Digital Media

Digital Media / Media & Culture — No Comments
30
Sep 09

Three Screens – Moving Content Consumption Across Platforms

I can’t speak for everyone, but I know how much my television viewing habits have changed over the last few years. Between the DVR, Hulu, and my Apple TV, my routine has changed drastically from just five years ago.

For one thing, I watch more. It seems fairly simple, but with better access to view the shows I want, when I want, I watch more. True, I pretty much only watch recorded programs, and pretty much always fast forward through the commercials, but I most certainly watch a lot more than I used to.

So, the most recent research from Nielsen’s Three Screen report shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone – video viewing is up. According to their research, overall viewing is up by 1.5% over the same quarter last year, including, as you’d expect, an increase in internet video viewing.

More interesting is the data on simultaneous TV viewing and internet usage, which is at 56.9%. Quite a large number, but certainly not a surprise to me. I can think of a zillion times I’ve been in the middle of watching a show and felt the immediate need to look up an actor on IMDB, or Wikipedia.

These patterns are just glimpses into the future as media consumption continues to change. These changes will result in increased consumption, not decreased, but with better control and more choice. Hopefully quality won’t suffer in the meantime. But it’s time that programmers got smarter about how to bring the three screens together during programming. It’s time we moved beyond SMS voting campaigns…

Digital Media — No Comments
14
Jul 09

Changing patterns of consumption

Having spent most of my career trying to educate media companies from the inside about the effects that disruptive technologies will have on the future of our business, I’ve long thought about the changing patterns of consumption. This report from Morgan Stanley doesn’t repeat anything new, or tell us anything we haven’t heard before from either other reports or casual conversations with youth.

But it’s still an important reminder that even though we can easily be pulled into the cultural zeitgeist of a phenomenom like Twitter, it’s still important to place things in the right context. Certainly there is much to be impressed with about what Twitter has been able to accomplish, but one thing it hasn’t accomplished, which is echoed in this report, is modify the behavior of teens.

What’s amazing to consider for those folks in media who cling to the holy box is just how disruptive things like the iPhone will be on future consumption behaviors. A quick scan of YouTube will find lots of videos of toddlers and babies watching TV on their parent’s iPhone – even knowing how to navigate. It should be painfully clear that a child who grows up with not only vastly different understanding of “tangible” – what average teen today cares about buying CDs – and who grows up using devices like the iPhone as a primary interface for viewing video will most certainly not look at the “box” in the same way.

The most interesting thing will be when we, as programmers, really start to program to these new devices. Right now we’re still just repurposing TV content on other devices. The internet does work very well as a distribution medium, and certainly Hulu shows this well; however, there is so much more power in the internet for programmers than just as a distribution medium.

What happens to programming when you’re no longer just pushing linear time based stories over a simulcast network. What happens when you’re creating narrative environments in a multicast network where every viewer is addressable as an individual? What will “stories” look like in the future? Just as advancements in editing and filming technology changed the types of stories filmmakers were able to tell – evolving from single stationary cameras will little to no editing to what we see today – we, as storytellers, should be very excited about embracing the internet as more than a distrubtion medium, but as an environment that will enable us to tell stories in ways that we’ve never been able to before.

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