Zoning Out in the Age of Netflix
What a time to be alive. As long as you like picking things…
“Could you put something on in the background.” More than once in recent months, that’s been a request from my wife while she’s doing something around the house. Specifically, she’s talking about the television. And the request is of me because I’m the one who has ensured we haven’t had cable for years at this point.
While sports was long the fall guy when it came to why people couldn’t “cut the cord”, that excuse has slowly but surely been falling away. But beyond some (major) reliability concerns, I believe the above may be the last, rather interesting issue.
Said another way: I think a lot of people like cable simply because you can turn on the television and you always know that something will be on. In our age of everything on-demand, many of us are constantly paralyzed by choice. And so just turning on the TV and watching whatever is on can seem freeing from such bondage. Yes, it’s paradoxical.
I know this is something the folks at YouTube, and other streaming video services, have long thought about. In their parlance, it’s the “lean back” (passive) experience versus the “lean forward” (active) one. But this is almost the extreme version of that — it’s not just mindlessly scrolling through channels. It’s simply turning the TV on and having something, anything, be on in the background.
I wonder if there’s a way for the newfangled streaming services to not only replicate this, but to replace it with something better.
Right now, when you load Netflix, you’re greeted with a menu of posters for the content you might enjoy. If you’re watching on a television, they’ll start playing a trailer, but that’s not the same thing as above. With YouTube TV, when you load the app, you’re likewise greeted by a menu. Live content will start playing, but only in chicklet form, until you decide what you want to actually watch.
It would seem that newer networks like Cheddar are doing a good job here in terms of a take on the business news channels that you might see on mute in the background at offices. Ambient television, as it were. But it’s more of an update in content and approach, not necessarily presentation.
I don’t necessarily have an answer here, but I do think this is something non-obvious that has been overlooked in our move to having endless content on demand at our fingertips. And I’m not sure the answer is just to do exactly what cable used to do — cable worked that way because that’s what the technology at the time dictated. Perhaps passive content became ingrained in our culture as a result of this. Or maybe there is something more to it.
Certainly, in some cases this can make an empty house (or gulp, an empty life) feel less lonely. But in many cases, I think it’s just nice to have some ambiance in audible and visual form to dip in and out of paying attention to. I know I used to love watching some of my favorite movies passively this way while doing chores around apartments of years past, for example.
I also wonder if there are opportunities for other non-television (or film — video in general) content. For example, when getting ready for work now, I often ask Alexa to “play the latest news”. Yes, this is what the radio used to do, but now we can do it on-demand, via voice commands. Likewise, podcasts now fill the background of my chore time, thanks to the AirPods.
Such devices are even better for music in this way these days, because you can just say something like “play some 90s rock” and not worry about picking one song from all the music ever recorded. This could point to the right solution for video too — “play some cooking shows…” — or maybe not!
Regardless, it has long seemed like a waste that we all now have these massive screens in our homes that are blank most of the time. At the same time, the small screens in our pockets are almost never in our pockets and are certainly never blank when they’re not…
