Attention Must Be Paid - Content Consumption a la Mary Meeker

Incase you missed it last week, the 2016 Internet Trends report, aka Mary Meeker deck, aka the only 217 page PowerPoint presentation you actively want to read, was bestowed upon the internet at the 2016 Recode Conference. The coming of the Meeker deck each year brings considerable conversation about the contents that Meeker has selected to highlight. This year, considerable conversation has been had about automotive ingenuity and the future of Detroit as well as China, but one of the things that received a few slides worth of conversation was the future of video evolution.Here, Meeker sees the evolution of video in an accelerating phase, moving past the traditional linear distribution method that has dominated television since its inception in the 1920s to a new method, one she has defined as Real-Live. This real-live method has received a great deal of press recently, much of it owing to a rubber banded watermelon and a laughing woman in a Chewbacca mask. The question has been does the viewership of a live audience watching a stream equate to a live audience watching something like an NBA Championship game.To that, we ask – why bother comparing? They’re different audiences, we know that. They’re apples and they’re oranges and they’re elephants, or whatever fruits or mammals you’d like to use to describe them. What matters is that people are actually paying attention.Meeker gets this. Alongside this definition of Real-Live, she shows statistics on the growth of user-shared video views on Snapchat and Facebook. Between the two of them, they’re approaching a combined 20 billion daily views.  That’s the sort of thing that should be paid attention to.So rather than squabble about whether or not the views mean something in comparison to television, let’s instead be BRaVe and identify the opportunities that can be gained from harnessing the power of Facebook Live in conjunction with traditional linear television. Facebook is clearly cementing itself as part of the future of TV. With technologies that allow for high quality production capabilities and brand integration, Facebook will be able to mimic several key aspects of what linear television has had for the past decades. Once the infrastructure is cemented, the opportunities to tell stories across both Live and Real-Live are endless.