Posted on 02/12/2008 7:04:40 AM PST by abb
More users are doing it as networks make it easier
By Heidi Dawley Feb 12, 2008
With TV writers going back to work tomorrow, many are wondering whether their three-month strike, largely over payment for online work, was worth it.
A new study suggests it was.
While many believe it will be years before watching full-length TV shows on the internet catches on, this new report from JupiterResearch contends that time is already here. Says Jupiter analyst Bobby Tulsiani: “The internet streaming era has arrived.”
The interest has been there, reports Jupiter. What's changed is that it's so much easier to do these days. "Things are finally coming into place to do this,” he says.
A 2006 survey found that 15 percent of respondents were interested in watching full-length TV shows online. But as Tulsiani notes, a survey the following year found that only 10 percent actually had done so.
The reason, he believes, is that it was too hard for users to find the content, and when they did find it, the viewing experience wasn't good. The networks wanted it that way, fearing that if they made the content easily available online it would cannibalize TV viewership.
But in the time since, they've come to see the internet as akin to a DVR, as a place for fans to go to catch up on episodes they've missed or want to see again.
So they've moved to make content easier to find on their sites but also to get it out onto sites like Hulu, the just-launched video site, as well as mainstream portals like Yahoo.
And while the quality might not be comparable to that of a traditional TV set, Tulsiani believes it's good enough for viewing on a standard PC monitor.
Tulsiani also thinks that interest in watching full-length TV shows has risen since those earlier surveys and may now be as high as 20 percent to 25 percent.
“We would have seen bigger adoption in the autumn if it wasn’t for the writers’ strike. If the internet is acting like a DVR, people will go to watch if there are new shows. If there are no new shows, they you don’t go,” he says.
But challenges do remain that keep viewing of full-length episodes on PCs from going mainstream.
For one, not all episodes are put online. Networks limit episodes to protect DVD sales. And that's not going to change until they figure out how to better monetize content--make money from advertising, chiefly.
And that's still some time off, Jupiter figures. While ad revenues will be growing quickly, by 35 percent or so a year, it's from a small base. Jupiter forecasts it to grow from $760 million this year to some $3 billion in 2012. While that seems a hefty figure, it's still well short of the roughly $20 billion made in the DVD market.
But the big drawback is that consumers still see their TV set the place of choice for watching full-length episodes of TV shows.
At some point, the technology to allow viewing of streamed shows on TV sets may be in place, but it's not there yet, nor is the quality of shows streamed over the internet.
What you have now, says Tulsiani, is the internet competing with cable over who can better provide on-demand programming, and both face challenges.
For the cable companies, the TV set doesn’t provide an easy way to search through a library. For online, the search is easy, but the quality of the stream is not. Says Tulsiani: “They are battling each other. Whoever gets to the middle first might be the winner here.”
Meanwhile, in online ratings for the week ended Feb. 3, according to Nielsen Online, Google claimed the top spot among parent companies, followed by Microsoft, Yahoo, Time Warner and News Corp. Online. The top five brands were Google, Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live, AOL Media Network and Microsoft.
NexTag was the No. 1 advertiser with 7.1 million impressions, followed by No. 2 Experian Group Limited at nearly 6 million. With 33.4 million ads served, Yahoo was again the top advertising site, well ahead of No. 2 MySpace at 4.2 million.
Sessions per person per week were even to the previous week at 17, and domains visited per person were down one to 41. PC time per person was even compared with the previous week, at 18 hours and 16 minutes.
Wow Nielsen actually trying to get ahead of a curve, that’s amazing.
Of course the article only project about half the country will be viewing some content online by 2011. Certainly not a reason to end networks and their broadcasts.
For over two years, I have read everything and anything related to the realignment of news and information distribution. Much of it has been posted as Dinosaur Media DeathWatch threads. I have also taken to reading as much media history as I can consume. It is absolutely fascinating to comprehend. I’m just about to start a bio on Henry Luce (Time, Inc).
I absolutely believe the digital revolution will equal the invention of movable type as an agent of change.
It very well might, in many ways it already has, but that doesn’t mean the networks will disappear, and it especially doesn’t mean they’ll disappear quickly.
One thing to pay attention to when you review the history of media is how often the “death” of various medias have been predicted, and how rarely it’s happened. Radio has been supposedly dead at least 3 times, and yet in many ways radio is bigger now than ever. Movies, specifically theatrical movies, have also been counted dead at least 3 times, and yet they hauled in just short of 10 billion domestic dollars last year.
A lot of what makes various media types appear to be in trouble is that they’ve all been addicted to claiming poverty for a long time. For a variety of reasons the 3 largest parts of media (music, TV, movies) have rejoiced in calling every project a financial failure for decades. So all their news is “bad news”, of course if you look at the real numbers their “bad news” usually isn’t that bad. Take Sunday’s Grammys, ratings were down, terrible news, of course ratings were down to 18 million viewers, and a lot of that “down” seems to be from smart counter programming by ABC which got only slightly lowers ratings for the Home Makeover show than the Grammys, between the two shows two of these “dying” networks had 36 million roughly simultaneous viewers. Doesn’t sound very dying to me. The music industry has supposedly been on the ropes for a decade and is certainly facing a tougher market, yet by their own numbers 2007’s “down” sales translate to a little over 1 1/2 CDs sold to every man woman and child in the country, sure that’s down from a few years ago but nobody selling 1 1/2 units to everybody in the country is on the ropes.
The internet is going to be added to a lot of media types as a distribution and revenue method. It might even become the primary distribution and revenue method (periodicals are the most likely to become mostly an internet concept). But broadcast TV and TV networks are no more likely to be killed by the internet than they were to kill movies.
What I have said is that network television as we know it today will go away. There won't be a 'command' system anymore. And I don't think they will have the resources to float money-eating news divisions for much longer.
Likewise the dominance of large metropolitan newspapers as arbiters of what is and isn't news is over.
And perhaps they won't "die" in the strictest sense. But the bastards sure are looking poorly.
It all depends...on what the meaning of “is” is.
I think by and large the networks will still be roughly the way they are. Appointment TV is still the most profitable part of their spectrum, sure it’s good to get additional revenue from DVDs and the internet just like it was good to get additional revenue from reruns, but when push comes to shove the money is made on that first broadcast. That will still be where the largest audience is so they can charge the most for ads.
And I think they’ll keep news divisions. They’ll be reducing the cost, and one network might get rid of theirs. But sometime there will be another major event, terrorist attack, natural disaster, one of those big “throw out the schedule and just show this” events. And the network that doesn’t have a news division will look like idiots, because they’ll either have to cobble something together with whatever they find in the closet to cover the event, or not cover it at all, and either way they’ll look slapdash and unprofessional. And they’ll rebirth the news division a few months later. Also keep in mind that the news is considered one of the “public service” requirements for an FCC license, if they don’t have enough public service they can lose their license. The target is going to be to put together a half hour news show for no more than a half hour sitcom costs, lots of use of local affiliates and stock footage.
I recently took a trip to South Florida, camping in my van. In Marathon we had a nice site with wireless internet. I found an internet site that streamed movies, and we watched a movie on the laptop/wireless internet connection.
Now that I know how, I can hook the laptop to my LCD TV/Monitor and watch free movies at home.
I don’t think it’s a matter of being “on the ropes” financially, but the transition of a business model. Networks used to have a huge amount of control over what you watched. The advent of cable and the remote control meant you could change channels instead of sit through a commercial. A DVR meant you could fast forward the commercial break entirely. On demand and rental services meant you could select a wide variety of shows. But in all of those transitions, the source is always the media conglomerate. Whether it’s Viacom, GE, Disney, Time Warner, or Newscorp. They have control over what gets made and released.
Furthermore, the shows they tend towards are becoming cheaper “reality” game shows rather than expensive special-effects laden series. So what if some upstart guy decides he’s going to put a show up on a website that starts getting *real* numbers. It doesn’t even need to be 18 million viewers, it could be 6. It’s enough to pull advertising dollars away from the conglomerates. And since the distribution is cheaper, they can charge less for advertising than the big media companies. Someone could grow a whole network out of one inexpensive hit. It could be edgy with nudity and swearing (Big Brother-Sorority?), or completely the opposite, with wholesome childrens’ and parent programming. Look how much people pay for DVD’s of toys filmed on a black background (Baby Einstein).
I’m surprised the Wii is not used as a delivery method. Youtube videos are already viewable on the box.
I’m afraid we’ll just have to disagree. Appointment TV is over. News divisions are over. License to broadcast is over. The internet is like a sieve and the Feds cannot control it.
Advertisers know this and are removing the dinosaur food even as we type.
Appointment TV is not even close to over. 18 million people watched a home make over show, 18 million watched the first episode of the Terminator series, and that’s just canned shows. Looking for live stuff don’t forget the over 90 million that just watched the Super Bowl. Appointment TV is alive and well.
News divisions are going to get cheaper, but aren’t over. Nobody wants to not be able to cover the next huge story, that would be just too embarrassing.
Licenses to broadcast just brought BILLIONS of dollars into the fed so clearly also not over.
So sorry but you’re wrong on all counts. None of what you list as over is even remotely within sight of over.
Well, that's what makes a market, doesn't it? We shall see, in the fullness of time...
You bring out the big gun. Oscars typically rank as the next biggest annual broadcast event after the Bowl, weighing in at less than half the audience. (Did a network even broadcast Oscars this year?) Do you really expect a few big annual broadcast events to financially carry the entirety of network television?
News divisions are going to get cheaper, but aren’t over. Nobody wants to not be able to cover the next huge story, that would be just too embarrassing.
But, you see, anybody with a cam can cover both small or huge news stories. A study from a few years ago indicates that audiences care more about timeliness than production values when it comes to breaking stories. In other words, its OK with the audience if a rank amateur jiggles her cell phone a bit while capturing breaking news and the audio sounds muddy. Raw real time coverage apparently provides more value than well coiffed news journalists staging running commentaries after the fact.
Licenses to broadcast just brought BILLIONS of dollars into the fed so clearly also not over.
Sometimes spending BILLIONS simply indicates a dumb deal.
The McClatchy Co. could be on track to write off half of the $4.4 billion it paid for the Knight Ridder newspapers it proudly acquired in the summer of 2006.
Yet another dumb deal in retrospect.
Taking on big liabilities at the wrong time to buy out competitor Hollywood Video for $1 Billion in 2005, the company collapsed under the weight of the debt in the face of a huge decline in the retail movie rental business. Companies often succumb to temptation when they buy competitors out in what turns out to be false bottom for the business. Several newspapers publishers made this mistake when the they bought papers in 2005 and 2006. Moreover, like newspapers, Movie Gallery confronted the disruptive technology of the internet and digital cable that made their retail distribution channel obsolete.
Of course I’ve seen this play out over and over and it always plays out the same. That which is expected to “die” doesn’t. In fact it often flourishes. If the networks get smart about using the internet it can grow the audience for the broadcasts. The nightly news has been predicted to be dead for 30 years, and yet it keeps on going.
You do understand that there was an invention called television and on it they show shows, right?
Appointment TV is all about the big guns. Although you seem to have missed the fact that Extreme Makeover on ABC drew very high ratings while opposite the Grammys, there are plenty of big guns out there that aren’t a few big annual events. There are plenty of shows out there drawing solid appointment TV ratings weekly.
Anybody with a camera might be able to “cover” a news story but can they make it look like a professional job? Or will it look like some guy with a camera in his trunk is doing it? People might say they’re OK with jiggly camera but that’s assuming all other things aren’t equal. Jiggly camera AND first on the scene is acceptable but in order to get the timeliness you need a pre-existing news division that’s capable of setting up the remotes. If you’re last to the party and the lowest quality broadcast you’re going to lose the viewers and look stupid.
I wasn’t talking about money spent buying newspaper companies. I was talking about the billions spent buying FCC licenses, now 4 times as many FCC licenses because of the switch to digital. Those dumb deals have absolutely nothing to do with what I was talking about.
A great read for the latter-winter reading list: Amusing Ourselves to Death.
The older version seems to be out-of-print, so its the library or...
A few dozen weekly hits have been carrying the entirety of network television since network television was invented. Networks have always been built on one of two models: 1 big show a night, or 1 really big night a week. Being CBS in the 70s (MASH, All in the Family, spinoffs of All in the Family) or NBC in the 80s (Thursday nights, Cosby, Cosby spinoff, Cheers, Night Court), that’s always what it’s been all about. Heck the entire Fox empire was built on 3 shows: Simpsons, Married with Children, and the X-Files.
Times change, the networks have more competition, it used to be the big three plus local so their base share of the audience was higher. Then came cable. Now the base share of the audience is lower, of course the population has grown so a low share equals more viewers than it used to. And they sell more ad time, and they sell product spots within shows. The money is out there, they just need the handful of shows to haul it in. The only real thing that’s changed is that now instead of just fighting each other for viewers they have to fight each other, 100 cable companies, video games and the internet. But the cash still exists and the core math is the same, they need about 3 hours of high rated TV a week.
This idea - that there is a content called "the news of the day" - was entirely created by the telegraph (and since amplified by newer media), which made it possible to move decontextualized information over vast spaces at incredible speed. The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination. It is, quite precisely, a media event.
Although the author goes on to lament the decline of the Age of Typography allow me to introduce the notion of a neo-Age of Typography for mass media orphans as evidenced by forums such as Free Republic.
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