Linear TV still going strong
Our weekly columnist Raymond Snoddy attends a London Business School conference on the future of on-demand television, where “the evidence is starting to pile up in support of evolutionary, rather than revolutionary changes to viewing behaviour”…
Paddy Barwise takes no prisoners when denouncing “the digerati” – those who insist on predicting the death of conventional, or linear, television – time and time again. Those who suffer the Barwise lash range from George Gilder, who said in 1990 that television was a tool of tyrants whose overthrow was at hand, to Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab, who wrote in 1995 that by 2005 Americans would spend more hours on the internet than watching network television.
Earlier this year there was the Guardian’s Emily Bell who wrote that “within two years audience behaviour has completely changed due to the availability of broadband and the penetration of the internet”. Then there was the British independent producer who said that in five years TV channels may no longer exist.
All nonsense, according to Barwise, or as he tends to put it, examples of “2.0 bollocks”. At a London Business School conference on the future of “converged” and on-demand television (VOD) on Tuesday, the good professor came up with a dramatic vision of his own – very different from that of the digerati.
“In 2019, I see people still watching an average of say, 25 hours per week, mostly live programmes on their favourite channels, supplemented by time-shift viewing on a PVR or equivalent, plus some catch-up TV, mainly from the same channels. I see true on-demand still accounting for well under 10 per cent of total viewing,” said Barwise.
If he is right then the premises behind Lord Carter’s Digital Britain are profoundly mistaken “giving precedence to infrastructure rather than content and people. In the Digital Britain vision all the serious resources are to be invested in fatter pipes with the top priority going to universal, or near universal broadband at 2 megabits a second.
“But the only significant consumer application that currently needs 2 meg is on-demand TV,” says Barwise, who like a proper academic defines his terms precisely. “True” on-demand TV as described by the digerati, he argues, means watching neither live nor time-shifted TV but “completely asynchronously and drawn from a wide range of decentralised sources – including other consumers – along the lines of YouTube”.
But could an emeritus professor – Rupert Murdoch once explained that the “e” in emeritus editor stood for exit and “meritus” meant you deserved it – really be right in the face of the massed ranks of the romantics of the information revolution?
At the LBS on Tuesday the call was for evidence based on ACB – actual consumer behaviour – and the evidence is starting to pile up in support of evolutionary, rather than revolutionary changes to viewing behaviour.
The star turn was Michael Link, vice president of methodological research for Nielsen, the audience measurement specialists. The three year video-mapping study conducted with Ball State University based on close observation of the actual media consumption of several hundred American consumers came up with dramatic results.
The study found that in the American home television still dominated – even in the 18-24 age group. Computer use of “free TV” is still very small, accounting for just 2 minutes a day, or 0.5 per cent.
Perhaps the marketing community should also take note of the fact that TV users were still exposed to a average of 72 minutes of TV ads and promos a day. “This dispels a commonly held belief that modern consumers are channel-hopping or otherwise avoiding most of the advertising in the programming they view,” the study notes.
And in findings which were replicated in UK behavioural studies consumers routinely underestimate the amount of live TV they watch while exaggerating – sometimes by a factor of two or even three times – the use they make of online and mobile video.
In the UK Sarah Pearson, managing partner of ACB (Actual Consumer Behaviour) told how some of her subjects swore they watched hardly any live TV and time-shifted almost everything. The reality was that in typical examples something like 88 per cent of all viewing was live, 11 per cent time-shifted and 1 per cent online. Overall only six per cent of all viewing was on-demand and half of that was accounted for by the BBC iPlayer and involved catching up with favourite programmes broadcast on linear television.
Pearson found that what her subjects most wanted was greater storage capacity on their personal video recorders to assemble a personal archive, largely drawn from the big channels and the big programmes – rather than more VOD.
Prof Barwise believes it will be possible to make money out of catch-up TV or VOD but suspects that most of the investments will end in tears. “It does mean that we should stop talking about a revolutionary change in how much, how, why, where, when and with whom people watch television – none of which has changed much in the last 50 years,” Barwise argues.
So how come intelligent people are still talking about the imminent death of linear TV and TV channels when the evidence is going in the opposite direction? “It’s religion. They are true believers,” says the emeritus LBS professor.
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