" faster.

Luvyawork Mike.

Jim Stewart

[Shahane]

Your article could not have come at a more relevant time for me. I have been asked to create a viral ad for uploaded to YouTube. Largely my reason to do it for free is that it will probably receive more viewing through viral than it ever would on television.

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