Video Viewing: Leaning Back vs. Leaning Forward

Stephen King (not THAT Stephen King, but the one from the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto) spoke yesterday at my day job. He discussed the difference between legacy television viewing ("leaning back") and online video viewing ("leaning forward"). Obviously our attention span is different for each task- 30 minutes to hours for "leaning back" and minutes when we "lean forward," because we want to drive not passively consume.

Stephen asserts that the lines will continue to blur, and certainly the TiVo announcement is a good example. What we should watch for is a network acquiring an online video "station." YouTube has apparently been courted by many frightened networks and has (according to some blogs) has turned down offers of as high as $1 billion. If I owned YouTube it would take me 13.4 seconds to accept an offer for half that. Remember- popularity isn't profit. There's a lot of work ahead to prove that eyeballs can equal income on YouTube.

More from Stephen coming- he told me he'd give me a soundbyte on video.