by Paul Rule
The ways people are consuming content on new video platforms remind me of how I sometimes eat one of my favorite foods – shrimp fried rice.
Traditional linear TV is consumed the way fried rice is intended to be eaten. The rice, the veggies and the shrimp or chicken or whatever meat is at hand are consumed together. However, online clips and on-demand video in general tend to promote a bit of cheating. It’s like those occasions when I’m not all that hungry, and after a few bites I find myself starting to skip over the vegetables and rice, seeking out the shrimp and just eating those.
Think YouTube, and here we are hunting out a clip of one particular segment we like from a TV show, the rest of which didn’t impress us. And we certainly don’t want to see all of those commercials that ran in the program. So we go online and find a clip of what we want. Yum, tasty shrimp!
Even if we watch a full episode of a program on cable on-demand or on Hulu or a network website, we’re still enjoying a distilled version with few, if any, commercials. An hour long show often magically becomes a 45-minute experience. And if the streaming software allows it, we may skip around in that and watch only the program segments that particularly interest us. It’s not just the cable or broadcast network ads that vanish. Those couple of minutes or more from each hour that the cable systems sell to local advertisers are gone, along with the local inserts in broadcast shows sold by your local affiliated stations.
Lots of people make their living selling these local availabilities. You can hardly blame them if they feel threatened by digital technology. There are new revenue opportunities, but there may be periods of starvation before we can develop them to the point of company and personal profit. For example, “dynamic” on-the-fly commercial insertion in on-demand TV offerings at either the network or local level is still more a promise than reality. And we haven’t even touched on the effects of DVRs in the viewing mix.
Meanwhile, audiences are learning to skim the cream and pitch out the skim milk. Pass the shrimp.
Paul Rule is President of Marquest Media Research.