The Revolution Will Be TelevisedThe story of digital video is not necessarily going to be the same as that of digital music, though the parallels between Napster and YouTube are fairly uncanny. It’s not self-evident that watching long-running movies or TV shows on very small devices will become a mass behavior. According to a recent study, the majority of Internet users watch roughly 3 hours of video on the Web each month, compared to the average person’s 4.5 hours of TV each day. For all the hype surrounding Web video, it was not surprising that NBC, responsible for 40 percent of iTunes’s video sales, had earned only $15 million last year on those sales, a point NBC Universal’s chief, Jeff Zucker, made (uncontested) in announcing he would pull NBCU shows off iTunes at the end of last year. (This content is mostly going to Hulu.com, NBC’s joint venture with Fox, where NBC hopes to sell advertising time much as it does on the air. How this will work better, given the still-unproven Web-video advertising market, remains undetermined.) The video story is different from the music story in another crucial way. Being a music fan traditionally involved going to the record store (remember those?) or ordering from Amazon and committing a large sum of money to a product you knew about only via one or two songs, and then usually being disappointed by what you got. The iTunes music model, and the illegal-download model, represented a quantum leap in consumer satisfaction over the previous iteration: you could pay for only the songs you wanted (or not pay at all!), and there was a convenient sorting system that meant you could get rid of all those CDs and broken jewel cases. The traditional-TV model is altogether more user-friendly. It’s free, or at least the costs are buried in cable bills (where, my Houston friends notwithstanding, years of learned behavior dictate that this is simply a cost to be borne), or they are buried in the more recent “triple play” offerings from Comcast and other companies that bundle cable with phone and high-speed Internet, obscuring the costs even more. Watching video on the Web, contra-trend, remains more of an analog experience than watching it on TV. On TV, you can click through hundreds of offerings instantly, or choose from dozens more you’ve recorded on your digital video recorder, and there’s a handy electronic program guide to tell you what’s on and when. On most Web video sites, however, clicking from show to show involves launching and relaunching players and then sitting through seemingly interminable “pre-roll” ads (and it’s almost always the same ad). The quality remains subpar, with poor definition, small player windows, and unsynced audio and video. The selection is spotty, and there is no central guide to what is available where and when. It’s easy to say these problems will be solved, but there’s always the suspicion that the experience is intentionally being made unsatisfying so that people don’t leave their TV sets too quickly. As Mark Cuban, the not-as-boorish-as-he-appears Internet entrepreneur-cum-Dallas Mavericks owner-cum-reality-TV star, has pointed out, the curve on Web innovation has stalled, even as bandwidth has begun to top out. In other words, only so much data can be thrust through the Internet’s distributed nodes, and this structural limitation makes it unlikely that a satisfying, seamless Web-video experience will be on offer anytime soon. For these reasons, with great counterintuitive brio, Cuban last year pronounced the Web “dead and boring.” This is where the problem and opportunity lie for traditional TV. The flip side of the music business’s obstinacy is a kind of we-need-to-be-down-with-the-kids type of herd mentality. It dictates that unless you throw everything online, you don’t “get it.” But “getting it” does not necessarily mean giving in to the braying of the digerati, especially when you will destroy your business in the process. In the past couple of years, the TV networks have thrown their shows onto the Web willy-nilly, some on their own sites, some via AOL, Yahoo, and so forth, and some on new ventures like the aforementioned Hulu. The logic is that if they don’t, someone else will; indeed, a dedicated surfer can find most any show through sub-rosa peer-to-peer file- sharing systems that are used by an astonishing proportion of Web surfers, perhaps as much as 70 percent of the total. In the age of distributed media, you give the people what they want when they want it, where they want it. “If they want their show to succeed, they’ve got to get it out in front of as many people as possible,” an analyst for the technology research firm Forrester said of the Big Four broadcast networks, articulating the moment’s conventional wisdom and following it with a typical note of alarm: “The window is very short.” But as the music industry learned very quickly (and the newspaper industry before it), this model swiftly turns you from a business to a charity, undermining the value of your product even as it brings your content to a larger audience. This is because advertisers and broadcasters have yet to settle on a protocol to sell advertising to accompany the near-infinitude of available content, and consumers are not yet ready to spend a lot of money paying for downloads. As NBCU’s Zucker put it in announcing the end of the network’s iTunes deal, “We don’t want to replace the dollars we were making in the analog world with pennies on the digital side.” Michael Hirschorn is an Atlantic contributing editor.
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