Content Tapas

I love tapas.   You probably do too although you may not think of them as such.  In Spain, these are little plates of food – a few bites – that traditionally have been eaten while you’re at a bar.  In Italy, particularly in Venice, they’re called cicchetti – bite sized appetizers.  Bar food.  Go on, admit it.  How often have you looked at a menu and ordered 3 or 4 appetizers while skipping an entrée?  They’re the stuff of which great bar hopping experiences are made.  Meals you eat in snack-able portions.  We’ve become a culture of snackers, and it’s not just in food.

Content has become tapa-like in many ways.  Anything over 10 minutes (I’m being generous here) is considered long-form.  The optimal podcast is probably 5 to 8 minutes.  People just don’t have the attention spans they once did.  You get a sense of it while watching HBO or PBS – places where there are no breaks for commercials.  I, for one, find myself getting fidgety and my mind wandering -where is the commercial break?  This has changed how content is created and consumed.  No more big plates.  Stuff on which  consumers can graze and move on.  We can debate if this changes by platform but DVRs or virtual DVR ability on the web tells me that the control has moved from producers to consumers and that control is becoming ubiquitous across device.
Jose Andres, the great Spanish chef, calls tapas  “…a way of eating and a way of living.”  I don’t think he had content in mind but he’s absolutely right whether it’s food or programming.  The challenge we face as content producers is taking the old business model of ad supported long-form consumption and reinventing it to go along with the snacking model.  No simple task, especially when the audience is eating in a lot of new bars that didn’t pose a challenge even 10 years ago (and for those of you who tried to stream video in 2000, you know what I mean).  For those of us in the sports business, we’ve got something special – a big live entrée that doesn’t lend itself to snacking.  For everyone else, the menu is changing before our eyes.

What are you eating this weekend?  Whatever it is, enjoy it!