The New York Times Brian Stelter has this trend piece that claims the nation's office workers save up their online video viewing for the lunch hour. Giving this trend the label "video snacking," the piece claims that the mid-day hour experiences a peak in viewing and that workers gather together to watch web video as a kind of communal experience, so much so that some content providers are now staring to schedule programs for this period.
That might be right. It's been a while since I actually worked in an office on a daily basis and it makes sense that web video watching does spike when people are legitimately free to engage in non-work activities.
But I've got to believe that a whole lot of web video viewing in the workplace is going on throughout the day. I've swapped emails with office workers at all hours of the day directing me to watch interesting or funny videos. Based on my limited experience, people are watching videos all day long.
The notion that people are saving up their video viewing for a specified time reminds me of that old Steve Martin joke about smoking marijuana, where at first he admits to smoking it, but only in the late evening...except for those times he smokes it during the early evening, and well, yes, those times he smokes it in the afternoon...and so on.
Here's the joke in full, courtesy of Wikiquote:
I used to smoke marijuana. But I'll tell you something: I would only smoke it in the late evening. Oh, occasionally the early evening, but usually the late evening - or the mid-evening. Just the early evening, midevening and late evening. Occasionally, early afternoon, early mid-afternoon, or perhaps the late-midafternoon. Oh, sometimes the early-mid-late-early morning...But never at dusk. Never at dusk.
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:46 AM|Comments(0)
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