"The figures for 'on-demand' media consumption are headline-grabbing," says a rather self-referential introduction to a story in today's Financial Times. According to the piece, the success of Apple's video downloads combined with viewing figures for VoD in America show that it's turning the corner.
At Time Warner Cable, the average household now watches 30 such programmes a month... "Video on demand is starting to approach the magic number of once per day per household," said Craig Moffett, analyst at Sanford Bernstein.
On-demand media is certainly on the up, but are we really hearing the whole story? If high-consumption America can only offer an average of less than one on-demand TV show per day, then are we really talking about a fundemental shift? After all, I think it's probably fair to imagine that those people using PVRs to timeshift their viewing are actually relatively heavy consumers of the technology: this drives the average down among those who aren't dedicated users.
Certainly the figures are growing overall, but looking at the numbers a little more closely opens up new thoughts too: if, as the article suggests, Comcast is getting around 120m on-demand views per month, then it doesn't fare too well against its total number of subscribers (around 21m). And now TiVo - always lauded as the pioneer in this arena - is going to include searching for advertising, according to this morning's Wall Street Journal. Maybe it's just me, but that doesn't seem to be the behaviour of a soaraway success story.
Make no bones about it: on-demand changes the way we approach media and advertising. It offers new avenues for viewers, producers and promises a sea-change in the way we think about broadcasting. But if its benefits are limited to a small base, then it's quite likely that the revolution will not be televised.
