Week in Media: streaming is booming but curation is lagging
If 2020 really was a landmark year for video on demand as Ofcom says, then 2021 needs to be a landmark year for user experience, writes the editor
Something extraordinary happened to me a couple of weeks ago: a Kantar Media rep knocked on my door and asked if our household wanted to become of the Barb measurement system.
“Have you heard of Barb?” he asked. “You could say that…” I awkwardly muttered, while trying to calculate the odds of them choosing a media journalist’s address for an audience measurement panel.
My wife and I answered a 15-minute survey about our general TV viewing habits and were presented with a £10 gift voucher, with the promise that more would be offered if we signed up as a Barb household.
As keen as I am to influence the UK broadcasting industry through my current binge-watching of the hilarious “Pitch Meeting” YouTube series by ScreenRant, ultimately we’ve decided not to do it because of one small but important detail: each member of the house has to use their own remote control before watching TV to let it know we’re the ones it should monitor.
No, thanks. There is far too much friction in TV-watching already. First, you have to turn the thing on. Then you have to switch on the satellite or cable. And then – and this is the biggest hurdle – you have to decide what to watch.
I have literally spent days of my life scrolling through Electronic Programme Guides on Virgin Media, YouTube, Disney+, AppleTV+ and Netflix. There is now so much content that I find it difficult to commit to watching something because everything seems just ‘okay’ and I can’t help thinking there’s something better if I just flick through another line of thumbnails.
The difficulty is compounded if you’re trying to negotiate what to watch with a partner or housemate.
Jason Brownlee’s piece on radio hit the nail on the head when explaining that the power of curation remains extremely important in a world of seemingly infinite media content. You just turn on the radio and, as if by magic, a team of people decide what you should listen to. A friendly voice guides you through the process and you might even get some news thrown in as a bonus.
We shouldn’t forget how valuable this is because this extreme abundance of choice is becoming a source of friction in itself. This is critical as we emerge from the pandemic because, as the latest Ofcom Media Nations report showed again this week, last year was a “landmark” year for streaming video.
The average time spent watching traditional broadcast TV each day is still over three hours, but this drops down to an hour for 16 to 24s.
Nearly four in five of us have TVs connected to the internet and more households have a Netflix subscription than an active Virgin Media or Sky account.
Unfortunately there is no metric for “time spent desperately scrolling through hundreds of titles before user gives up and reads a book instead”.
In other words, increasingly more of us are having to spend more time choosing what to watch on streaming platforms than having a programme controller decide for us on linear TV.
More choice is great but these platforms could do with more curation. Amazon, for one, should be making much more use of its IMDb ownership by allowing users to filter shows easily with all the category info at its disposal.
Better still, Netflix could pilot the use of a live “VJ” who could guide us through different movie genres or TV shows as a way of helping viewers discover content they don’t already know.
It’s telling that the most-watched Netflix show in 2019 was Friends. When all else fails, you can always stick on a Friends rerun, a strategy that worked well for E4 for years.
So if 2020 really was a landmark year for video on demand as Ofcom says, then 2021 really needs to be a landmark year for user experience.