The Economist has a typically smart piece on the way we watch TV. Some of it is pretty surprising, or at least contrarian to the conventional wisdom.
As the mag notes, and as the chart below shows, people say that they watch a lot less TV than they actually do, and they say that they watch a lot more online video than they actually do.
The lesson seems to be an old one: Old habits die hard. There's still plenty of life left in the idea of a communal experience. Decade in, decade out, people like watching TV with their family and friends--or even perfect strangers in a bar. And if they can't watch TV together, they like to be able to talk about it, in close to real time. So that means that there's plenty of room for services and apps that facilitate communications, from the telephone to e-mail to social networks to whatever else comes next.
But, The Economist notes, "people seem unaware of their own behaviour." Or perhaps, one might say, they have an idealized view of themselves, and "couch potato" doesn't seem very idealistic.
Here's the mag's take:
In surveys they almost always underestimate how much television they watch, and greatly overstate the extent to which they watch video in any other form (see chart 4). In particular, they underestimate their consumption of live television. One of Ms Pearson’s subjects, a 27-year-old man, claimed to watch recorded television 90% of the time. In fact he watched live TV 69% of the time. He was probably not so much fibbing as misinterpreting the question. When asked how he watched television, he gave an answer that described his behaviour when he was alone, and thus did not have to compromise. But most of the time he watched with other people.
Efforts to improve the TV-watching experience have often gone wrong because they took people at their word. The past ten years have seen a parade of websites and set-top boxes—Apple TV, Boxee, Joost, Roku—offering a huge range of content and interactive features. All promised to deliver TV the way people (that is, individuals) really want it. Because they failed to take account of the social nature of television, not one has caught on. Efforts to turn TVs into personal e-mail devices and home-shopping outlets have fared no better. “The killer application on television turns out to be television,” says Richard Lindsay-Davies, CEO of the Digital TV Group.
So the media environment is changing, it's just not changing quickly. And some old forms will endure, no matter what. Because we are people before we are machines.
