Just settling on which video service to watch can take 10 minutes. By the time we choose a genre, someone usually needs a snack
Well, I suspect everyone with a Netflix subscription knew this already. But now Nielsen, the iconic data and analytics company, has confirmed it. Because there’s so much streaming content available, people who watch television have become paralyzed by the endless choice.
Nielson’s latest Total Audience Report shows that the average television viewer currently takes seven minutes to decide what to watch. And that stat doesn’t include my household, where just settling on which subscription video service to canvass that day can take 10 minutes. By the time we choose a genre, someone usually needs a snack.
The average television viewer currently takes seven minutes to decide what to watch.
People too young to remember when television on demand meant turning on your set and being blessed with whatever content the networks had scheduled to share at that moment may find all this baffling. They never had the formative experience of being home sick from school and having a choice between Three’s Company reruns, Card Sharks, and Phil Donahue. And feeling profoundly grateful for those options. So now there’s a lot more to watch, they think. So what? Shouldn’t that make the whole thing easier?
Here’s the New York Post summarizing Nielsen’s new research: “(A)mong adult subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) users, only a third of them bother to browse the menu to find content, with 21 per cent saying they simply give up watching if they’re unable to make a choice when bombarded with options.”
READ MUCH MORE HERE AT THE NATIONAL POST.
