News junkies have seen an explosion of news choices, but publishers -- while still creating indispensable content -- have witnessed their revenue shift to multiple search alternatives, from Google and Kelly Blue Book to Fandango and eBay. This is a win for news lovers, but a business challenge for newspaper publishers.
Similarly, music fans now have unprecedented access to their favorite bands and artists with the extraordinary amount of affordable, portable and on demand music experiences available today. The win for listeners is clear, but musicians are left to create news ways to make a living with their art.
This brings us to TV. The programming grid -- which used to dictate everything on television -- is waning in its importance to viewers who are taking control of their TV viewing behavior. The shift from institutionally controlled media to user controlled media is seemingly irreversible. This started as a trickle with the introduction of the VCR and skyrocketed with the introduction of the DVR, the explosion of bandwidth and now the arrival of the connected living room.
With the DVR, viewers can watch on their own time, which is a win for them, but a loss to the broadcaster and the marketer. In fact, Hulu research indicates that viewers who want to avoid ads use the DVR more than twice as much as everyone else. Time shifting ads on a hard drive is bad for business, but at the moment, DVR viewing taken collectively is larger than any individual network viewed live.
However, new technology has enabled a shift to viewing video on demand which is very promising for broadcasters and marketers. In the most recent Nielsen Q1 Total Audience Report, it was revealed that the SVOD universe is now equal to DVR penetration at 50% of homes using TV. And that’s up 19% year over year.