As Exciting as Watching Cookies Bake….

Tonight! Most Haunted Castles of Denmark!!

I was reading Cynopsis this morning and it made me think:

Next month, TLC brings back its reality series Table for 12 chronicling the abundant Hayes family, with all-new back-to-back episodes starting November 10 at 8p and 830p. The Hayes family consists of 13-year old twin boys, 11-year old twins and 5-year old sextuplets, plus police office dad, Eric and stay-at-home mom, Betty. 

That was followed by this one:

The production company True Entertainment is seeking great home cooks for a new TV series for a major network. … If you are known in your area as the maker of a particular dish or if you have a fabulous family recipe, especially for pizza, macaroni and cheese, chocolate chip cookies, all type of pies and other comfort-type foods then the producers would love to hear from you.

Stay at home mom Betty;  pizza and chocolate chip cookies.

This is what we have come to.

Ironically, I read this on the heels of seeing Jude Law in Hamlet, another piece of mass entertainment from an earlier time.

This juxtaposition made me start to wonder to what degree technology drives our own taste in entertainment. 

During Shakespeare’s time, it was very difficult to put together all the elements necessary to create public entertainment. First, Shakespeare, even at his height, could only write one or two plays a year.  Then it had to be performed live. Then anyone watching it had to schlep to Stratford on Avon to watch the performance – a once in a lifetime (if even that), event for most people.

A live performance was a remarkably complex, expensive and difficult enterprise which, in a strange way, insured that only the very best would survive. It was a kind of Darwinian entertainment process.  No one was long going to go through all the effort to mount a Shakespearean production if the result was watching Ophelia make a pizza.

“Is this the tomato I see before me, its stem pointed toward my hand?”

Today, public entertainment is ubiquitous. And even then, the demand for it is growing at an explosive rate.  Where there were once three TV networks competing for our attention (I note the death of Vic Mizzy last week, who composed the themes for Green Acres and The Addams Family); even that was extremely limited fare – in terms of volume today.

The total appetite for content in Shakespeare’s time was perhaps 1 play per year.

By 1973, with three networks, the total appetite for content had grown to about 40,000 hours a year. 

With the introduction of cable, by 2003, the demand had reached 4.5 million hours of content a year.

Now we are just dipping our toes into the online video world and the iPhone video streaming world, and we are going to expect to be entertained all the time, in every nook and cranny that we can fit a screen.

What will, after all, fill the endless hours of elevator TV, AirportTV, iPhoneTV, AndroidTV and Tablet TV?  Not to mention regular TV?

We are going to have to create 10+ million hours of video driven content every year.  

Just to put this in perspective, your entire life is about 760,000 hours long.  A million hours of content is more than your entire life, in real time, squashed into a year.  10 million hours is almost incomprehensible.

Will we end up filming our neighbors doing their laundry so that we can all have something to watch?

The only limiting factor here is what people will watch.  

While the platforms become limitless, the number of hours that any human being can devote to screen time is inherently limited. 

Americans now spend 8.4 hours a day staring at screens, of one kind or another – computer, TV and smart phones.  As broadband and 4G kicks in, the percentage of that content that is going to be in video is going to escalate wildly. Right now we spend 4.2 hours a day watching TV, so about half of it is video. My guess is that by 2015, it’s going to be closer to 90% video.

The competition for attention is going to be intense.

And that will be a change for broadcasters, who until now have lived in a world in which content was limited and eyeballs were in the millions.  It made broadcasters believe that so long as you put up anything that moved, some people at least, would watch. Enough to pay the bills.

That may no longer be the case.

In a world awash in video content, content may no longer be king.

It may instead be driven by communities.  

Right now, decisions on ‘what to produce’ are driven by blind guessing. “What about a family of dwarfs? What about a family with 20 children? 25? How about a cooking show about pizzas?”

Content decisions are driven by watching what has succeeded in the past and then simply attempting to imitate as best one can.

Throw some crap up on the wall and let’s see if something sticks.

This is a stupid way to make programming decisions.

Because in an online world, the audience is already there. And they will tell you what they want. All you have to do is listen to them.

Watch for Facebook TV.

The tools to create it are already in place.

Bloomberg Terminals are already a social network for The Wall Street Journal.

What we have to do is reverse our thinking process.