"Changing" TV viewing behaviour

About five years ago, I wrote about how much TV viewing has really changed;

So - 85% of viewing is definitely not watched "as a family", because nearly half is watched alone... but that said, the point here is that I'm not seeing anything here that makes me think that there has been a significant change in viewing behaviour over the last decade. (Interestingly, we watch more TV on our own in the summer months- which is when we tend to watch less TV overall.)

This is a chart of the share of viewing time spent alone - ie. with nobody else in the room, whether or not they are actually "watching" the TV;

Bar chart showing very little change is the amount of time spent watching TV alone from 2013 to 2019.

Since then - well, things have obviously changed.

Covid and lockdowns had a massive impact on the time people spent at home vs. out of home, with the longer-term legacy of working from home being increasingly 'normalised' (the current trend seems to be a gradual return to the office - but at least day or two WFH seems to be the 'normal' for what was 100% "office-based" work before.

SVOD subscriptions have rocketed; more TV viewing is to stuff that never had a TV broadcast.

Phones have got faster, and we've gone to 5G - making watching video on other devices a virtually frictionless experience.

More people are watching new platforms like TikTok.

AI is about to change the world again - and is already flooding social media feeds with growing volumes of slop.

So, how have those changes manifested themselves? What does an updated version of the chart above look like?

I've coloured 2020 - the obvious 'change point' black to make it clearer where all that dramatic change in behaviour really kicked off.

Bar chart showing very little change in the amount of time spent watching TV alone from 2015 to mid-2024.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose…

(Footnote 1- this data is about viewing to television sets; whatever it is that is being viewed, based on Barb Audiences' data. I've written extensively before on what I think "television" is, and in my view, its basically "whatever is on the TV". There's a whole other conversation where that might have come from and which "pipe" it went down to get there - but my personal interest and focus is always on the media behaviour rather than the content.)

(Footnote 2 - In case you were wondering why the data only goes up to June, its because I wrote this post in July as a draft, forgot to click 'publish', and just spent ages trying to find the link to a thing I knew I had written but couldn't find. Whoops.)

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The role of Synthetic Respondents in 'Human-centred' Research

In the growing buzz around generative AI, a new concept in research methodologies has arisen; "synthetic respondents". Instead of asking people the questions, a Large Language Model creates 'synthetic respondents' which you can ask as many questions as you like. And they will give you answers. And they will probably sound like real people. They will never get bored. They will never try to disguise their "true" thoughts and feelings (as David Ogilvy once said, “People don’t think what they feel, don’t say what they think, and don’t do what they say.”.) You can get answers from thousands of them, very quickly and at very little costs.

(Also - they never leave behind a bad smell, and won't eat all of your biscuits.)

But again - so obvious as to be barely worth mentioning - they aren't real people. They are synthetic - "made up." Just like the 'actors', pretending to be the sort of people we actually want to talk to.

They will do it faster. They will do it cheaper. Will they do it better - or at least, 'good enough'? Well... that's the real question.

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The Device is the Boring Bit

The Apple Vision Pro is now on sale. People are getting their hands on them, and sharing their opinions. People who haven't got their hands on them are sharing their opinions. There are a lot of opinions flying around.

First thing - sure, I'm interested in the headset, and the device actually getting in 'normal' people's hands (or on their faces) is this week's news; I'm not going to buy one, because it's ridiculously expensive and if I had that sort of money to throw around, I probably wouldn't be driving a car that's approaching either its 18th birthday or its last trip to the scrapyard and has done the equivalent milage of 5 times around the circumference of the earth.


But what I'm really interested in is the Vision platform; the bits in the software that are going to be the same when the next headset device is launched. And once there are a bunch of different ‘Vision’ devices - where they will fit, in the spaces in people's lives.

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Who owns Taylor Swift's voice?

Ben Evans on Threads;

It's a lot easier to understand the IP issues in 'give me this song but in Taylor Swift's voice' than 'make me a song in the style of the top ten hits of the last decade.' If a human did that, they wouldn't necessarily have to pay anyone, so why would an LLM?

There's an interesting twist with the "Taylor Swift's voice" example; Scooter Braun owns all of Taylor Swift's recordings (at least, I think all the ones released before any ChatGPT-era training dataset were compiled) - he bought the record company, so he owns the master recordings (and all the copies of the master recordings, and the rights relating to them) - but not the songs themselves. Taylor Swift still owns them - which is why she can make her "Taylor's Version" re-recordings (which Scooter Braun doesn't get a penny out of.)

So there's a key difference here; a human would copy the songs (that is, they would be working off the version of the songs that are in their heads - the idea of the songs), so Swift would get paid as the owner of the songs.

But the kind of generative AI we're talking about would be copying 100% from the recordings (ie. the training data would be the sounds, digitised and converted into a stream of numbers) - which Swift doesn't own. The AI doesn't "see" the idea of the songs - it wouldn’t “know” what the lyrics were, what key the songs were in, what chords were being played on what instrument - any more than a Large Language Model “knows” what the words in its (tokenised) training dataset or output mean.

She still owns her songs, but she’s sold her voice.

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How might 'Metaverse Identities' work- and what's in it for Meta?

If “moving seamlessly between virtual spaces” is a key feature of the metaverse, how might that actually work with virtual identities on a decentralised platform? (And why would Mark Zuckeberg, who holds a bigger centralised database of virtual identities than anyone, want that to happen?)

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Neil McElroy - Godfather of "Brand Men", Soap Operas, and the Internet

If your job is anything like mine, a huge part of it has been shaped by a man you've probably never heard of; Neil McElroy. He was central to the invention of market research, brand management, soap operas - and involved in (although admittedly much less) the development of the internet and the iPhone.

I’ve been doing some reading around the foundations of media and market research (trying to figure out the general trajectory of ‘jobs like mine’; what they are, what they used to be, what they might look like in the future), and along the way learning about a man whose name wasn't immediately familiar to me - but whose career I found fascinating.

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What can we learn from "The Dress" today?

"#TheDress" is an interesting thing to think about because in itself, it doesn't matter. In 2015 it was a social, viral, publishing phenomenon. In 2021, at best, its the answer to a trivia quiz question in a loosely defined "the internet" category. Nobody really cares about it. (Except possibly that person who had the tattoo...)

But it tells us something about how people come together on the internet in a way that they didn’t just a few years previously. And that is something that does matter.

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How much has TV viewing really changed?

In a recent episode of the “Rule of Three” podcast, Joel Morris (one of the podcast hosts) says, about 4 and a half minutes in;

I was always under the impression that Googlebox was a fiction, that families didn't gather around the TV and watch it anymore [...], and we looked up the BARB figures (about 5 years ago) were that 85% of programmes were watched live, by a family, on a sofa, when they went out. And I thought - god, I thought that was a vintage and antique thing. I am sure that is not true any more, and that must have changed really quickly, and I'm wondering whether the culture of comedy, where the demand is for things to hit straight away, whether people have quite caught up with the fact that people consume everything so differently now."

I'm really interested in changing TV viewing behaviour for all sorts of reasons, so I thought I'd take a look at whether this is true - what has changed in the last 5 years?

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Digital Media's Growing Pains

Its now about 11 and a half years since I thought it would be a good idea to work in the media industry for a year or so. I didn't quite understand how everything was on the internet for free but somehow companies like Google and Facebook were worth millions of dollars - but knew that it was something to do with advertising, and wanted to understand how that business worked a bit better.

As it turns out, the first thing I learnt which pretty much shaped the next decade of my career was that communications technology might be interesting, but the impact it has on people and their behaviour is far, far more interesting.

Something else I learnt, probably a few years later, was that the world of "digital" that was massively disrupting the advertising industry is only a subset of "marketing". The problem is that "best practice" for digital media/advertising isn't necessarily "best practice" for advertising in general.

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