Traditional TV has survived the net threat, but for how much
Source: John Naughton
Little Mix, the recent X Factor winners. The show is one of the few TV programmes that still attract a mass audience. Photograph: Ken Mckay/Ken McKay / Rex Features
Connoisseurs of the 1967 film, The Graduate, in which Dustin Hoffman starred as Benjamin Braddock, a bewildered 21-year-old, treasure the moment when a ponderous family friend comes up to the young man intent on imparting some advice. "I just want to say one word to you," he intones, "just one word �C 'plastics'."
For the last two decades, the computing and media industries have been intoning their own version of "plastics". They call it "convergence". It's all based on the realisation that, since the 1990s, most media �C print, audio, video, graphics �C have been reduced to the lowest common denominator: bits, the ones and zeroes of binary arithmetic. If you examine the contents of your computer's hard drive �C or your iPod's flash memory �C all you will see are bits and there's no immediate way of knowing whether a particular bitstream is a portion of an email message, a photograph, a song or a video.
Finally, after these two decades of promise, we might now have reached a tipping point in this convergence story. (Though one is always tempted to quote Sam Goldwyn on such matters and say: "I'll give you a definite maybe.") Among other developments, there are perhaps two key events. One is YouTube's Original Channels �C dedicated "professional" niches as opposed to YouTube's signature amateur clips �C rolling out this year, which could result in viewers no longer distinguishing between made for TV and made for YouTube. Complementing this is the emergence on the market of "smart" �C that is, internet-enabled �C television sets. We might now ask: where does TV begin and the net end and do we care?
During the shifts of recent years, it's not surprising that the various industries involved have predicted that all bitstreams would eventually converge on a particular device. Touchingly, each one predicted convergence on to its favourite piece of equipment. Bill Gates and co thought that the PC would become the centre of the digital universe. The TV people assumed everything would converge on the television set in the living room, while the mobile phone industry argued confidently that the mobile handset would be the key to everything.
The funny thing is that while all this prediction was going on, nobody seemed to notice that convergence had already happened. All those bitstreams had converged in one place �C on to the internet �C and henceforth the determining factor for the future of any device was the quality of the window on to the net that it provided.
This fact is particularly traumatic for the television industry, which was shaped in an era when broadcast (few-to-many) organisations were the dominant beasts in our media jungle. It's not all that long ago since a few TV networks could attract up to 90% of the available prime-time audience.
Between 1960 and 1990, broadcasters really were masters of the universe. They shaped people's viewing habits, changed our politics and determined how we spent much of our leisure time.
But once cable TV and (later) digital technology arrived, that began to change. Broadcasting became less broad as cable and satellite channels proliferated. And in that "narrowcasting" world, the audience became increasingly fragmented into more specialised segments. There were still moments when the broadcasting model came into its own: major sporting events, Big Brother, The X-Factor and the like, where mass attention is focused on a single, unique event. But in general, the huge mass audience that was routinely characteristic of broadcast television in its heyday looks like becoming an endangered media species.
The arrival of YouTube in 2005 exploded the notion that a few hundred terrestrial, cable and satellite channels represented real narrowcasting. YouTube's motto is "Broadcast yourself" �C with its intimation of a world with millions of TV channels. There are, after all, two billion people using the internet now and an awful lot of them seem to be fascinated by YouTube.
That, at any rate, is what the data suggest. After Google, YouTube's search engine is the second most popular in the world. It currently has 800 million unique visitors a month and 3 billion page views a day. Currently, 48 hours' worth of video is uploaded to it every minute. And by the time you read those numbers, they will be out of date. The big question is whether YouTube poses a strategic threat to the traditional television industry. Up to now, most observers have been sceptical about that. They see conventional TV and YouTube as inhabitants of parallel universes. TV is all about marshalling scarce and expensive resources, exerting tight editorial control and charging for content. YouTube is all about the absence of editorial control, not charging for content, harnessing the abundance of free, user-generated (and sometimes copyrighted) material and extracting value from it by attaching personalised advertising to video clips.
The parallel-universes theory appears to be supported by comparisons of how people use YouTube and conventional TV. While a lot of people visit YouTube every day, they stay, on average, for only 15 minutes. Conventional television viewing, on the other hand, at between four and five hours a day in the US, seems to be holding up quite well. On the basis of these numbers, can TV executives continue to sleep easily?
Maybe. But Google, which owns YouTube, has plans to increase the "stickiness" of YouTube by getting into the content-creation business. Typically, it's doing this at one remove (the idea of being a "content" company is anathema at Google) by becoming a "commissioner" of channels. It invited proposals from teams of producers, writers and entrepreneurs for specialised entertainment channels. YouTube pays advances to successful teams on the principle that they can start earning revenues (shared with Google, naturally) once the advances are paid off. Underlying this new venture is the assumption that YouTube users will find professionally produced content more compelling, stay longer on the site and therefore become more valuable targets for advertising.
The big problem with the parallel-universes theory is that there is one point at which the two intersect and where the internet may indeed pose a serious threat to the TV industry. And it derives, oddly enough, from Douglas Adams, who was the first person to point out that the answer to life, the universe and everything was 42. This also happens to be the number of hours in a week that the average person has to pay attention to "leisure" activities, after deducting time for working, eating, sleeping and living.
Attention is now the really scarce resource in our information economy and competition for it is much fiercer than it was in the heyday of broadcast TV. What's more, it's a zero-sum game. So if YouTube does indeed manage to increase its share of our attention by producing more compelling content, then something else will have less. Television executives, please note.
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