21 Aug 08 Broadcasting vs Streaming

So the Olympics was watched on TV by around 92% of viewers, and if you look at the total minutes watched agaisnt minutes streamed online it’s over 99% (source TV Week)

I suspect that these are probably similar for most types of video material.

I know that I’m very atypical when it comes to TV. I almost exclusively obtain my news and worldly information from the Internet, with a much smaller amount from broadcast radio (mostly BBC World Service). Then again, I watch very little TV. Period.

Of course, producing TV programming isn’t cheap. Someone somewhere has to pay for it, and mostly its supported by advertising.  What I do find strange is that although many people will complain about advertisements on web sites, or blogs, such as this one, they’ll quite happily watch an hour-long show, that is interrupted without warning every 7-8 minutes by intrusive annoying commercials that can’t be skipped, and most often bear no relation to the content of the programming! For me, aside from having a great difficulty of finding content that I find interesting and engaging, viewing is spoiled for me by those ads.

I can watch shows from a service like Joost or Hulu, and while there are commericials they’re much less obtrusive, more contextual, and much less frequent than network TV.

Of course, another great advantage of online services such as those I mentioned above is the ‘on-demand’ model. I’ve already said I watch little TV, but if I did, I want it to be my slave and not my master. I don’t need to mess around with VCR, DVR, Tivo or anything else with Joost for example. I can watch what I want, when I want.

Tags: advertisements, annoying commercials, bbc, bbc world, bbc world service, broadcast radio, demand model, dvr, hulu, Joost, little tv, network tv, olympics, tivo, tv programming, tv week, vcr, video material