Multiple news organisations have picked up on the results of an ICM survey for BBC News which looks into how online video is affecting people’s viewing habits. Unfortunately, they tend to go for the big numbers rather than looking at the bigger picture.
Sure, things aren’t helped by the BBC’s own headline, which screams Online video ‘eroding TV viewing’. Well, yes, it may be eroding TV viewing habits, but currently it’s doing so at roughly the same rate as the glaciers did to the Cairngorms — very slowly and selectively.
Looking at the headline figures, and you see (thanks to the BBC’s helpful pie charts, reproduced to the right) that 43% of people who watch online video say that they watch less TV as a direct result. A slender majority say it hasn’t affected their conventional viewing, while a small number — just 3% — say that their online viewing has meant that they watch more TV, not less.
That 43% does look pretty big, and pretty worrying. But hold on — that pie chart comprises only the people who currently watch online video once a week or more frequently. And that comes to just 9% of all respondents to the ICM survey. Which means that just 3.8% of the viewing audience is watching less TV as a direct resulting of watching online video.
That’s a lot less than the headlines would have you believe. And, while that 9% of people who regularly watch online video is going to grow, so will the opportunities for conventional, broadcast television to use the nascent medium for audience building.
In the US, the major networks have online viewing strategies in place, whether via their own sites or selling episodes via stores such as Apple’s iTunes. One of NBC’s biggest hits, their remake of Ricky Gervais’ sitcom The Office was on the brink of cancellation before it was made available on iTunes — after which, audience figures for the on-air exploits of Stave Carrell and company went up.
Right now, support for online viewing in the UK is strictly limited, although all the major terrestrial channels are on the way. Five has a downloadable rental service (although they call the process ‘buying’, you’re only allowed to keep a copy for 14 days, so it’s a rental in all but name). Channel 4 will have its ambitious on-demand service, 4OD available on PCs shortly (a related service is already available in some cable areas). And at some point, the BBC will actually get around to releasing its iPlayer instead of just endlessly talking about it at new media conferences. So far, there hasn’t been a move to start selling episodes via iTunes — which means that Mac junkies such as myself have fewer options than people burdened with running Windows — but that doesn’t mean to say the idea hasn’t been mooted.
Will any of these advances mean that online viewing habits increase conventional, living room-style TV viewing? There’s a good chance they will, if NBC’s experience is anything to go by. But even if they don’t, if they just mean that people start watching more TV shows on a computer screen, is that necessarily a bad thing, if they’re watching the same shows, from the same bradcasters, that they were before?
And that is all the ammunition that the BBC will need to push for home computers to be included in the license fee...