The Economist just ran a terrific feature on television. The piece underscored a mantra I constantly preach to clients, “now not new.” I’d link to it, but you need a subscription to get the articles.

The thrust of the feature is that despite the numerous cries of paradigm change and a death sentence for TV, the good ol’ boob-tube has fared quite well – better in fact that the rest of the media industry (music, news, publishers).

The feature went on to note that overall time spent watching TV continues to increase. Interestingly, attempts to make TV-viewing more feature rich, portable, interactive, etc. have all met with resistance from television viewers. From DVRs to MobileTV to Hulu, Joost and YouTube, numerous alternatives and peripheral devices have been offered but fundamental viewing habits have not changed. In many cases the devices have had trouble finding large audiences.

This gets to the essence of Now Not New, which is the idea that what makes something novel – the newness of it – is not the driving factor businesses should focus on. Rather executives should look at how people use technology ‘now’, today, when the money is being spent and markets are being made. It’s easy to become infatuated with new devices and there is always a group of early adopters who wait in line for whatever is next simply because it is. The masses though, always trail, and often this trailing adoption takes much longer than the media hype machine would have us all believe.

Getting back to TV, one article amusingly titled The Lazy Medium points out that TV viewing remains a largely live and passive experience. That is, even with TiVo’s and such, 85%+ of programs in England are still watched at their live time slot and 60% of shows recorded on a TiVo are watched within a day. In this supposedly paradigm-shifting new digital world we are not only watching more TV than ever but even with the power to enjoy our programming on demand still largely plunk ourselves on the sofa at the time broadcasters ask us to. The technologies available may be new but they’ve yet to fundamentally changed our behaviors en masse.

Slow to change, at least by today’s standards.
Behavioral change among any sizable population tends to be much slower than people think. While celebrities and sensations seemingly appear overnight, in truth they often labor in obscurity for quite some time before flashing upon our collective radar. Just as with watching the stock market daily (or hourly), tracking too much media buzz (a symptom of our age) creates a sense of erratic, endless flux where we’re all always playing catch-up as something new is introduced by the minute. This can obscure more useful trendlines like broad adoption. We also don’t tend to notice the failures that just silently drift away after their 15 seconds of fame. They don’t make good news stories so why cover them? In our media, the story is always about what’s new, what’s coming and what’s next. Even if there’s no reason to believe it is anything more than just new at the time the stories run.

Admittedly, relative to centuries (or even decades) passed, behavioral change is happening faster. The relevance of this, however, in business terms, is a matter of which perspective you choose to take.

Futurist Alvin Toffler wrote a terrific book called The Third Wave which was a treatise on the increasing rate of change and the new third wave of innovation that was sweeping across the planet at the time it was written (1980). Viewed as he did, in terms of centuries, there’s no doubt things changed much faster in 1800 than in 1200 and are changing faster now than in 1800. That’s a useful observation in some contexts.

For companies working in today’s frenetic environment however, the rate of change – and by this I mean behavioral change that leads to market leadership shifts and lucrative new categories of business – is much slower than often expected.

For example, Apple’s Newton appeared in 1993. The PDA concept didn’t really catch on until around the new millennium and it’s only in the passed few years that smart phones have seen some broad utility. Part of this is due to continued technological innovation, part is due to infrastructure (broadband, 3G, etc.) and part of it is behavioral – it took people a while to figure out what they really needed a PDA-type device for. This latter piece is still being ironed out by thousands of app developers building tens of thousands of apps – very few of which, its important to note, see much broad usage.

To be sure, the path to the future is paved by experimentation. However, companies should be cautious before deciding to be one of those pioneers. Being first doesn’t always mean being number one in your category should that category actually emerge as a marketplace.

The bleeding edge and bleeding out.
I would offer that experimentation is on the leading edge of change waves. It is followed very closely by industry sensationalization. This happens because there are a lot of media channels all competing to ‘break news’ (and thereby stay in business). As such, the media will latch on to anything, regardless of how unproven, and present it as the beginning of seismic change.

This frontline of experimentation and subsequent hype turns into first-mover entrepreneurialism. Small start-ups get funded and develop largely experimental products and services to offer consumers.

Then there is often a culling of the herd where new technologies and the numerous startups that cluster around them begin to suffer because the aggressive adoption they expected doesn’t happen quite as fast as anticipated. The venture capitalists sometimes pull out, or the technology becomes obsolete before it reaches a tipping point. Still at other times the companies themselves become unsustainable due to how they’re structured (see ‘DotCom bust of 2001′). Finally, at some point still later one, broader acceptance is gained. This happens when the improved versions of these technologies – which reflect the hard-learned lessons of market realities and consumer demand – are taken up by enough people to deliver broad utility. Then, and only then, does a meaningful change take place wherein markets arise and empires are built.

As an example, look at digital music, a technology held up for its paradigm changing, industry decimating, distruption. MP3 players made their debut in 1998 (it was a RIOPMP300, not an iPod). Apple’s first came out in late 2001. But even Apple’s first few iPod versions had very modest sales. It wasn’t until 2005 that iPod sales began to escalate. So while today it seems like MP3 players blew up the music industry overnight, even by 2005 only 11% of the U.S. population had MP3 players. In fact, according to a 2010 Arbitron study, only 44% of Americans own an MP3 player today (get the study here). That’s still less than half the population a decade into the “paradigm shift”. More people have PCs, TVs, and mobile phones. This makes MP3 technology more of a paradigm drift in my eyes. I’m not contesting that digital music technology has made a mess of traditional music industry models and changed the way we engage with music. However, it did not happen overnight, it happened over a decade and still has a way to go before the technology becomes truly ubiquitous.

Compared to the 1800′s, a decade might represent rapid change. Compared to today’s business environment with Moore’s Law and increments defined in ‘Internet Years’, not so much. It’s all about perspective. For academics looking across centuries is enlightening. For businesses having a clear look across years is probably more helpful.

Paradigm Drift – TV in the Internet Era
My intention here is not to say change is happening so slow it can be ignored. It is, however, to note that change is happening slowly enough – from a business perspective – that it can be addressed. The Economist piece points out that while digital technology has created havoc in industries like music and news (and more recently, book publishing) the television industry has adapted quite well. That should offer a ray of hope to businesses contending with change.

Television still faces hurdles – from a declining portion of revenue coming from advertising to a polarization whereby mass hits are sustainable and smaller, less popular programs struggle more. There is also the matter of interactive media and the blurring of lines between TV screens, laptop screens, smartphone screens and possibly tablet computer screens (which I believe will neither has the paradigm shifting rate of change or broad adoption currently being set as an expectation by the media machine). However, goliath, bureaucratic, television is faring okay. It is still the dominant medium of our time, even though its death was predicted with urgency decades ago.

Businesses, take heart. Paradigms don’t shift, they drift. Change happens but it is not something that will necessarily uproot an enterprise overnight. It can be addressed if it is attended to (vs. denied, as the new and music industries did during those years change was permeating mass culture).

Sure, keep an eye on the road ahead, but don’t let the deluge of hype and hyperbole that is at the vanguard of change unbalance your business. Focus instead on how people engage with change the here and now. Waves of change might be impossible to predict, but if you surf along with your customers, you can align what you’re building now with what they’re asking for now. This is supply and demand and one sure way to keep the register ringing as the months, days, years and decades drift by.