I first witnessed double dipping when my son was arguing with me about a factual TV program. Without leaving the room he picked up his Sony PlayStation Portable, found Google and used the results of his search rather selectively to reinforce his point. It was a case of my memory versus Google.
Double dipping is the term given to people who surf the Internet while watching television and the term itself has just picked up momentum after a survey from online video search company blinkx established that it is a widespread phenomena, with 62% of double-dippers actually surfing on a subject unrelated to what’s on TV.
When adults engage in this activity, it involves a shuffle to and fro from the TV room to the study to Google some fact or other. But the younger generation thinks nothing of unplugging their laptops and taking them into the TV room so they can do two or three things at once where they sit.
It is this kind of logic that throws anyone in the prediction game for technology. SMS messages where an afterthought, and now they are a core communications mechanism, and mobile TV, was supposed to be TV on the go and it turns out that much European and Asian mobile TV occurs in front of the main TV screen.
In most IPTV visions it has been the creation of IP based applications on the TV screen that has concentrated the suppliers’ minds, but here we have evidence that what people want are two distinct experiences ‘ one shared with a room full of people, and one very private, they don’t want everything on the TV screen.
The survey finds that most double-dippers who surf the web for related content are looking for more information about profiles of actors (51%), products which were advertised (40%), or upcoming events (39%).
This is going to make Nielsen’s job of audience measurement virtually impossible. How engaged is a viewer when he or she can use the advertising break to look up something that’s bothering them? And what implications has that for free to air broadcasting. Maybe the ability to multitask will include an ability to take in the advertising, even if they are not looking at it. Stranger things have happened.
And what about the huge take up in watching video over the internet on a PC? Is that a purely private experience or do blinkx, and companies like it, need to copy the living room behavior and allow searching at the same time or not? How long before TV viewers begin using their PCs to watch replays of things they have just seen on TV, just as mobile TV surveys proved they watch different channels on their handsets to keep up with what’s on the other side.
And how long before home wi-fi complicates the picture further and all of this to transfers to a handset?
Suranga Chandratillake, CEO of blinkx said , ‘Online television shouldn’t simply replicate the living room TV experience we already have. We wanted insight into how to bring combined television’s best qualities, with the immersive, connected power of the Internet.’
The survey concluded that viewers aren’t abandoning TV in favor of the web, instead many are using the web as an accompaniment to TV viewing, with 78% of US adults going online while watching TV, and 35% of them doing so always or often.
One generational consistency revealed in the survey is the difference between a ‘talker’ and a ‘typer.’ In general, the older the individual, the more likely that person is to discuss TV content with other individuals in the room. The largest segment of individuals that routinely respond to TV content via face-to-face conversations (60%) was the 35-44 age group. Correspondingly, individuals aged 16-24 are most likely to interact with others online (17%) or read coverage or reviews of TV content online (24%).
This seems to show that the art of conversation is in fact dying, because by the time the younger viewers grow up, it’s likely that the most common activity will be to type why viewing, not talk.
The survey was carried out by Harris Interactive using online forms during February with answers from 2,471 adults aged 18+ in the US and 2,228 adults aged 16+ in Great Britain.
This whole issue of doing two or three things at once is going to have to form the basis of a new way of thinking about ‘engagement’ in entertainment and should have a profound effect on how advertising is created, perhaps to work subtly across all three screens. Already business executives believe that it’s okay to answer their calls and SMS messages while in meetings and while attending conferences, pretty soon everyone will have been trained from birth to do three things at once, and that’s a real enemy of the advertising model, because ad breaks are a great time to focus on the other two activities you are doing.