The Death of Television: Part 1 in a series.

April 28, 2008 • Comments (2)

However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter*. — Clay Shirky

This weekend at the Coffee Cat I enjoyed a large house blend with a side of informative shoulder surf… um, user experience testing.

Watching TV on the internet in a cafe.

These two were college age. The girl was watching Grey’s Anatomy on ABC.com. I’m not sure what the guy was doing, but at one point he turned his screen to show her a YouTube video of a skateboarding bulldog.

These were the girl’s use patterns:

  • At every commercial break her attention just disintegrated. She would press “mute” and then talk to the guy. When commercials interrupt me I press F12 to check my email/Twitter universe. Decades of loud, irrelevant TV commercials have created a hair trigger “attention standby” mode in all of us. Even “unskippable” ads are useless on the worst medium for interrupting people ever devised.
  • Not once did she share what she was watching. In contrast, the guy showed her a YouTube video and they shared a laugh. Television = passive watching and absorbing ads. YouTube = recommending and discussing interesting clips. Which model do you think best fits a world of short attention spans and powerful social networks?

Note that the technology used by ABC and YouTube was essentially identical. TV networks have a business model problem, not a technology problem.

This post is the first in a series, so tune in tomorrow, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

* Mary Ann obviously.

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2 Comments ↓

  1. Joe Pulizzi writes:

    Nathan…great insight. Traditional media operations are having the roughest time not because of technology, but because the rules of the game changed right in the middle of their business models. Smaller content companies with new business models can gain tremendous reach in a short period of time by leveraging new models.

    Best
    Joe

    April 29, 2008 at 10:18 am
  2. Nathan Bowers writes:

    I agree Joe. On the “fat tail” end, it will be interesting when the biggest movie and TV producers are the likes of Netflix.

    How about this for a TV show: The Office, but with competent, likeable, and motivated people, and set at Google. I’d watch.

    Be sure to check out part 2 of this series about the death TV.

    April 30, 2008 at 11:04 pm