Current Question:
In a presentation to advertisers, Ted Harbert, the chairman of NBC, expressed his distaste over using DVRs to skip commercials by saying, "This is an insult to our joint investment in programming, and I'm against it."
Harbert is expressing an industry-wide phobia among broadcast networks, but what do you think?
Will increased DVR use cut into TV advertising revenue?
Ted Herbert’s recent comments expressing
his distaste for the use of DVR to skip commercials highlights the complete
lack of connection with his customers. I
can only hope other chairmen are not so disconnected from their client base to have
similar beliefs.
There are two reasons to use a DVR;
to rewind and to skip. That a DVR is
used to corral up your favorite shows and keep them in order for future viewing
is implicit to the technology. Mr.
Herbert’s comments only make sense if he assumes that the majority of his DVR using
customers are watching television as it airs and so all they are going to do is
rewind.
Yeah, right.
This may be true for the weekly
series that are the main focus of water cooler conversations, but not for every
other person who has relinquished control of their lives to their ever
expanding schedule of responsibilities.
Mr. Herbert is clearly focused on a
business model that allowed NBC to butcher the presentation of the London
Olympics. And yet there is one
fundamental problem with the results that leads him to think he is right. We keep watching. And we watch with a greater sense of thrill
because, with a DVR, we get to watch the shows we want to watch. He doesn’t know he’s about to lose us.
Let me be perfectly honest. I do not own a DVR. My mother-in-law believes I should move into
a cave and has episodes of Gabba Gabba and Fresh Beat Band piled up for my son
at her house in a display of competitive parenting that I cannot hope to
win. So I opt for opting out.
But not really. I watch Hulu and Netflix and have shifted my
viewing style to watch every episode of every season in a series over the
course of a few weeks. I could wait, I
suppose, but why bother? My daily conversations
are not based on television programming, so I have no need to stay up to
date. To avoid commercials, I’m willing
to wait.
My TV conversations have shifted to
the marathons of programming. I have
shifted to the evolution of character types over multiple seasons. What Mr. Herbert needs to figure out is how
to monetize that specific interest. I’ll
watch a commercial here and there, but our interest in utilizing DVR technology
is not going away.
That said, we have already begun to
focus on content creators. They are more
accessible today than ever. They tweet. They Facebook.
They find alternative avenues of media.
We are less and less interested in the corporations that manage these
content creators because they are no longer required to use the corporate
avenues to express their art.
At the end of the day, Mr. Herbert is already hopelessly
behind. He hasn’t figured out where the next monetizing idea is coming from and he is desperately clinging on to the old
tricks. I get that. Too bad it won’t work.
