Look out, TV is moving online

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: the networks, which once feared the havoc the Internet would wreak on the long-sacred TV schedule. In 2005, ABC became the first network to make its shows available for purchase on iTunes, and soon afterward started to put some of its current shows online. Other networks developed their own ways to air their shows, embedded with ads.

Advertisers discovered that online video was something to love: Now, their spots could be micro-targeted and rendered impossible to skip. On Hulu, a single advertiser sponsors each individual stream, airing several ads mid-episode or one ad at the end of a short clip. McQuivey said advertisers pay 50% more to place ads online than they would on the network airwaves.

And consumers, he said, don’t seem to mind sitting through a few commercials. That frenzied talk about the DVR killing the 30-second spot turned out to be premature.

“All the DVR showed was that people want convenience,” he said.

The move toward convenience has been building for awhile, but some trends have recently converged. For a long time, DVR use hovered at about 12% of the population, McQuivey said; now, about 26% of Americans have the device, and the expectation that TV schedules scarcely matter. Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider, just announced a new milestone: 7 billion views of its On Demand programmes since 2003. And about 52% of the country has high-speed Internet access, McQuivey said, making streaming video more viable.

Still, so far, viewer behaviour is changing slowly, said Albert Cheng, executive vice president for digital media at the Disney-ABC Television Group. Yet, since its launch in September 2006, more than 280 million episodes of ABC shows have been launched from ABC.com. But online viewers tend to skew relatively young — their average age is 28 or 29, compared with the mid-40s average of broadcast network viewers.

“What’s driving people to use it primarily is that they’ve missed their favourite show,” Cheng said. “There’s still a preference to sit in front of the television to watch it. And if they can’t, then they know that they can at least catch up with it online.”