Scheduling content or scheduling choice?
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 9:05 
Whilst listening to the BBC's Media show [episode 26/08/2009) on my bicycle this morning (actually through my iPod and not the bike itself) I found myself challenging the distinctions made by a guest on the show. Patrick Barwise, Professor of Management and Marketing at the London was responding to the question of whether he thought that once video on demand (VOD) could be delivered through a television, whilst delivering the same picture and sound quality, it becomes a revolutionary development. He felt no, on the basis that all the evidence points toward people predominantly watching live television.
By use of the term ‘live’, he’s making the distinction between VOD and scheduled broadcast television output, not ‘live event’ television in the old sense, i.e. it’s being shot right now. However clear his distinction was, it still conceals a fundamental point. The majority of television is scheduled, and at the moment, that is the prerogative of the broadcaster. When the BBC only operated on one channel, it couldn’t provide choice, but once BBC2 came along, the continuity announcer could suggest an option to the viewer. That meant a shift from forward scheduling (telling me what’s happening later on) to include sideways scheduling (what’s happening on other channels). An easy shift one might think, but something that channel managers have continued to redefine. What’s to say that this mechanism for delivering choice won’t be extended to the choice of seemingly infinite channels of content, where the continuity announcer (or even visual interface/EPG) simply offers up a choice selection of the best that’s (constantly) available, thereby highlighting the wealth of other (always available) content provided by the broadcaster. As a viewer I won’t question when the announcer suggested the choice, rather I will simply be conscious of the fact that the choice is ‘live’.
So I agree that people will continue to hit the TV on button and expect to be able to consume content there and then, but to suggest that this can’t offer up VOD misses the point. The majority of broadcast content is already scheduled and to enable the user to self-schedule is more a challenge of the way you present that choice, not a distinction between live and VOD. I don’t question whether YouTube is live, I question how fresh it is. Where the innovation needs to happen is in the way broadcasters couch user choice, whilst maintaining the values of the Broadcaster, i.e. to maintain the sense of continual live editorial presence but at the same time offering choice to the viewer. The iPlayer is clearly on the way to making that evolutionary step.
Reader Comments (4)
Dear Paul
Many thanks for your email. This is a complex topic. As background, I suggest you look at the presentations from a half-day conference we ran here in July: go to www.acbuk.net and click on Conference. I especially recommend the Nielsen presentation. To these presentations, I’d add the following points:
1 Much of what’s written about VOD (including your blog comment) is pretty evidence-free. In the words of Ed Deming (quoted in my intro to the conference), “In God we trust. All others must bring data.” And it’s important to look at data on actual, not claimed, behaviour and with a proper representative sample. The difference in the context of VOD (and other traditional and non-traditional screen usage) is huge – see the Nielsen and ACB presentations. I won’t name names, but as well as a lot of data-free waffle on VOD there’s also a lot of bullshit data floating about. The facts don’t tell us what will happen in the future, but they’re not a bad starting-point.
2 The distinction you make between the viewing of live events and the viewing of recorded content is important in the context of live vs non-live TV viewing (eg DVR usage, where we already have a lot of evidence on this). But VOD isn’t the only, or even the most important, type of non-live viewing. It’s still early days, but the evidence is that, when ordinary viewers (ie not techies, etc) have all the bells and whistles, on average (i) about 80% of their viewing is live (still mostly of recorded content), (ii) maybe 15% is time-shifted off the DVR, and the rest is a mixture of (iii) catch-up TV (basically, time-shifting if you hadn’t set the DVR to record the programme) and (iv) true VOD, including both long-form content (TV programmes and movies) and short-form content (video clips). To me, (i)-(iii) – which account for over 95% of viewing in the average home with DVR and broadband – are all evolutionary, not revolutionary. (ii) and (iii) are both ways of watching much the same TV content as (i) but at a more convenient time, etc.
3 As DVR adoption increases and as DVRs get bigger, the need for (iii) – and even (iv) – may actually decrease, especially once people have to pay for them (see the next point).
4 The internet is an extremely stupid way of distributing large amounts of bandwidth-heavy video content, even SD, never mind HD. It’s still unreliable, low quality, and enormously more expensive than broadcasting (by satellite, cable, or terrestrial transmission) to an STB/DVR. Although (iii) and (iv) account for only a very low % of current TV/video viewing, they are already causing significant congestion on the internet. At some point, someone will have to pay for the bandwidth, as well as all the other incremental costs. The evidence is that viewers’ and advertisers’ willingness to pay for (iii) and (iv) is limited. (Meanwhile, thank you Google for picking up the tab for YouTube and ditto to all the other media companies subsidizing VOD until we can see what a viable business model might be).
5 People watch broadcast TV an average of 25 hours/week. This has hardly changed in 40 years, suggesting that TV is meeting some pretty big needs pretty well. Viewing in the UK has actually increased in the last two years, partly because of the recession, partly because - with bigger, flatter screens, DVRs, etc - it’s now meeting those needs even better than before: all the growth has been on main sets (ie in the living room). VOD is a significant market in its own right, but to talk of a revolutionary change in how people spend 25 hours/week is implausible, as (in my view) is the idea that it represents a large pot of gold even for the winners, especially given its inherently high costs.
6 Catch-up TV and VOD on the TV set (as well as the PC/laptop) will help. But the initial indications, including Virgin Media’s coyness about releasing figures on usage in homes with DVRs, are that the extra benefit isn’t all that dramatic.
The jury is still out on this but, with so many VOD and catch-up services now on the market, we should at last have a definite answer (after 20+ years of failed predictions from people like George Gilder and Nicholas Negroponte) within 12-24 months. Having studied TV audiences for over 30 years, my strong expectation is that this will be that the future of TV viewing will be evolutionary not revolutionary for at least the next 10-20 years. If you look at the presentations from our conference, I’ll be surprised if you don’t reach the same conclusion.
Please feel free to put this on your blog.
Best regards
Patrick
_________________________________
Patrick Barwise, Emeritus Professor of Management and Marketing
Direct line +44 (0)20 7000 8615 Email: pbarwise@london.edu
www.london.edu
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