Commentary

Cord Cutters Suffer the 'Paradox of Choice'

by Steve Smith , Staff Writer, February 1, 2011

We speculate a lot about how many people out there in America really are cutting the cord from their TV service and relying on Internet or connected TV experiences to satisfy that big screen hunger. But what would happen if someone took your TV service provider away for a week and left behind one of the trendy Over The Top (OTT) boxes in its place? That is what Hill Holliday did recently with five Boston-area families. The company removed their standard cable boxes and gave them an Apple TV, a Roku, Boxee Box, Xbox 360 or Google TV.

The results should give the MSOs a smile. Most of the families reacted negatively to the experience, feeling immediately the absence of the constant flow of automated TV choice. The biggest and most obvious shift for consumers was from passivity to lean-in involvement. Virtually all of the OTT boxes required that the user choose each and every TV experience. It turns out that for many people TV viewing is something of an experience that lives somewhere between lean-back passivity and on-demand super-choice. "I don't want to have to think about it," one subject said.

In fact, as Hill Holliday synopsized at their site, "As with 'the paradox of choice' phenomenon that describes how broadening the range of options leads to a decrease in overall consumption, we saw how families gave up on watching TV altogether when they couldn't decide what it is that they wanted to watch." None of the OTT solutions seemed to have an answer to the problem of having to decide always what to watch next. In my use of Google TV I have seen both the YouTube Lean-Back mode and CNet use autorun methods to keep playing a line of video clips, and that is effective for keeping engaged with a short form brand.

The OTT boxes also defied user expectations for how TV should work. As the video below demonstrates, the users seemed to find all of the ways in which Apple TV, Roku, Boxxee, Google TV and Xbox frustrated expectations rather than surprised or delighted anyone. In fact, at least in the video sampling it is notable how few gee-whiz-look-what-they-got moments there are.

Now arguably, the situation Hill Holliday created was a false one. I have some of these boxes installed in my little living room lab and they seem designed for now as complements, not replacements of TV. They are best suited for those high-consideration items like rented movies and TV, specific Web video brands you want to monitor that even these test families used.

Still it is notable that the interfaces, poor structure for content sampling, upfront payment systems, and Web lag times are sources of real frustration to real world families. Once you take these units out of the hands of geeks like us, the response to their complexity and "choice" is curious and daunting.

An Experiment In Cord Cutting from Hill Holliday on Vimeo.

technology, television, tv, tv everywhere, video

3 comments about "Cord Cutters Suffer the 'Paradox of Choice'".

Check to receive email when comments are posted.

Doug Garnett from Protonik, LLC, February 1, 2011 at 5:25 p.m.
Finally, some truth in the cord cutting discussion. Especially key is this truth that consumers WANT sit back time. I do - I won't even watch HBO movies on a weeknight because they demand too much of my energy.
So, there ARE full cord cutters. (The small number I know had cut the cord long before internet TV came around.) But I'm quite skeptical that they will become a massive movement.
Instead, what the internet TV folks need to learn is how to make TV better - because it's ALL (entirely - completely) about making more valuable the 30 hours a week that an average home views.
YouTube can't do this - how many 2 minute videos of cats do I have to find to fill 30 hours? And do I care about more than 3?
There is TREMENDOUS potential. My sense is that the convergence guys embraced traditional TV with it's economic model and began to add to it.
Reply

Carolyn Hansen from Hacker Group, February 3, 2011 at 3:07 p.m.

We cut the satellite dish almost a year ago. There are trade-offs. It's cheaper to buy a full season of the TV we like than to pay for all that TV we don't want every month. There are WAY fewer ads on Internet TV -- none, if you're willing to pay for the content. But some things we like aren't available online and there have been some technical frustrations.

I suspect that someone who turns off the cable or dish themselves, rather than has it done for them, will be looking for the positives -- making this test of limited value. And an advertising agency obviously has a vested interest in the results turning out the way they did.

That said, it's clear from this post and from Doug Garnett's comments that there are many different types of viewers. My husband and I have never been all that passive in our viewing -- it's always been pretty intentional. We don't turn on the TV just because we walked in the door. It started when the first VCRs came out and kept going through TiVo and now Internet TV. Others love having TV running in the background all the time. Which group is more valuable to pursue?

Mike Smith, February 21, 2011 at 1:56 p.m.

Yes - People don't need to "cut the cord" right away: It's easy to hook up a PC to your PC (or a TV PC like The Wave at CatchTheWaveTV.com), that has full and unrestricted access to the Internet (not like those other boxes that are restricted or blocked by some websites). Then just see how much you watch it versus cable or satellite... Also, note that Hulu has the best queue and e-mail alert system, and keeps playing continuously.