NBC’s “total audience” numbers for the Olympics (latest here in .pdf) give a little insight into the bad user experience (UX) that plagues cable VOD. It’s also interesting when applied to all the local content that’s appearing on VOD these days. So far, VOD is making up .1 percent or less of the unique universe of Olympics viewers, compared to 7-8 percent for the web, according to NBC. Of course, more people have access to the internet than cable VOD, but that shouldn’t account for such a dramatic difference. I, for one, didn’t know the Olympics were available on Comcast VOD until I saw the NBC press releases and started surfing around.
Ah, click “Top Picks” and “Beijing Olympics.” You’d think Comcast would at the very least make it a top-level menu item for the duration of the games. Nope. The same was true over on Charter VOD. “It should be the best VOD experience; instead it could medal in confusing,” writes Staci Kramer on PaidContent. As I’ve written before, the cable companies need to start producing VOD like the web or risk getting written out of the on-demand equation by experiences like Hulu.
Cable companies, especially Comcast, are aggressively ramping up their local VOD offerings. A quick perusal of Seattle’s local video includes local restaurant reviews, high school sports, pet adoptions, weekend events, auto classifieds, video dating… quite a selection. But so far the consumption levels are low for the same reason as the Olympics: people don’t know it exists in the first place. But it could become a competitive threat to local TV very quickly once cable companies fix the VOD user experience.