“There’s nothing on.” Was something you and I said in the days when turning knobs chose a channel and fiddling with rabbit ears improved reception. Back then, a little booklet would list a week’s worth of shows and movies alongside featurelets that made browsing fun. Today, we long for those good old days.
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Time shifting viewable video has a time problem. The time we spend looking for something to watch eats into our viewing time. And, since consumption time is finite, that’s not good. Not good for me and you as consumers and certainly not good for the people who support our free viewing with ads.
By the way, when did, “Me and you,” or “Me and [name],” replace “You and me,” as the grammatical norm? I’m hearing it all over the place among people under thirty.
Time is a problem in search of a solution. Any solution. Literally any solution. Well, except mine.
About ten years ago, I had sold my company and became addicted. To sloth, gluttony, and lust. Sitting on my couch, eating an awful lot of chips, and itching for another game of Civilization Revolution. Prompted by regular interventions from a friend, I left the comfort of my living room and walked around the city.
I strolled down Broadway. Passed the then recently Disneyfied Times Square. Wondering where the peep show was that Oscar Madison stopped at in the opening of Odd Couple — the original. Well, not the Broadway show. And, not, not the movie.
By the time I got to Macy’s I realized that the market was up. Yes, I walked right by the Nasdaq MarketSite. But it wasn’t like there was a flashy neon sign that said, “Up.” No. They had a big board of red and green blocks. Red blocks meant a stock was down. Green meant… you guessed it, up. That day, most of the blocks were green.
I started to think, “What if TV used color the way Nasdaq did?” TV knows what I watched. So, if I watched the whole thing, it kinda knows I like something, the way TikTok knows people like TikToks they watch to the end. Put a little green glowy thing behind the uniform picture tiles for the movies and shows I like. Actually, the more I like them, make them more green. The system also knows who I know. We’re connected on Facebook or something. So, if my friends are watching make the show’s picture tile bigger. If my friends all start to watch ESPN, maybe a game went into overtime.
There, I fixed TV navigation. Instead of a bunch of equally sized tiles, a dynamic heat map that GUIDES you to better TV choices. I patented the idea. One of two I have. Which leaves me 236 shy of my college roommate, Mike. A story for another day. I started a company. Pitched it to Netflix so their viewers wouldn’t waste 18 minutes browsing for a 22-minute episode of a show. They never called back. Neither did Comcast. Or, any other cable channel or streaming service. So, I’m left to flog advanced media tech to pharma companies for leftover ad dollars. Sigh.
A decade later, streamers are looking for a navigation solution. Even without a green glowy thing, this story makes it pretty darn clear, “Media companies need to get radical and get outside their comfort zone.” That’s a quote from John Peters, the Managing Director for Media and Entertainment at Accenture.
More than a third of streaming subscribers are tired of browsing for something interesting to watch. Two-thirds say streamers aren’t recommending content that interests them. Forty percent say they spend too much time browsing and not enough time watching. This isn’t ten years ago, it’s last week.
There are two ways to fix this. One is you do something radical. The other is you intertwine content with featurelets to make browsing more interesting. Instead, the streamers are doubling down on what they already do that their customers don’t like. They’re going to create even more content. That will fail and increase the already absurdly high churn rate.
The funny thing is this is a winnable situation. And, the victor here is going to reap some big spoils.
It doesn’t matter if the viewer watches linear TV, or streams shows from services like Netflix, or still pays for cable, or watches free ad-supported streaming television (FAST), it all starts with navigation.
For the better part of two decades, Google has navigated the VAST (viewable ad-supported technology, my term) internet. Before you go to CNN.com or CNBC.com, you go to Google. They mix listings with featurelets they call snippets to make their listings fun. Proof: No one complains about how much time they spend in googling. And, notwithstanding their current headwinds, Google is crushing it. The more you browse the more they learn. The more they learn the more they become more important than the movies and shows.
Streaming services can come and go. The folks who figure out a solution,… any solution,… well, any solution that isn’t mine… to navigate content will make a killing.
But good news, the animaniacs who run Disney have a solution. They’re going to create genre-specific channels within the Disney+ app that show a continuous feed of programming so you won’t have to browse at all.
In my day, we called “a continuous feed of programming,” TV. But, hey why let a simple word that people readily understand get in the way of meaningless made up term create when a group of MBAs fed a strategy document through an AI chat service to come up with free-ad-supported-television?