Last week, TechCrunch ran a story that only 38% of TiVo users watch live TV. The rest of them watch their favorite shows whenever they want. They pull the content off the box.
With much more people spending their time online, tradition media trends don’t look great. Who likes to be interrupted by TV/radio commercials, direct mail pieces, or cold calls from telemarketers? Hardly anyone. For some fascinating trends in marketing, see my infographic called “Inbound Marketing Ecosystem.”
TiVo alone is not the killer of a live TV — it is the abundance of set-top boxes, apps, or services connecting our TVs to the internet:
- Roku Box: allows you to watch certain channels / video podcasts, pulled from the internet
- Netflix: gives you ability to watch a movie / TV shows using your game console, laptop, smart phone, tablet, etc.
- Hulu: gives an access to TV shows
Podcasts (delivered to your phone) or Pandora (streamed with your phone’s internet connection) are replacing the radio during our commute. Internet and blogs like Huffington Post have replaced many newspapers.
People seem to like that “pull” thing.
According to Nielsen, people in US spend 2.7 times more time on blogs & social media than email. And as “internet generation” grows up, more and more of content will be consumed on a pull-basis. Value for value — we’ll pay for the content we want to support. Directly to the producers — without middle men nor forced packages. For example, a popular podcast “No Agenda” is 100% donation-based. Hosts haven’t became the millionaires, but they do get by.
Leo Laporte, a guy behind TWiT with dozens of different video podcasts, has an option to “tip” him on a website. He gets his yearly salary of $100K from the tips, reinvesting the balance into the business.
There is no reason I should pay for the cable companies’ “packages” of channels I will never watch. I want to go directly to the source!
How to lead in the pull-based market?
The answer is pretty simple: produce amazing content. Customers will find you whenever they realize a need for your products/services/content.
Recently, a comedian Louis CK went direct-to-consumers and topped $1 million in sales while charging $5 per download. He did not care about the piracy and files did not contain any restrictions. Granted, Louis CK had a lot of fans to begin with, but producing really good stuff will get you noticed. It won’t make you a $1 million overnight, but in the long run — it might.
Think of it as “pay-per-like” model
As I understand, with the cable packages, content producers get paid even if you never watch certain channels. With Netflix or Pandora, royalties are distributed per view/listen.
I think, we all should put our best effort every time — like we are getting paid by number of “Likes”, tweets, shares, inbound links, etc.
Imagine if artists wouldn’t get their royalty if a person listening to the song skips or “thumbs down” it?
Imagine if royalties were distributed after you watch a movie. Let’s say you pay $8 per month for Netflix and watched 8 movies ($1 per movie). At the end of the month, you can give a “bonus” to the movies you liked by taking some royalties away from the movies you did not enjoy.
Adopt this mindset today!
This model would force production of the best content and Hollywood wouldn’t be able to get away with just a great trailer — movie would have to meet expectations set by it.
If more talented people start following Louis CK, we might see this model in action, but even today, would it hurt to put out the best content in the world?
