Media Tech Bites: Serving the Niche

Here’s my short take on a piece of media technology. This week I look at how the big broadcasters are ignoring niche at their peril. Do you agree? [blog.mindrocketnow.com]

It’s a curious phenomenon that whilst there’s more content being produced than ever, there’s less choice being exercised. In making a choice, we are a product of our unconscious biases. Default bias will guide us to choose the first in a long list of programmes, the pseudocertainty effect will guide us to choose the most familiar as the most risk-averse, projection bias will overestimate how much we’ll want to actually want to finish the series that we started, and the sunk cost fallacy will make us watch every episode until we get to the end. Because we just don’t want to incur the cognitive pain of choosing something new, we watch another episode of Friends.

The reason that we don’t choose something new, something eye-opening, something horizon-expanding is because content service providers are really bad at providing good options for us to choose from. Netflix is the market leader, so should be really good at this, and yet we ended up watching the latest Adam Sandler halloween movie for our family movie night. I assumed it was going to be bad, IMDB rated it to be bad, and yet we ended up watching it because it was a choice that we all settled on - perhaps it incurred the least amount of cumulative cognitive pain.

Technology should be enabling more choice. The incremental cost of distributing another VOD asset is negligible. The incremental cost of another broadcast channel is low enough that a “pop-up” broadcast over satellite is eminently economically viable. And costs will inevitably be driven down as broadcasters take advantage of economies of scale of the cloud. But the opposite is happening. 

Wouldn’t it be great if technology could take on some of the cognitive load. Rather than relying on sifting through irrelevant recommendations presented to me, wouldn’t it be better if there were some sort of artificial precognition that could be applied to content catalogues to find something to watch. The distinction between these two approaches is important.

We don’t need more big companies to suck more data about us so that they can better market their content to us, and sell our digital soul to everyone else. We need to take control of our choice, and we need tools to help us do so. I’m looking forward to the day when I can apply my emulated thought process, on technology that only I can access, to pre-sift the increasing tide of dross for me, so that I can spend my time watching the gems.