How Did We Manage to Make Watching TV Hard?

Pop quiz: Which channel carries "Ice Road Truckers"? Discovery? History? National Geographic? Is it the same channel as "Deadliest Catch"?
(Answers: History, and no - that one's on Discovery).

Now which website do you go to to find it? Well, that all depends. For example, where are we in the season? During premiere week, there's a good chance generous amounts of current, full-episode programming will be available on both the History Channel website or via Hulu which either carries the programming natively or links you to the History Channel website.

Okay, so same for "Deadliest Catch", except that would be on the Discovery website, right? Oops, not quite. You can find some clips and excerpts on Hulu and links to a bit more on the Discovery web site, but full episodes, no. Even if you have website access to full episodes, that's only until they decide to take down the shows. Sorry, not clear when that would be exactly, depends on the show or how one or more channels and/or websites change their policy.
Even dedicated viewers might find this sort of viewing "Tougher in Alaska" to quote yet another show title in the Alaskan enthusiast genre. Oh, and that show only has clips available on History or Hulu, but you're welcome to buy episodes on iTunes and of course DVDs, once the season wraps. Got it?

Seriously - why is this so hard? Under the general rubric of "Television Everywhere", there's at least an implicit promise of letting viewers watch what they want, when they want, where they want. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Doubtless all these distribution decisions are individually logical, consistent with the revenue-maximizing idea of release windows, but the net effect is chaos. In fact, internet TV in general has so far been compounding an already-serious problem of fragmentation and channel brand destruction or, to drop the industry jargon, generally jerking viewers around.

Forget about the internet for a minute. Let's look at how many channels viewers have long been getting in the plain old "linear" television world, and the little help they get to manage them.

In US multichannel TV (e.g. cable, satellite) we now live in an approximately 400-channel world. This is a full multiplex count in that it includes the, say, fifteen versions of Discovery (Discovery Kids, Discovery en Español, etc., etc.), eight or more of HBO and so forth. Nevertheless, even the broad average channels per viewer broke the hundred-channel barrier quite a while ago and for premium subscribers is considerably higher.

Secondly, less than half of US subscribers have the tools to even begin to manage viewing in this sort of environment. Almost 70% of US television households don't yet have a DVR. Of the 30% or so that do, our complete swag of an estimate is that half of those have no idea how to use the advanced features to find and schedule their viewing in a consistent, meaningful way - i.e. for half of DVR users, it comes close to having an old VCR sitting under the TV, blinking "12:00"

Then there's Video on Demand. Let's be generous and say about half of US television households have digital cable (the technical prerequisite - the satellite guys are still trying to figure this one out). Therefore, half potentially have the convenience of watching what they want, when they want. But they don't - according to Leichtman less than 2/3 of those self-report being regular VoD users.

MSOs have become cagier (could there be a problem?) about releasing VoD buy rate information other than of the "billions viewed" sort. But we already know that buy rates decline rapidly after initial experimentation. And if viewers were going wild with the convenience of VoD, you can be sure we'd be hearing about it. As with the DVR, slogging through the set top interfaces to find, select, and view what they want, isn't for most viewers.

So netting it out, less than half today's television households are capable of using the inadequate "advanced" multichannel TV viewing tools they've been given. We're not only a ways off from 'Television Everywhere', we're not even coping with the television industry's pre-internet reality of complexity and missed opportunities.

Want to know how to fix some of this? Stay tuned to this blog... 

By the way, if you’re interested in a couple of minutes of fun – a rather “high-level” consumer complaining about even more basic aspects of the flawed TV experience (boxes, buttons, remotes) – here’s the Duke of Edinburgh. The interview below marked the 50th anniversary of the Prince Philip Designers Prize, and design commentator Kevin McCloud interviews H.R.H. Prince Philip about his passion for good design. The brief but acerbic television critique begins at around 6m 50s.

 

H.R.H. Prince Philip on interacting with a televison as "one of those ghastly things" - 6:50