TV vs Web: consumption characteristics

On cranky usability guy Jakob Neilsen's Alertbox, this wonderful chart on the relative "consumption" characteristics of TV vs the web.

Velocity of Media Consumption: TV vs. the Web (via ResourceShelf)

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zyodei

The sad subtext of this is that, for a sizeable majority of users, the Internet has become just another one way conduit of entertainment media. Except with the idea to add comments.

At least there is the potential, at least, to create – and that counts for a lot.
Anonymous

I really thought that rah-rah internet fetishism was over. TV’s is irritating but it was in many cases, my families included, a way that families sat around the hearth once or twice a week and shared an experience. The internet is fantastic is some ways and in other ways it contributes to the pod-people like existence of American’s these days. Disconnecting people even in public space. The internet IS TV for many people. A mind numbing time waster chock full of the illusion of choice.
fALk

“On cranky usability guy Jakob Neilsen’s Alertbox, this wonderful chart on the relative “consumption” characteristics of TV vs the web.”

I am not an english native speaker so perhaps I am missing something but this sentence makes no sense to me whatsoever.
- Little John
  
  It’s because it’s not a sentence. The long compound subject doesn’t have a predicate. An English sentence typically has at least one verb in it, but this … doesn’t
  
  So don’t feel bad.
Anonymous

Works as long as you consider your computer your primary device to access the interwebs – and a dumb TV-Set for Broadcasting Content. So maybe, one day, these opposites will serve as the ends of a continuous access / interaction pattern.
Anonymous

Somebody should show this to team Murdoch/Ballmer…
Pantograph

1996 called. They want their list back.
george57l

“On cranky usability guy Jakob Neilsen’s Alertbox there is this wonderful chart on the relative “consumption” characteristics of TV vs the web.”

There – all fixed now.
Anonymous

The article in its entirety is better than the chart — in actual fact, this post and the reaction to it proves his point!
William C Bonner

At first glance I was intrigued.

Then I saw that the TV watching experience was so outdated by not using a DVR. (The only time I pick a show and sit back for half an hour, watching all of the commercials, is when I’m working on my laptop, so the TV has less than 50% of my attention already.)

Then I saw that the social experience of the web was outdated by not including IM or social media.

Then I saw that the modern web experience was outdated by not having any comment space for social interaction.

After all that, I still find the table a useful starting place, but am more likely to forward a link to this page than the original, because this page includes discussion about the topic.
the_headless_rabbit

While a lot of this seems fairly obvious, it is nonetheless very helpful to have it all presented side by side in a single chart. It is easy to feel like you know something when you see it, but its easy to forget this kind of stuff in the process of doing something.

This is going on my cork board. I will try to focus on these areas in my own little corner of teh internets.

Thanks for the post, Mr. Doctorow
aldous

Ridiculously vague and outdated – and how is ‘lean forward and decide where you want to go at any time’ any different from changing channels, deciding which on-demand movie you want to watch, etc. etc. ‘Can do almost anything’? Really? Sorry, but clicking around and commenting on a YouTube post (or a BoingBoing post, for that matter) does not an active experience make. Given the amount of content carried by each platform, I’d wager that the crap-to-quality ratio is about…oh I dunno…ten million times higher on the web than it is on TV. If you believe ‘quality’ is at least a partially objective thing. Which it is.

Why do people – especially here – need constant affirmation that the web is the greatest thing ever while simultaneously pushing the idea that TV is this outdated entertainment model run by The Man?
peterbruells

I have real qualms with “figure it out” and “powerful, can do almost anything”. That reeks of someone dearly in love with the internet, blind to the many users who treat computers as magical devices. Fer chrissakes, don’t people like the author read the comments at youtube and the like?
Tania

This is bizarrely out of date. Tivo? Netflix? The list doesn’t even take into account the age of cable; everyone watches the same basic channels so the programming is bland? The Daily Show, Lost, the Wire, the X-Files, MST 3K, in fact, the Twilight Zone, these things were bland? I know they lack LOLcats, but still. And as for supposed lack of distractions on TV, the innovation I hate most in TV news is the proliferation of little windows and scrolling text here and there; you have to evolve a kind of tunnel vision to keep your mind on the main story. I love the Internet passionately too, but this person hasn’t turned on a TV since 1987.
Anonymous

I reject the idea that “interactive” media is always preferable to passive media.
W. James Au

This is way too much web triumphalism for my taste, and a lot of it’s not even accurate. Almost all the largest web sites are corporate owned, and the vast majority of web traffic goes to those sites. Not only that, the largest web sites aggregate content primarily from TV, movies, and celebrity pop culture. That’s even true of Google, where the top search subjects are generally in those categories, and Wikipedia, where the entries about those subjects are generally the largest and most visited. Neilsen’s version of the web is a very small part of the actual web.
Chris S

Although it is nominally about media consumption, it skips over a couple of key points, which I think are highly relevant to the topic it wants to address.

Robustness – the average end user TV is far more robust, delivering on its stated goals all the time. Do you worry about viruses disabling your TV? All that computing capability comes with a decrease in robustness. Although it doesn’t discuss it this way (because it is looking only at TV), radio is more robust than TV, and print is more robust than radio.

Cost – all that capability comes with a cost as well. No matter whether you are MSM or a lone creator, if your goal is to reach the lowest economic strata of society, you’re not going to launch a website. You might but up bus shelter posters instead.
alisong76

Then of course there’s the fanficcers, fan artists, fan vidders et al who blur and blend the line between the two. Fandom changed the entire way I engaged with television (and other media) – I take a much more active approach to this supposedly passive activity.
- holyalmost
  
  Exactly what I thought too when reading the ‘passive’ user experience thing. As soon as you start imagining extended scenes and your own desired character interactions it’s not passive anymore. In front of the tube is practically my drawing studio. This would probably count as Distraction too.
  
  The TV column may need some more thought in order to be more accurate. I have to love a show to pay attention to it unwaveringly. The dinner table and the TV room is just the place our family spends time together, it doesn’t mean we’re really watching what happens to be on the TV at the time, or that we wont switch the channels halfway through a show. And as for Main access UI – networks are constantly changing the time slots to their shows depending on ratings. A single show can air on different networks too, then there’s syndication. Viewers have plenty of different options to choose from when it comes to deciding what their going to pay attention to on TV.
  
  It makes me wonder though if my TV consumption habits have changed due to the internet, or it they were always this way.
brianary

This does seem pretty outdated. More and more people are hooking computers up to their HDTVs to watch hulu and Netflix and Boxee and Zinc and MythTV and Miro, and this setup shares similarities with both sides of that chart.
OoOoOo

It should be noted that in addition to “showing pictures” a TV can also “play sounds”. And that it is really silly to say that the web “can do almost anything”. It can’t give birth to puppies or bake a cake or jump on a trampoline or take a bath, etc. Of course neither can a TV so they are pretty equal there.
adamnvillani

Is this supposed to make me feel better about browsing the web for hours at a time instead of taking a walk?