When the The Walking Dead premiered its sixth season in early October, a sizeable number of the 20 million or so regular viewers of the post-zombie-apocalypse thriller likely tuned in the old fashion way, seated before a living room TV at the appointed time. You can also count on a fair amount of fans watching the show from portable devices, including laptops, tablets and smartphones – as it airs, or from a DVR or VoD server. Still, others may have passed on the traditional week-by-week consumption practice altogether, choosing instead to binge on an entire season sometime in the future. 

Welcome to the new world of video consumption!

Content, though still king, is fending off a furious challenge to the throne from experience. For today’s television viewers, led by maturing millennials, how video is consumed is nearly as important as the content itself.

More and more television viewers are spending increasing amounts of time consuming content on something other than the family television. Viewers in the US watched on average 12 hours and 13 minutes of video over the Internet a month in Q1 2015, an increase of nearly 90 minutes from the year-ago quarter, according to Nielsen’s The Total Audience Report, published in June 2015. In addition, viewers spent 16 hours and 13 minutes a month watching time-shifted TV in Q1 2015, up from 15 hours and 32 minutes in Q1 2014, according to the same report.  

Shifting Patterns

This shift in video viewing patterns is positioned by many in the industry as a direct threat to pay-TV operators, particularly MVPDs. Cord cutting, which has become shorthand for the curtailment of bundled television packages in favor of streaming media over high-speed Internet connections, is positioned as a major accelerator of the inevitable decline of pay TV. 

Pitting cable operators and other video service providers in an existential struggle with OTT forces makes for good theater. But it also oversimplifies the current state of the industry and discounts the potential of today’s media aggregators and distributors to move up in the media industry pecking order. It overlooks the fact that service providers own much of the infrastructure that OTT players will use to stream vast libraries of video content across the Internet.

The truth is that by controlling the pipes that will carry video directly to consumers, as well as many of the connected devices that will display that content, aggregators, including cable operators, satellite video providers and fixed and mobile telecommunications companies, are in an advantageous position to provide today’s video consumer with the personalized and unified experience they crave.

In the past year or so, more than a dozen content owners or aggregators have either announced or launched streaming services that bypass traditional television programming distributors. In most cases, these services will stream ad-free content to so-called cord cutters for a fee that is considerably less than a traditional pay-TV service bundle. 

Bundle Alternatives

The major shortcoming of this a la carte model as a potential alternative to the bundled services of pay-TV providers is that the consumer experience is highly fragmented. Each device — TV, smartphone, tablet, PC, game console — and each service — cloud DVR (cDVR), VoD, OTT, linear TV — comes with its own experience, its own unique interface and access requirements. Weaving all of these separate modes of video consumption into a somewhat coherent experience has historically been next to impossible. 

The end result is that not only is content being fragmented across multiple devices and services, so is the experience.  What television viewers desire from today’s lean-forward television consumption era more than anything is a unified experience: the ability to view all of their video, regardless of device or service, in the same manner and using a single interface.

It may surprise many that the media industry entity that may be in one of the most advantageous positions to provide this single, unified experience, is the MVPD. As cable operators and others continue to launch multiscreen services and adopt next-generation solutions, such as cDVR services, they will be well equipped to reverse the ongoing fragmentation of the video consumption experience.  

No other participant in the media industry ecosystem possesses the breadth and depth of services and capabilities– which can be aggregated into a single, personalized and consistent experience– than MVPDs. In addition to controlling the broadband connection over which all this video will stream, content aggregators deliver the full spectrum of services, including live, linear, VoD and streaming video. As consumer-recorded content moves into service providers’ networks via the adoption of cDVR capabilities, MVPDs will be unique in their ability to deliver all of a consumer’s content from a centralized repository and through a unified interface. 

The television industry is making a dramatic shift toward a more personalized and interactive approach to content consumption. The first service providers to seize on this disruption will be best positioned to capitalize on the opportunities it presents.