• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, April 15, 2015

Last Sunday, I fired up HBO Go on the laptop, and HBO Now on the iPad and waited to see if “Game of Thrones” would happen at 9 on both/either/neither. Maybe I don’t gripe enough, but while it didn’t happen right on the dot, it happened pretty much when it was supposed to. I realized I don’t expect online video to be “on time” because mostly, streaming is on our time.

I also realized that millions of viewers--not techies, or journalists or “in the industry”--were doing something similar. They were monitoring the streaming thing and commenting crabbily, sometimes, when “Game of Thrones” took until 9:15 to get going.

Maybe it’s just happened so gradually we don’t notice it, but lots of us are becoming as interested in the machinations behind how something gets delivered to us as we are with what it is we’re seeing. Online video even made net neutrality something the average person could get excited about. 

That’s because, at least in part, viewers must feel they are a part of the whole streaming scene. After all, they create it, sometimes. They get counted on YouTube and other places, and can see their part of the mass audience reflected quickly. 

And like never before, they can see how their actions can topple empires. Audiences have seen newspapers tumble; they now see networks scramble and cable react to cord cutters.

All that economically impacting information comes to them in ways far more directly than the Nielsen ratings ever have.

Nielsen needs to protect the anonymity of its sample panel. Internet metrics put a lot of it right out there and so via Twitter and other social media, and more or less instantly available metrics, HBO hears from its viewers and it’s instantly tabulated. While it’s true the Internet watches what the anonymized “you” does and shops and eats and drinks, it’s also true the real, live, flesh-and-blood you is reporting in, too.

Once, you had to call in to the local TV station to complain about a program, and some secretary would file it and forget it. Not now.

Except for the stars of “Friends” and “Seinfeld,” and except for blockbusters like the Super Bowl, the whole world has only a vague idea about what stars they see on TV earn, or what advertisers are paying. But YouTube particularly changed a lot of that.

You still don’t know what a lot of them make, but the economics seem kind of intuitive, and vloggers constantly reference their cheap existence. Some, like Hank Green, have written fairly detailed accounts of their economics. Green recently wrote wondering if the idea of going directly to viewers for support was a tenable economic model for YouTube creators; it works for him, to some degree, and it’s far more attuned to creators’ ability to make a living than the advertising model is. After all, he says, CPMs exist for advertisers, not for the people who make programs.  

But he writes, volunteer payments have an obvious downside.

“This is not, however, a model that you can build huge entertainment businesses on. It’s much easier to monetize concentrated audiences and ultra-famous creators with forced (retail) or passive (advertisement) revenue than distributed (but massively satisfied) audiences. Obviously, the current industry is much more focused on ultra-fame / blockbuster models, so the “Just Ask” model tends to strike traditional entertainment people as either insanely idealistic or subconsciously threatening. Fractured fame is useless to them, so they tend to see it as irrelevant.” 

But he also notes, that's the problem.

The larger point, at least to me, is how fully the user is getting control of the content: how they get it, how fast they get it and what they’re willing to pay for it. It doesn’t bother me, but HBO is learning that if they’re going to sell HBO Now, they want HBO...now. Ditto with much of online video.

Advertisers need to get wise to that really different mind-set, as the streaming business verily screams. They want what they want.

pj@mediapost.com