Live Earth, and Television's Declining Viewership 2
So, I didn’t do my part to save the environment, which apparently was to watch a live rock concert on TV. Anyway, it turns out only an average of 2.7 million Americans were watching the concert, with Britain chipping in for another 3.1 million and Germany picked up another 1 million. What’s interesting though, is MSN’s 9 million Internet streams.
I have to say I have an increasing dislike of the TV, and tend to prefer the Internet. I didn’t watch MSN’s broadcast either (bets as to whether it was Linux compatible? ;-), but I saw a few screenshots of the interface. It looked a lot like a TV. ;-)
Two things have become clear to me:
- The Internet is going to kill TV.
- TV will have the last laugh, because the Internet is going to look more and more like TV.
So who loses in all this? Well, I worry that the Internet might suffer, but I imagine it is a matter of perspective. I suspect search engines are going to have to work a bit harder to extract meaning from video content, but it hardly seems impossible. I’m thinking probably the biggest pain will be felt by satellite companies (I’m looking at you Rupert Murdoch with your DirecTV and SkyTV networks) followed up with any cable companies whose profit was largely the function of being a licensed monopoly.
Otherwise, it is probably going to be a Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose chose kind of thing. What is also becoming clear to me is that the Nielson ratings are becoming an increasingly irrelevant metric of what the younger generation is interested in, which hopefully explains why TV’s content is getting worse and worse in a way that doesn’t doom us all to extinction in like two generations.
I’m going to have to chat with some of my neighbours (who are overwhelmingly in the TV business) to get an idea as to how the industry is going to respond to this. I thought they were all focused on HDTV, which at this point seems likely to be stillborn. To get an idea just how far off target HDTV is, keep in mind that the younger generation seems more than happy to view TV content on 2.5” diagonal screens with 320x240 resolution. So much so that a good chunk of them will pay money for it. About the only aspect of HDTV that is following something resembling a trend is the focus on thin TV’s, which seems to be following the already so-overdone-it-may-be-losing-its-cool razor thin cell phone trend.
I don’t think the Internet is going to kill all TV. I really don’t. People don’t mind like watching short things on their cell phones or the Internet, things like the talking heads of the news. But, I can’t imagine them watching movies there. Or live sporting events.
Also, from the technical perspective, the Internet is a really bad technology for pushing similar content to tons of people simultaneously. Things like satellite networks are much more efficient at things like this. What needs to happen is the Internet should be used for things it’s good at, and satellite networks for what they’re good at. This will take time, and I’m sure it will toggle both ways several times in the process before it becomes and efficient system.
Lastly, people can’t use search engines to determine what they want if they don’t know what that is. It’s the paradox of choice. TV has done a very good job of telling them what they want to see. And people are more likely to say “I want something like CNN” than they are “let’s see what’s on the Internet” today. Yes, this can be accomplished with things similar to “Google News” type feeds. But I think people, in general, trust the editors at CNN more.
I couldn’t agree with you more…. and yet they do. More importantly though, Internet != cell phone or small screen. I was mostly pointing to that as evidence that HDTV isn’t really following the trends. I consider things like MacTV, TiVo, and MSN’s coverage of the concert. etc. to be an indicator of where things are going.
Tell that to bittorrent. ;-)
The internet is a really bad technology for a lot of things. E-mail is a horrid technology for sending files, but people use it. HTTP is a horrid transport for RPC’s, but people use them anyway.
The point is the internet is fully capable of delivering TV content right now, and people seem to be preferring it, for any number of reasons that I can imagine. Furthermore, once you have a large, general purpose broadband data connection, do you really need a second connection for specific kinds of data?
Yeah, and I think what is quickly falling apart is the notion of satellite networks being very handy for delivering content directly to end users. It might not be a bad broadcast medium for highly popular content, but because users are going to increasingly be hotlinking around to other content and watching things with a time skew, you’re going to have at the very least a DVR sitting between them and the satellite, and I suspect once you have that it is just easier to use the internet. It’s just got a cheaper infrastructure cost.
I couldn’t agree more. We have blogs, collaborative filtering (look at launch.yahoo.com’s success with music), portals, etc. for that kind of stuff. My point about search engines was that their job was going to be a bit harder, because it is a bit more challenging to get a computer to understand video content than text content, so their job will be a bit trickier.
I think there will always be a place for content aggregators, although I think collaborative filtering based aggregators like reddit.com will probably take over a bigger chunk of that job (people seem to like narrow casting and collaborative filtering is the cheapest way to do it), but yeah, someone like CNN will be around for a long time, but they are going to have to change the way they do their business. My guess is that a couple of them will get it before the rest do, and they’ll end up making substantial market share gains while the rest continue to lose market share.