Tag Archives: Google

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Surprise! YouTube is Now the Top Television Platform in the U.S.

What may come as a surprise is that a company known first as an internet gateway is the source of more hours of television viewing than any other provider.

If you have a clear memory of life before 2000 you might expect that television is still about networks, 13 week “seasons” of comedies and dramas, and any number of television “specials,” usually built around a singer or a beloved comedy performer. But that also dates those of us who think in terms of the programming appearing on the standard over-the-air VHF channels 2 through 13.

A lot has changed in the television universe. Most dramatically, top programs have migrated to platforms that have nothing to do with the original idea of “broadcasting,” which means delivering a television signal to an antenna. Obviously, cable providers carry their own networks as well as those who still broadcast. And we now look for content that is mostly “on demand.”  What may come as a surprise is that a company known first as a computer content platform is the source of more hours of television viewing than any other provider. This is according to Nielsen Research data. YouTube, a branch of Alphabet Inc., arose to the top from its origins in Google.

Nielsen Research Data

YouTube takes no single form or point of view. Each user sets the parameters in the algorithms for videos they may watch. My YouTube habits would in no way mirror yours, unless you like pipe organs in the United Kingdom or a bass guitarist with interesting videos on music theory.

The specificity of content the single most significant element of the platform. It has made it possible to search and find content that matches a viewer’s interests. Few of us studying the mass media in the 1970s could have imagined that “television” could be tailored to the quirkiest  interests. It may be as close as we get to democratizing media. As Jacqueline Zote notes in Sprout Social, the average user spends 48 minutes a day watching YouTube. Younger men are a key demographic in the U.S.  And if its possible, there are even more avid viewers in India. Ads appear if viewers use only the free service, but they are a bit less intrusive than on broadcast television. And, mostly, they won’t butcher an extended music performance.

Because there are both private as well as institutional sources of videos (i.e. a single English historian with interesting ideas, as well as legacy broadcasters like BBC News), viewers need to avoid the mistake of thinking of all videos as having equal veracity.  Fools and fantasists often have an inflated view of their talents, and are often all too willing to display them. A viewer needs to choose sources and their motives carefully.

Not only is YouTube a redefinition of what television is, it is also a medium that thrives at least as much on small screens and computers as well as traditional home sets. Its an internet site, but now also a regular program source for television viewers. Maybe “television” is the wrong word since much of YouTube’s content originates on demand, and outside of the traditions and usual pathways used in professional entertainment. Anyone can upload a YouTube video or be a mobile user of the medium. The results range from the local elementary school showing part of its holiday pageant, to German public television with a full documentary on the free but nervous Baltic states bordering Russia. There is no shortage of individual content providers. In addition, public broadcasters and some news organizations release scores of fascinating programs that would be at home on Netflix. They represent the very tip of professionally produced content. At the other end of the spectrum, some YouTubers clearly have little talent for explaining or organizing material. But more than we might guess, many show evidence of mastering the rudiments of writing, lighting, sound, camera usage and editing. Producing a good video is a humbling experience that takes time and a degree of talent.  We are usually not talking about 4K here. But neither are most YouTube videos going to look like your grandfather’s home movies. For example, Katie Steckly offers a primer for novices who want to start their own series.  At last count she has around 300 subscribers.

Providers of content have good reason to complain if they expect their content will provide a significant revenue stream. Even though there are 100 million paying subscribers, it’s hard to get enough views to make money on YouTube. Even a thousand hits on a person’s YouTube site will only make enough cash to buy lunch. On the other hand, opening up video production to nearly any source has lead to some surprisingly good offerings.

On the downside, a universe of discourse nearly as broad as the population means that a lot of misinformation, anti-social content, and other forms of video mischief are sometimes left on the site.

As boomer undergraduates studying media, we thought of the three primary networks as the largest of the American mass media. Even throw away content got huge audiences. We were pretty sure print would be the pathway used by thinkers and innovators to reach audiences with very specific interests. Now the advent of video has turned that world upside down. The best of independent content providers can almost match the slick offerings of a network. Traditional broadcasting and most on-demand platforms—including Google—exist to make money; but YouTube videos are ubiquitous because content providers usually have a strong appetite for the subject that they want to share.

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Giants That Struggle With The Idea of Personhood

The hard truth is that many rich mega-giants have lost the will to engage directly with their customers.

There was a time when major organizations had enough employees to deal with customer problems. Name the organization—a media outlet, a service provider for a utility, a business dependent on selling products and services—and there was usually a person ready to receive a question or complaint. “Customer service” meant a company tried to be available to those with whom they had a relationship. That is still true in business-to-business communications. For example, Ford certainly expects that a supplier will take their calls. But the public and social media side of the ledger usually offers no such chances. In a quiet revolution, A.I. robots have taken over customer relations while the rest of an organization sits behind walls of anonymity. Thousands of employees in the offices of Google, Microsoft, Apple, and scores of other companies are mostly insulated from the people that use their services. Commercial in even modest-sized organizations  are now careful to not list contact information.

There are outstanding exceptions in almost every area.  Amazon still offers phone help. At least a few years ago the electronics giant Onkyo was happy to put me through to an engineer to solve a technical issue. And local businesses show a lot of patience to still deal with customers.  But the “virtual assistants” up and running in most larger enterprises pull the con of giving a person’s name to microchips and algorithms that offer simulations of the human voice or texting, all with the increasingly lifelike lexicons of real human rhetoric. The great leap in speech-mediated A.I. can be awesome, but it has given us a kind of zombie intelligence that can only “think” in binaries and fake comprehension.

All of this takes personhood out of the equation, with real and often sad consequences. Imagine, for example, the fate of a new widow facing a labyrinth of health, state, county and employer bureaucracies to be contacted after the death of her partner. A few will be appropriately responsive.  But others will throw up a filibuster of recorded phone directories and “try again later” messages. Lately even Social Security can’t be bothered to pick up the phone.  And COVID is a poor excuse. If a person can still do interoffice communication with their colleagues, they can still represent an organization to customers or clients.

The hard truth is that many rich mega-giants have lost the will to talk directly with their customers. None of us would think it would be a good use of our time to try to call Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft. Granted, they have a lot of customers.  But most haven’t developed a graded gatekeeping system that would allow private and serious users to reach them.

I a challenge with Google  that is a good case in point. I have two Google e-mail accounts: hardly unique. But in this massive organization’s self-contained world–even using my real name, passwords and my patterns of internet usage–I am still “Person 1” and “Person 2.” And they are pretty sure that one of us is up to no good.  I benefit from using Google Analytics data for this blog. It does what Google does best: track, count and sort. But person 2—who, I swear, looks exactly like me in a mirror—apparently has no business even asking to see the data. Sadly, they think they are being useful to warn Person 1 that Person 2 is trying to break into my account. Ditto for Microsoft, with confounding and insistent new logins to expose what they see as different accounts hacked by robots. In the name of security, the idea of personhood has more or less been lost on them. They think a real person can read laughably smudged CAPTCHA tests. Meanwhile, these companies have moved on to creating networks they are selling as “teams,” apparently not noticing they have yet to master the basics of authentic one-on-one communication.

My more computer savvy friends will tell me there are workarounds for these inconveniences, especially if I am willing to take them on as my second job. But they are missing the point. In many cases there is only a useless “virtual (non)person” to “chat” with. Even a two-year old can detect the fraud of a fake human being passed off as the real thing: the original basis of the previously discussed Turing Test.

To be sure, organizations feel like they are under siege from product users who call insistently because they can barely understand the services they purchased. But these companies have abetted the constant connectivity they now want to run away from.  For sure, Americans have all but surgically implanted their phones in their right hands. Not-so-smart phones have become substitutes and surrogates for many of us. But its all part of their world these giants created, and they need to find better ways to deal with their users as humans.

No wonder electronic games are so popular with more Americans. They can make interacting fun—even if it is just with a machine. At the same time, many of us our losing our capacities to deal directly with others in the kinds of collaborative problem-solving that existed just a few generations ago.