Imagine yourself watching TV right now. Where would you be? Would you be sitting back in your favorite chair in your living room and holding your remote control in one hand? Or are you sitting down at your local Starbucks, sipping coffee and watching video on your iPod?

Odds are most of your TV watching still occurs in comfort of your living room with your TV set. But increasingly, consumers are watching video anywhere they can: from work on the PC, on the road from a laptop, on iPods and iPhones, and other portable media players.

Even the term watching TV can be misconstrued, since there are so many options today. Does it mean watching a live broadcast TV channel as it is being aired? Does it mean viewing a show on-demand from your DVR? Does it mean buying the latest Daily Show episode from iTunes and watching it on your iPhone during your morning commute? Or maybe you’d rather go to NBC.com and watch the full episodes of Heroes for free (with limited commercials, of course).

I’ve recently been thinking about an old phrase from the early days of Internet video: Lean forward vs. sit back. Essentially, it’s the difference between PCs and TVs. PCs are more interactive while TVs are a passive experience. Lots of companies I spoke to back then were interested in the future of television and interactive TV services and wanted to blur the lines between PCs and TVs.

Not much has changed today; I believe that the PC-vs.-TV contrast still holds true. According to ComScore Networks’ Video Metrix service, the duration of an average online video was just three minutes. By comparison, most TV shows are 30 to 60 minutes, and movies are even longer than that.

So why is there such a gap? Lean back vs. sit forward. People are multi-tasking on their PCs, and can only take short breaks. So a three minute online video is the perfect break for someone that’s been crunching numbers on a spreadsheet all morning. Think about the last Internet video clip you watched and try to remember how long it was. Thirty seconds? A minute? Odds are it was a lot shorter than half an hour, even though thirty minutes is considered short on traditional TV.

This morning I tried an xperiment. I went to NBC.com and tried to watch the latest full episode of Heroes online. I figured that watching a professionally produced TV show, rather than some random user-generated video would make the experience more compelling (not to mention longer).

As I sat down to watch, I quickly realized that my office chair is comfortable, but it’s not great for relaxing, especially for long periods of time. After only a few minutes my attention started to wander. I began thinking about work. Then a phone call interrupted me. An instant message. Facebook. E-mail. Digg. Finally, I cracked and started fully multi-tasking as I watched the show.

After a few minutes, I was concentrating too much on typing and writing, and not paying attention to what was happening on the show. I realized I was paying much more attention to the sound of the show, rather than the video, since I was looking at my work, not the video screen. (No wonder I prefer to listen to music while I work, rather than watch TV.) So I abandoned my experiment after just a few minutes.

When I watch TV in the living room I’m more apt to give it my full attention. There’s nothing in the way to distract me, and thus, I can sit back and watch longer shows. There’s no keyboard, no mouse, no Microsoft Office or browser staring back at me. In fact, on the TV screen I find that I don’t want any interruptions. One of the main reasons why I use TiVo is because I can fast-forward through commercials and compress a half hour long show into about 22 minutes.

So the primary difference between TV and PC is the location. PCs are not usually found in living rooms, but in a separate room like an office. PCs are also usually tucked away into a corner of a room, not like a TV standing tall and proud for all to see in the middle of the living room. Also, the primary purpose of a TV is to do nothing except give us TV programming. PCs are a bit more complex and can do a little bit of everything.

The secondary difference is attention. In the living room, I’m more apt to give my attention to the TV. In my office, I’m more apt to pay attention to work and shorter distractions.

One exception to the lean forward/sit back rule, is mobile video. More and more people are using portable electronics like laptops, mobile phones, or portable media players to watch TV shows. Mobile video changes all the rules because location can be anywhere. So one minute I may want to check my work e-mail, while in five minutes, I might be ready to relax and watch a random YouTube video.

If the lean forward/sit back axiom essentially boils down to location and attention then I believe that consumer habits will eventually change in the future. Change is already happening, albeit slowly. Researching Internet video consumption for this article, I found that the length of an average online video clip has increased from 2.7 minutes in September 2007, to 3 minutes in December 2008. How we interact with TV  will surely change as well, since TV is finally becoming a lot more like the Web–and vice versa.

Jose Alvear (jose@alvear.com) works as an independent digital media consultant, researcher and analyst. He is currently an IPTV Analyst for Multimedia Research Group, a market intelligence and research company focusing on next-generation TV. He also blogs about digital media at Digital Media Bulletin.

 
13 Comments


Read more: IPTV, Online Video, TV