Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 13, 2009. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The incredible abundance and constant availability of video content has caused a growing number of television viewers to migrate to the internet. Surprisingly, however, it is not user-generated contributions on portals such as YouTube that lead the popularity rankings among the user community, but conventional television content. This is confirmed by a current report from US financial research institute Sanford Bernstein, according to which professionally produced content from regular television programming clearly accounts for most of the video material viewed online. At 58 percent, more than half of the US citizens surveyed say they regularly use such web content. Contributions from the amateur and user-generated sector lag far behind in this respect at only 28 percent.
“Unlike the newspaper and music industries, where the internet has fundamentally changed people’s purchasing and consumption behavior, the television sector is not yet as strongly threatened by current online offerings,” the Wall Street Journal quotes Bernstein senior analyst Jeffrey Lindsay. Apart from the cost factor, television audiences - particularly those with a digital video recorder and video-on-demand services - are fundamentally very satisfied with their cable or satellite television providers. “As with newspapers and music, consumers clearly prefer professionally produced content. For conventional broadcasters and cable networks, these conditions are very good news because they show that, at least in the short term, they will not be displaced in the value chain by user-generated content,” Lindsay explains.
“Media consumption in broadcasting is always a matter of trust. Large television broadcasters with a strong brand stand for a certain standard of quality and therefore exert a particularly strong attraction on viewers online as well,” Corinna Drumm, Managing Director of Sat.1 Austria, told the pressetext.de news service. Here, quality refers not only to production quality, but above all to quality in terms of satisfying viewers’ needs. “Online as well, users rely on their familiar broadcasters because they know that they can adequately satisfy their various needs there, such as the search for information or orientation. This orientation function is an essential characteristic of major television-broadcaster brands. The route by which orientation is ultimately provided is not decisive in the end,” Drumm concludes.
