“The future of media will be personal.” Many have taken this prediction to mean that satisfying tomorrow’s viewers, listeners, or readers will rely heavily on analyzing massive datasets to understand what’s going on inside each of their heads.
But history has shown that curating content based on what’s happening in the outside world offers a more immediate route to delivering great media experiences.
We like to think of ourselves as individuals with particular tastes, especially when it comes to the TV, music, and other media that we feel passionately about. But that doesn’t mean that our whims aren’t affected by various shared external factors — the season, the time of day, the weather.
Many of us watch scary movies on the night of Halloween, listen to upbeat music on sunny mornings, and read longer lifestyle journalism over the weekend.
Spotify shows the keenest understanding of this reality. The streaming music provider has invested heavily in employing human “tastemakers” to create playlists that suit certain contexts, which surface on its app at opportune times.
“Your Morning Coffee”, for example, appears at breakfast time, “Music for Concentration” during working hours, “Funk-Soul Drivetime” at the end of the working day, and “Songs for Sleeping” late at night.
The irony is that TV companies have more expertise in this area than some would admit. The art of scheduling – knowing when and where to place programming in order to attract the most viewers – is highly prized in the broadcast TV world, but has become an unfashionable term as Netflix and other on-demand services have captured the world’s attention.
This is perhaps due partly to fears that much of the content that broadcasters created or bought to fill the schedule outside primetime would be revealed as precisely that – “filler.” Given the choice, the industry wondered, would anyone choose to watch what was on daytime TV? Wouldn’t they prefer to stream House of Cards or any other latest multimillion dollar thriller?
Certainly, TV first aired on primetime outperforms that aired on during the daytime in terms of on-demand viewing. But this seems to have more to do with quality than genre.
Most of the top-viewed shows on broadcasters’ online services are not high-end dramas but fall within genres that are synonymous with daytime TV — soaps, reality TV, and game shows. They just happened to be made better than those aired during the day and were promoted more heavily.
What does this tell us? The future of TV might not be the one Netflix likes to paint. People like to watch shows they know other people are watching or will watch shortly, so they can talk about them with their friends and colleagues in the real world or via social media.
For many, this activity is a key part of the enjoyment they take from watching TV and creating such events is an underrated skill.
Despite the undoubted appeal of the high-end series and movies that have helped attract nearly 70 million subscribers to Netflix, many people are not “in the mood” to watch its brand of personal TV all the time. The challenge for established TV companies will be working out what content to invest in and when and how to present it in order to fill these gaps in moods, and not just airtime.
Rob Gallagher is director of research and analysis for media and entertainment at Ovum.