Small Focus Group on Digital but Interesting Nonetheless

Posted by Darren on Nov 1, 2009 • (Comments)

I spent last Thursday afternoon and all day on Friday up at my alma mater, Skidmore College.  The reason I went up was to attend a few meetings and to give a presentation to their Marketing/Advertising and Entrepreneurship classes.  The point of this post is less about the presentation but more about my lunch afterward with a handful of students at Scallions in downtown Saratoga Springs.

While the ~6 students I had lunch with were hardly a legitimate focus group, it did give me some directional thoughts to ponder on my 2.5 hr trip home.

  • Cable in the dorm is rare.  Television viewing is now on the computer.  This is the status quo.  Hulu is a key driver of this.  Students also mentioned “Bit Torrent” and other “torrent” sites.
  • Pandora/Last.fm – big fans of these internet radio stations.  Students at first complained about their use of audio ads, but when I pushed back saying that they were getting music for free, they said that it was a fine tradeoff.  I asked about the wallpaper ads for these sites and the students didn’t really notice them as they generally open a tab to stream Pandora in and not view the wallpaper or display ads at all.
  • Twitter – not really mass adopted on campus.  Students didn’t see a point to it.
  • Facebook – still going strong, but students hated the new release.

What I’ve been noodling around for the past few days is the “Cable in the dorm is rare.”  While this is hardly rare (many of my friends have traded in their cable box for Boxee or Hulu), is this the death of our traditional television model as we know it?  I’ve been following the debate for a while and the writing is certainly on the wall.

Opportunities abound.

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , + Categorized as Internet & Web X.0
  • senithomas
    One point to consider though is that dorms weren't tracked by Nielsen until recently and the sample is still very small. Therefore they aren't really represented in terms of the viewing audience so no one is really "paying" for them anyway. Thus, the networks are better off having them view on Hulu/Their site where they make some $ off of them vs. an audience that isnt really counted and therefore cant be monetized through TV. IPTV changes the scenario of course.
  • fendien
    although in many dorms you may not find cable, once students move off campus you'd be hard pressed to find people without cable. just something to consider, that its more of a "new to college and living in the dorms with whatever they give me" sort of thing, versus having the opportunity to get cable and instead using hulu/boxee.
  • the2noelle
    We discussed the same thing at the Trend School I went to last week with a panel of 8 18-23 year olds. Interestingly many of them talked of Hulu on the level of appointment viewing for shows that they had missed or that they normally didn't watch but friends would talk about... Most still found TV valuable to "zone out" in front of and/or for tv viewing that required 'real time" like sports.

    What popped in my head was not that the cable box was obsolete but with Hulu and other web based content, that there is really no longer a reason for products like TiVo or DVRs...
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