The Boston Globe’s Scott Kirsner has this piece today that muses about how viral videos capture as many (or almost as many) viewers as a “Seinfeld” episode in the series’ heyday.
He doesn’t really break any new ground, but like many observers of this hard-to-categorize phenomenon, tries to figure out just how viral videos (or any web-based video for that matter, it’s just that viral videos generate so much vieweing) will affect traditional media companies. It’s not like people will suddenly disconnect their cable or satellite services because they can watch “Evolution of Dance” on their laptops.
Yet, something is happening with video-on-the-Internet that is sucking audiences away from traditional TV and the impact of this erosion could, at first, eat away at TV ad revenues.
It’s not inconceivable that advertisers might one day not even need to buy TV time, but that an ad would simply get circulated by virtue of its entertainment value. Viral video “puts a huge new premium on entertainment and creativity,” says Jamie Tedford, senior vice president of media and marketing innovation at Arnold Worldwide, a Boston ad agency. “You’re trying to figure out what would make a consumer forward it to a friend.”
For those of us who have analyzed media businesses for more years than we care to admit, the web video phenomenon is very hard to predict because nothing like it has been seen in the history of electronic media. Only time will tell how this market will shape up.
TV isn’t endangered, but it will look very different in five years, when more devices will connect the Net to the TV set. Imagine an e-mail-like queue of video content, some of it produced by amateurs or ad agencies and forwarded along by your friends because it’s cool, and some of it produced by traditional media companies and sent because you’ve requested a `”subscription” to an ongoing series. Two-minute music videos made by your daughter’s friends down the street will compete with “CSI: Miami” for screen time.
Cynthia Brumfield at 10:08 AM|Comments(0)
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