The lazy medium

How people really watch television

Apr 29th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Only the content and the curtains have changed

A MIDDLE-AGED couple sits in front of a TV set. He flicks idly through a magazine, she holds a drink. An advertisement for Marks & Spencer, a British retailer, comes on. “These are really good ads,” declares the woman. Her husband glances at the screen. “Oh, I looked at that skirt,” she continues. It is a humdrum domestic scene, one that could have been captured at any point in the past 50 years. But that in itself is surprising.

The husband and wife in the video are playing back a programme that they have captured on a digital video recorder—something they do often. They do not need to watch advertisements. Indeed, they claim never to do so. Whenever an ad comes on during a recorded programme, the husband says in an interview, he zips through it at 30 times the normal speed.

Just outside Brighton, on England’s south coast, Sarah Pearson watches people watch television. She has almost 100,000 hours of video showing utterly banal scenes—people channel-surfing, fighting over the remote control and napping. Her findings are astonishing. There turns out to be an enormous gap between how people say they watch television and how they actually do. This gap contains clues to why television is so successful, and why so many attempts to transform it through technology have failed.

In the past few years viewers have gained much more control over television. Video-cassette recorders have been replaced by DVD players and digital video recorders (DVRs), both of which are easier to use. Cable and satellite firms offer a growing number of videos on demand. TV has gone online and become mobile. As a result, viewers’ expectations have changed dramatically. Katsuaki Suzuki of Fuji Television, Japan’s biggest broadcaster, says nobody feels they need to be at home to catch the 9pm drama any more.

But a change in expectations is not quite the same as a change in behaviour. Although it is easier than ever to watch programmes at a time and on a device of one’s choosing, and people expect to be able to do so, nearly all TV is nonetheless watched live on a television set. Even in British homes with a Sky+ box, which allows for easy recording of programmes, almost 85% of television shows are viewed at the time the broadcasters see fit to air them.

“People want to watch ‘Pop Idol’ when everyone else is watching it,” says Mike Darcey of BSkyB. If that is not possible, they watch it as soon as they can afterwards. Some 60% of all shows recorded on Sky+ boxes are viewed within a day. Often the delay is only a few minutes—just enough to finish the washing up or to make a phone call. For the most part, internet video is used in the same way. Matthias Büchs of RTLNow, a video-streaming website, says online viewing of a programme peaks within a day of that programme airing on TV.

Social animals

It may seem dated, but the image of the family clustered around the living-room set is an accurate depiction of how most people watch television in most countries. In Latin America advertisers have learned to tout grown-up products on children’s channels like Nickelodeon and Discovery Kids, knowing that many parents will be watching with their offspring. Indeed, TV executives believe there is more demand for programmes that the whole family can watch together. Colleen Fahey Rush, head of research at MTV, puts this down to the rise of two-earner households. Because both the father and the mother are absent more often, their company is more valued. “Today’s children actually like spending time with their parents,” she explains. A big thing they like to do together is watch television.

Like all social activities, television-watching demands compromise. People may have strong ideas about what they want to watch, but what they really want to do is watch together. So the great majority of them first see “what is on”—that is, what is being broadcast at that moment. Restricted choice makes it easier to agree on what to watch. If nothing appeals, they move on to the programmes stored in a DVR. On the very rare occasions when they find nothing there, they will look for an on-demand video.

This helps explain one of the oddest and most consistent findings of television research: that people seem unaware of their own behaviour. In surveys they almost always underestimate how much television they watch, and greatly overstate the extent to which they watch video in any other form (see chart 4). In particular, they underestimate their consumption of live television. One of Ms Pearson’s subjects, a 27-year-old man, claimed to watch recorded television 90% of the time. In fact he watched live TV 69% of the time. He was probably not so much fibbing as misinterpreting the question. When asked how he watched television, he gave an answer that described his behaviour when he was alone, and thus did not have to compromise. But most of the time he watched with other people.

Efforts to improve the TV-watching experience have often gone wrong because they took people at their word. The past ten years have seen a parade of websites and set-top boxes—Apple TV, Boxee, Joost, Roku—offering a huge range of content and interactive features. All promised to deliver TV the way people (that is, individuals) really want it. Because they failed to take account of the social nature of television, not one has caught on. Efforts to turn TVs into personal e-mail devices and home-shopping outlets have fared no better. “The killer application on television turns out to be television,” says Richard Lindsay-Davies, CEO of the Digital TV Group.

Some technology firms do “get it”, as the bloggers like to say. Yahoo is building internet widgets into the most advanced TV sets that appear as small icons at the bottom of the screen. Click on a weather icon, for example, and a sidebar appears with the latest forecast. The widgets work because they are unobtrusive and do not distract other viewers from watching their programmes.

Other technology outfits are learning to become more like television. YouTube, the original video-sharing website, became famous for water-skiing squirrels and bedroom musings. It still has plenty of those, but since November 2009 it has also had a “TV shows” section that is neatly divided into genres, not unlike a video-on-demand menu from a cable or satellite company. In North America the website has Vevo, a channel offering music videos. Another innovation is youtube.com/disco, which plays one video after another. The aim, says Hunter Walker, its head of content, is to create “more of a TV-like experience”.

All together now

Live television is not just the most popular way of watching video; it also influences the way people watch shows on all devices. The most popular live television programmes tend to be the most heavily recorded and the most watched on computers and mobile devices. In February “EastEnders”, a British soap, accounted for 12 of the 20 most played-back programmes on iPlayer, the BBC’s online video service. Technology slightly favours programmes aimed at men: science fiction and shows about cars are more likely to be recorded or watched on computers. But there is little to suggest that television is growing a long tail of niche interests.

Quite the opposite, in fact. David Poltrack, head of research at CBS, says technology is helping hits to attract even bigger audiences. Now that it is so easy to record TV programmes and to find them online, the big shows scheduled at peak viewing time are freed from direct competition with each other. Faced with a choice between two programmes at 9pm that they want to see, viewers will often watch one show live and play the other one back an hour later. So strong is the competition from recorded shows that it has become hard to break a new show in America at 10pm. Indeed, thanks to technology and the rise of multi-channel TV it is becoming ever harder to get away with repeats or mediocre programmes at any time of day.

In the 1999-2000 season the most popular thing on American broadcast TV was “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”, a game show. Every Tuesday evening it pulled in 28.5m viewers. But the rest were not far behind. The 10th most popular show that season attracted 63% of “Millionaire’s” audience, or 18m viewers. Even the 100th most popular show still got 30% of the top figure. By the 2008-09 season the also-rans had tumbled. The top show, “American Idol”, had 25.5m viewers. The 10th most popular programme pulled in 55% of its audience and the 100th most popular show just 20%. Relatively, the hits are becoming bigger.

Humdrum television thrived in a world of scarcity when there was little to watch. As the number of channels multiplies, more households get DVRs and television spreads to computers and mobile phones, there is always something on. “You don’t have to watch the best of a bad choice,” says Mr Carey of News Corporation. And one kind of show is becoming more and more dominant.

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