The Market For Bad TV is Huge

All too often I hear ideas for businesses that are absolutely great but are targeting a market that is too small. If I’ve learned anything from working for startups, classes at business school, and talking with entrepreneurs, it’s that you’ve got to target a sizable market. Without a big market, your chances of success are much slimmer.

I think about markets as my wife watches “Exiled” while I type this post. It’s a new show on MTV where spoiled teenagers are taken to the middle-of-nowhere to perform manual labor for the first time in their lives and hopefully grow from the experience. MTV produces a lot of bad shows but this one is truly horrible. It’s as if MTV skipped the whole creative process and jumped straight into the focus group stage. They asked a bunch of perky high school girls what they wanted to see and followed every word. To watch this is…well…it’s mentally painful. It’s like I’m de-evolving.

I have to remember. The market for this type of crap is huge. And as bad as it is, it makes sense for MTV to keep on pumping out this junk. I’m just hoping that the teenage world learns quickly how bad these shows actually are. It took them a couple years to realize how bad the boy-bands music was. Hopefully they’ll quickly grow out of this as well.

I Love Hulu

I truly love Hulu. For those who don’t know, Hulu was a venture by NBC and FOX to bring their television shows onto a streaming site where they control the advertising. The interface was created by Avenue A | Razorfish and it’s clean and easy to use. Every episode from NBC and Fox isn’t on Hulu but they have a nice selection of shows and the content is updated within a couple days of the show’s airing. The service just works REALLY well. I watch the shows that I want, when I want. There are a few ads during the shows at the time when commercial would show up, but they’re short and unobtrusive.

Techcrunch just reported that Hulu has broken into the Top 10 video sites online knocking Google Video off the list.

Hulu users are streaming over 63 million videos and, on average, are watching over two hours of video per month each.

Wow! So I guess I’m not alone in loving Hulu. Why can’t TV studios understand? We’re happy to watch ads if you give us the content we want when we want it. You can’t beat piracy. People will always try to circumvent the established system. But if you can give us what we want, most of us won’t use Bittorrent ever again…maybe.