Diffusion of Innovations

 Diffusion of Innovations

Television has been around in my life forever. Before the invention of the smartphone the television was my number one source of getting my news and information. Most people would either consume their media via cable tv or a radio. Cable tv has always been the way of life for most Americans, but in 2005, Youtube was created. Youtube was the first company to implement the idea of a streaming service where people could consume their content in a continuous manner not controlled by someone else. Fast forward to early 2020, streaming had grown into a much bigger challenger to cable tv with services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+. By the end of 2020 and early into 2021, our lives changed with the COVID-19 pandemic and our way of watching television had changed as well. 

It had seemed that everyone and anyone was deciding to create a streaming service. Brand new streaming services like Youtube TV, HBO Max, Paramount+, and Peacock TV, plus countless more seemed to pop up everyday. Every cable company seems to now have a streaming service alongside their cable networks.

The Diffusion of Innovation Theory is a theory that has to do with the phenomenon going on in the television world. This idea was theorized in 1962 by a man named Everett Rodgers. It is a theory that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology are going to spread.

There are 5 stages of the Diffusion of Innovation Theory, these stages go by the order in which people adopt this new innovation. The order goes by innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and finally the laggards.

The early innovators make up about 2.5% of the population. In the example of streaming, the early adopters would be the people who were watching Youtube in 2005, as well as people who started to stream movies when Netflix started streaming back in 2007. The problem with cable tv is that the cable networks dictate what is played and at what time. The consumer has no choice in what they are going to watch besides the actual channel they were watching. Streaming spread fast as people were now able to choose what they wanted to watch and at whatever time they wanted too.

The early adopters make up about 13.5% of the population. These are the people who aren't the innovators, but enjoy the innovation at an early stage. For the example of streaming these would be the people who were using streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of people decided to become early adopters in the streaming world due to the business model that these services were offering. One problem that cable tv has always faced has been commercials. While some commercials may be entertaining a lot of the time it just takes eyes off of the screen. When it came to streaming services, Netflix’s monthly payment was all you needed, it was a commercial free streaming service that only used their content. Youtube and many other websites offer their streaming services for free, using an ad based approach to creating revenue. Both ideas are good for the consumer as it drops the amount of time a user is looking at the screen watching an advertisement.

The late adopters is something that is more of an unknown in the streaming world because I do not think that we have yet reached that stage. With all the new streaming services coming out right now, I would say that we are in the early majority. The idea of packaging these streaming services into one big package is the innovation that late adopters are going to need to finally enter this new world of media. 

Personally, I do not see any negative downsides to this. We are living in a world where media is at our fingertips and we can access almost anything at any time. Cable tv simply does not suit the needs for how we consume our media today. People want to watch whatever they want at any time of the day.

For the laggards who may never join the streaming world and stick to cable tv, that is absolutely okay. Cable tv is not going anywhere for a while. Older people enjoy the simplicity of cable tv compared to the sometimes confusing interfaces of streaming services. Either way, companies are figuring out how to create the best way for people to watch their televisions. 

Streaming is the new way that people watch television and it does not look like that is going to change anytime soon.