• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, July 4, 2011

First, a confession. I am not an insider. As a journalist who covers media, my job is to remain as objective as possible. So please consider this and any future "insider" columns I may write in that context, because it is my job to be a little on the outside looking in. So let me tell you a few things I've observed since I began covering the video industry 30-odd years ago. Well, for one thing, we didn't call it the video industry back then, and I think a lot of the trouble we have defining this industry is the words we use to describe it -- because those words frequently disconnect the people who are the end-users of media and the people who make it.

I first realized this during the early 1980s, when a new form of video came along called "cable TV," and I began noticing that the words that people in our industry used to describe it frequently had a different meaning among the people who actually watched it. In the earliest days of cable -- before its multichannel explosion -- cable TV was HBO, and it was not uncommon to hear average consumers say they had gotten, or knew someone who had begun subscribing to "HBO," when in fact they were subscribing to a cable television service provider, whose primary draw initially was the premium TV channel that showed movies, and the occasional boxing match.

Over time those cable TV operators added more channels -- CNN, Superstation TBS, ESPN, MTV, etc. -- and they also began to face competition from direct broadcast satellite providers. The people in our industry spent a fair amount of time debating the differences an value of each of these video programming platforms. Was "broadcast" better than "cable"? Was "cable" better than "satellite"? Needless to say, each platform had its advantages and disadvantages from a technical point-of-view, but to the consumer, the differences were less about the method of distribution -- terrestrial broadcast, satellite broadcast, coaxial cable or fiber optics -- than they were about the programming they received and how they watched it. The real revolution of multichannel programming was not how it was distributed, but the variety of the content and how it began to fragment the video marketplace into niche interests. We even had a term to describe that in the earliest days of cable TV. It was called narrowcasting. Hold that thought for a moment, because the real point of this column is that for all the focus our industry has placed on the way people distribute and access video programming, the really important factor ultimately is how people watch it, and how they think about what they are watching.

The really significant changes in video distribution have less to do with technology, and more to do with how it changes or augments the way people consume it. And they are, in my outsider opinion, this:

1) Choice. Multichannel television ushered in an error of consumer choice, which in turn began to fragment the mass media effect of television. While we all continued to watch some of the same programming, we increasingly gravitated toward the niches that suited our personal interests the most. Initially, that meant younger viewers spent more time watching MTV or Nickelodeon, while men watched ESPN and women viewed Lifetime. But even given the paradox of unlimited choice, we human beings still selected only a relatively finite set of video options.

Cognitive psychologists describe this phenomenon as the "magical number seven, plus or minus three," which means that humans typically gravitate to a number of options somewhere in the range of between four and 10. Interestingly, over the years that Nielsen has tracked the explosion of TV channels, the average household continued to view only a handful of channels they had available to them. I haven't seen the research to support it, but I suspect this principle holds up in the age of YouTube too. While we all have micro niche programming options that we consume from time to time, we all still consume some mass content too, and I would expect that while the niche end of the spectrum is more granular than ever, the range of options still falls someone along the spectrum of the magical number seven.

2) Control. The other big change in the video consumption experience is in our ability to control what, when and where we see something. And it is a progression. The first big development was either the remote control or the multi-set household. I don't have the data handy to know which came first, but both developments began to change the way Americans consumed TV.

The remote control obviously enhanced the ability of people to switch channels -- which, as the number of channels expanded, gave rise to the phenomenon of channel surfing. And so on.

But the rise of multi-set households gave rise to something else that is equally significant in terms of video consumption: the rise of personalized viewing. As the number of sets increased in the average household, the amount of "family viewing" decreased and the amount of personal viewing increased. TV was no longer the "electronic hearth."

3) Convenience. Actually, convenience and control are connected -- as is choice -- so don't criticize me with categorizing them a distinct factors. Or for putting these developments into this bucket, they are the rise of time-shifting, place-shifting and platform-shifting technologies: the digital video recorder, video-on-demand platforms, online video streaming and downloading.

Everything from DVRs to Slingbloxes to the iPad and the cloud have only accelerated our ability to shift the time, place and screen on which we watch video programming. This shift, more than any other, may be altering the context of video programming, which can no longer be defined simply by the content people are watching, but also the time, place and device they are watching it on.

There are other changes that have occurred along these spectra, such as the role of interactivity, user-generated content, and user-distributed content (ie. social media), and I may focus future columns on them. But the main point of this one is that for all the emphasis we put on the differences among the platforms that people use to watch video programming, we probably don't spend enough time thinking about the people who actually watch it. Yes, technology can alter the nature of the content and consumer experience -- creating greater choice, control and convenience -- but in the end it is the way that people relate to or interact with the content that really matters. So let's focus on that.

In closing, I'd like to remind those of you who may have forgotten about a really insightful book written by former TNS executive Steven Fredericks. It was called "StrAdvertising," and despite its clunky name, it focused on an important epiphany: that we were moving from a society defined by its media platforms -- TV, radio, newspaper, magazines, etc. -- to one defined by its media formats - video, audio, images, text, multimedia, etc. -- and that digital technology, especially the Internet, was accelerating this shift.

Fredericks was right. It's time for us to abandon the semantics of media platforms, and to think about how people experience media based on the substance of its content, and the context surrounding that.