Real level of demand for VOD questioned
Editor ©RapidTVNews | 29-11-2010
The assumption, rapidly becoming a received wisdom, that the increasing availability of on-demand services herald the end of linear TV has been questioned by an eminent academic and TV industry expert.
As reported in The Guardian newspaper, Patrick Barwise, the emeritus London Business School professor of management and marketing, has declared as "confused and deluded" the belief that linear TV will die in the near to mid future. Furthermore, Barwise doubts whether the availability of VOD or indeed access to high speed broadband will be the catalyst if any great change in viewers’ behaviour.
Such an analysis is gaining weight. As reported in Rapid TV News, recent research by Thinkbox and Decipher reveals that on-demand usage actually highlights enduing strength of linear TV. The stand out finding of the Tellyport report, based on a survey of 3000 people in the UK, was that the main reason people watch on-demand TV services such as ITV Player, 4oD, Sky Player and BBC iPlayer is actually to avoid falling behind with the linear TV schedules. It found that on-demand viewing is seen as ‘back-up’ viewing and that the amount of on-demand TV watched to discover new TV shows has halved since 2008, shrinking from 22% to 11%. This has happened at the same time that the number of those watching TV on demand leapt from 64% in 2008 to 80%.
For his part in a speech to the Voice of the Listener & Viewer conference Waiting for VODOT, Barwise calculated four-fifths of 80% of viewing is of live TV, and the rest is largely catch-up in one form or another. He estimated VOD to account for only 1-2% of viewing for young adults and that watching missed programmes is the principal reason for using such services. The conclusion was that VoD would exist as only an adjunct to main viewing, or a marketing tool for online TV, OTT and IPTV firms such as Apple, Google and BT.
