SVoD presents some challenging issues when it comes to Live content. Live is not just simply wasteful. When dependability matters the most, it’s often not up to the task.
The Ephemeral Value of Live
Regardless of medium, Live actualities are most meaningful in the moment, but often fail to retain their value beyond that.
Newspapers are the quintessential ephemeral medium. In a matter of a day, the Fort Lauderdale Sun Times becomes the Fort Lauderdale Fish Wrap.
Content of a temporal nature is a wasting asset. Its value diminishes as it ages. It’s like bread. Desirable as it comes out of the oven, live content holds diminished commercial value with the passage of time. Today’s Cinnabon is tomorrow’s duck food.
The world’s most influential media “ecologist”; Marshall McLuhan, has been quoted:
“If it’s current, it’s currency”.
Temporal content establishes both cultural and tangible currency by being a concurrently shared experience.
Live experiences like spectacles or natural disasters are easy to understand in this context.
Disasters are not often commercial opportunities. That would be socially reprehensible. Right? Not always.
The video medium regularly creates disaster-like opportunities for commercial gain. Three examples come to mind.
- TV news often aligns its coverage to the most blood soaked or politically outrageous footage available. Rather than providing the most useful or informative material, video news provides a mechanism to promote calamity, large and small, for commercial gain.
- Reality TV. It’s not a real disaster, but it’s promoted as one. Simulated live spectacles with seemingly unscripted social conflict, featuring participants who must compete for the next tier of competition. Outcasts lick their wounds in intimate private confessionals.
- Sports. It’s a disaster for roughly half of the spectators. No need for further explanation.
Due to the “spectacular” nature of these programs, it is important to the viewers that they perceptively share the “live” experience. Not surprisingly, the more spectacular the experience, the less intrinsic value it retains over time.
This is a good thing. While temporal programming is perishable, its ephemeral nature urges the voracious public to consume their prey warm.
Even relatively small latencies in “spectacular” content is considered a problem. Sports fans don’t often appreciate “spoiler” tweets reaching them before they view the winning goal.
Viewers are less likely to archive “spectacular” content on their Cloud DVRs and watch it later in the week. They need to consume it live, with its sponsor’s commercial messages intact. This temporally enlivened content does not often go into syndication.
Once it’s aired, it’s duck food.
Hybrid VoD 