Cord-Cutters know 'shows' not 'networks'

Last week a Credit Suisse analyst reported that paid TV services like Cable and Satellite will lose 200,000 subscribers next year citing that there is a generation of viewers called ‘Cord-Nevers’ that will never subscribe for those services.

In a follow up article titled, “TV’s Scariest Generation: The Cable-Nevers’, Bernard Gershon digs deeper into this new generation:

Cord-nevers - This is the most troubling group for the traditional operators. They are graduating college, leaving the nest and have become comfortable finding their viewing choices online. They don’t recognize networks - they know “shows.”

Before ‘on-demand’ viewing became prominent, the only way to ensure a viewer would have access to their favorite content was to bucket them into networks. This was the great allure of cable. A channel dedicated to music, comedy, sports, cooking, etc. Cable networks found that there was a growing number of viewers interested in niche content and that those viewers would watch their network as long as they knew that they could find content that would appeal to them on that specific channel at any given time. They were the Independents. They were underdogs.

Now that viewers can watch pretty much anything they want on demand, the position on the dial is less important. I can’t remember if ‘Mad Men’ is on AMC or Bravo. Or if ‘It’s Always Sunny..’ is on Fox or FX or TBS… no idea.

The new generation of viewers know shows, not networks.

This will continue to be true for network TV programs as well as independently produced web series. It won’t matter if a show was created for FX, TBS, HBO, or if it was distributed online only. Great shows will reach their audience no matter how remote and quirky they are. As long independent web series continue to be creative and unique in their approach to creating content, these cord-nevers will find the content they want.

I agree completely. Unfortunately, we don’t operate in a limited, closed system like cable TV. With web shows, what I’m seeing is a similar pattern but exacerbated by our inefficiency as an industry to brand ourselves outside of networked silos like Blip, YouTube, MyDamnChannel, Koldcast, Revision 3, etc..

By that I mean, audiences identify primarily with shows - I agree. However, video portal discovery is in its infancy and platform cross-promotion is basically non-existent. A viewer may discover a show on a particular network and thus find other shows they like on that network, but cross-site audience sharing by content genre and audience vertical is an uncracked nut. For the most part, this is in the network’s interests (better to keep the viewer on that site watching a “related” show they may or may not like rather than send them somewhere else to watch a highly relevant recommendation on another site). But it has a damaging effect as well:

If a viewer knows about Revision 3, they probably know of most of the shows there but may have never heard of other portals like Blip or The Escapist. Blip’s new layout definitely improves discovery within other Blip shows (as does YouTube’s) but due to the massive scale of those sites I doubt there’s anyone (maybe Eric and Steve, but not on the customer side) who is familiar with ALL the shows, or even all the related ones. If I like You Suck at Photoshop (MyDamnChannel), how do I find other shows like it I would enjoy as well if they’re not on MDC?

If you look at the cross promotion The Guild (MSN/YouTube) did with The Legend of Neil (Atom) you have a rare instance of cross-network familiarity (due to shared cast members), which may have led to Guild/LoN audiences discovering Video Game Reunion (also Atom), but those fans don’t necessarily know about gaming related shows on other networks like Project:LORE (Revision 3), Gold: the Series (Blip), Zero Punctuation (The Escapist), etc. ad infinitum.

So, yes, viewers identify with shows over networks. But the web is a URL destination based delivery system with very few ways to discover content from one site to another (Google is useless for this). Until someone solves that discovery problem, a casual viewer who finds a show they like will have a difficult time finding the best related content in that vertical or genre. Similarly, advertisers cannot currently buy audience at scale based on cross-site aggregation of interest segments (i.e. I want to run McCormick Seasoning ads across all the best cooking and food-related shows on the web).

It’s not up to the distribution networks to solve this problem even if they could: on the viewer side, you need a cross platform curator (Tosh 2.0 or Ain’t It Cool News for web series), a TV Guide (Clicker started this but lost steam), or an industry representative with cross channel interests (the IAWTV, perhaps) to be vested in optimizing audience aggregation around shows on the web. Running cross platform advertising on web shows is a much more technical issue and I’ll leave that opportunity to some other entrepreneur. ;)

No one asks “where can I find the best networks online?”, but they DO ask “where can I find the best shows online?” and, for the moment at least, there is no easy answer: the best we’re offering them is networks, not shows.