Thinkbox's Lindsey Clay on Netflix's 'depressingly bleak and unlikely vision' of the demise of linear TV
This week Netflix product chief Neil Hunt told an audience in New York that "linear TV is ripe for replacement" and TV ads as we know them will die out in the next decade. Lindsey Clay, chief executive of Thinkbox, casts a critical eye over those claims.
Lindsey Clay
I suspect if you mention the words ‘linear’ or ‘scheduled’ near Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, or Neil Hunt, the service’s chief product officer, they break out in hives. I assume their PAs have old DVDs hurled at them when they try to organise their professional schedules.
'You’ve made a what? An appointment? What?! At a fixed time?! What do you think this is, 1953? Get out! You’re fired. I like to curate my meetings personally when and where I want them. And I like to binge-meet. You’ve only booked a single meeting. Jesus!’
I get it: Netflix is on-demand. If you subscribe and you want to, you can sit there and watch on-demand content to your heart’s content, and all without seeing any advertising. And Netflix collects lots of data about you to try and make recommendations.
That is all fine. But why can’t they understand that people like to watch linear content AND on-demand content, that they serve different human needs? Why do they think people only want what they are selling?
This week, Neil Hunt put the company’s scratched record on the deck again and played Netflix’s familiar line about the schedule being a ‘tyranny’ and linear TV being ‘ripe for replacement’ and ‘irrelevant’. The future, he claims, is about channels for each individual person.
Think about it. What a depressingly bleak vision. It is a great example of technologists bleaching the colour out of life. One of the greatest things about linear TV is that it is so social – as its blossoming relationship with social media shows. It isn’t just about humans, it is about humanity, and humanity is a collective that likes to do things together, to share experiences.
In our ‘Screen Life: TV in demand’ research we tested this by depriving people of live TV. They genuinely thought they wouldn’t miss the schedule when it was gone because they had the world of on demand at their fingertips. But they rapidly developed a form of televisual cold turkey when they realised how much they missed the schedule and how much they were missing out.
The fact is that people love living in the moment and sharing experiences in real time. That is why most people prefer to watch the vast majority of their TV live. This is unlikely to change. People also don’t like to fall behind or risk having the ending of much-loved shows spoiled. Miss it and you miss out. This drive to live viewing has been strengthened in recent years by people commenting on social media as they watch TV.
Alongside this, people occasionally like to binge on their favourite TV shows, if they can find the time; this has always been the case ever since box sets were available – now Netflix and other subscription video-on-demand services are a more convenient way to do this. Indulging in a binge is one way to enjoy TV, but it doesn’t satisfy the parts which live TV reaches. If on demand was all people wanted it would be all they watched.
Scheduled TV and VOD complement each other: they fulfil different viewer needs. If the schedule is our daily food, on-demand is a box of chocolates. So Netflix – yet again – is talking utter nonsense that ignores fundamental human behaviour, which is ironic for a service which boasts about learning what its users want in order to better serve them.
Hunt even said there would be no more TV advertising in the future, which, if it were true (and it isn’t, for the reasons given above), should terrify advertisers. There is no replacement for TV advertising. Nothing else is so effective and has so many different short and long term effects. Netflix might well know this in private. It certainly takes advantage of it: it was a one of the biggest new investors in TV advertising in the last two years.