Sometimes a seemingly random occurrence can lead to one’s viewing the world differently. That experience happened recently when observing a seven year-old girl skip through commercials with the help of a digital video recorder (DVR). Until that moment in time, the notion that TV might be in trouble, that media executives concerned about their beloved thirty-second spot had valid fears, fell on deaf ears. This girl belongs to a special generation. They have received the name “Echo Boomers” and will live life without ever having known a time without cell phones, iPods, wireless internet, and digital video recorders. This generation will not even recognize nor believe they need to follow the rules set by others with respect to the content they consume.
The DVR will not lead to the demise of television. It is merely one of many tools that provide users with more control of what they consume. In many ways the initial popularity of cable television speaks to the same underlying principle. Cable television proved that people wanted more choices and would even pay for those choices. Commercial free television was not the main draw of cable. As is also the case with the DVR, people do not buy them to skip commercials; they buy them for the freedom to watch what they want when they want. VCRs allowed people to record and skip commercials well before the DVR’s existence, and there too it wasn’t the skipping functionality that led to their popularity. If that were what consumers wanted these devices would be called commercial bypassers and not recorders.
The television industry does need to re-evaluate how they do business, just as the marketers that rely on it need to re-assess their strategies. The same holds true of the music industry. In both cases though, these industries appear to have their lens too microscopically focused. They both choose to attack the technology and not leverage the choices now available to users. TV and music though have simply had too easy a ride to do that. In television’s case, their format has not changed in almost 50 years. When it comes to music, executives have long promoted the album even though rarely is it the entire album that causes the user to buy. When file sharing came on to the scene, it caught on not just because it offered “free” music but because it provided users the granularity they always craved. Bad free music exists in plenty but it doesn’t have an audience.
Advances in technology and distribution, ones that increase choice and access, take off time and again. Netflix doesn’t appear to share much in common with file sharing, but it fulfills the same basic needs. It empowers users – the increased selection, quick turnaround time, and reasonable price worth the trade-off in immediacy of conventional video stores. Netflix also helps DVD makers keep more titles in circulation and gives other titles a chance to be viewed not otherwise possible within the confines of the traditional model. Netflix has flattened the DVD rental industry, uniting the entire rental market rather. The DVDs themselves have proved to be a boon to the movie business. With more money being spent on purchases and movies making most if not all of their profits on sales, the success metric should take into more than the one size fits all weekend theater tallies.
In the end, the wired age has really had the opposite effect. It has freed people, the fragmentation and decentralization of content an expression of what people want. Content is still king, but distributors of content can no longer construct walled gardens and expect success, nor can they rely on content as a means to control the user. The user finally controls the content, creating a two-way street in an area that often only went one way. Nothing has really changed with respect to the way the world runs. People still want to watch TV. They still want to listen to music and see movies. Was this not the case then products such as the iPod would not have taken off. And if users had a complete aversion to purchasing digital music, Apple would not have sold more than four hundred million songs in less than two years. Similarly, if people did not want to spend money on music, then the hundreds of millions currently spent on ringtones by cell phone owners would not exist. Both forms of music might represent only a small percentage of all music, but considering that the music industry did not lead this initiative, the real impact is bigger. Digitization has not and will not destroy the content or the marketer. Subsidized content will always have a home. It just might not be in the home.
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