The two clock paradox: How short-form content became premium entertainment (and what to do about it)

Entertainment companies everywhere are now acknowledging that they have to operate based upon two clocks. One of them is an alarm clock—the premiere you clear your night for, the finale you go to great lengths to avoid spoilers for, and the release that causes you to refresh the page at midnight in order to listen or watch. The other is the clock that you fail to realize is ticking—the scrolling that takes up 40 minutes between two things you actually intended to do, the podcast playing in the background as you cook, and the feed that flows like a faucet. Let’s refer to the first as the appointment clock and the second as the ambient clock.

For most of television’s history the appointment clock had been the main concern. The networks would plan out their entire schedules with the aim of getting people to arrange their evenings around a broadcast. Streaming didn’t destroy that logic; it simply transferred the appointment from a fixed hour to a fixed week—with the Sunday night drop and the season that releases all the episodes at once, even though everyone still rushes to finish it before it gets spoiled. There was also the ambient clock, mostly in the form of radio, news, or the kind of content you’d walk by in an airport; mostly in the background and mostly regarded as a second-rate option. The kind of programming that was appointment-based received the bigger budgets, the prestige, and the campaigns for awards, while the ambient content got whatever was left over, or relegated to a secondary distribution window.

That hierarchy has unobtrusively reversed, and the paradox at its heart is this: People are spending more time than ever on the forms of entertainment they never originally intended to set aside time for, and that is becoming the new “premium.” Ambient consumption is no longer just taking scraps of attention. It is now occupying hours that used to be entirely reserved for the appointment clock. And the true reason isn’t that people have become worse at concentrating, or lazier, or less insightful. That would be a superficial explanation disguised as something profound. The real reason has a name and stems from a consideration that entertainment executives have never had to deal with before: coal.

Jevons’s Cousin

In 1865 the economist William Stanley Jevons observed a situation that appeared to be counterintuitive. British engineers had just made steam engines much more fuel efficient, so it was assumed that Britain would use less coal as a result. To the contrary, it actually used more. Since the cost of running the engines had been reduced, demand for the resource did not decrease but increased—because the limitation on coal consumption was not a lack of desire to use it, but the cost of using it. So as the cost of coal went down, the more consumption it got at the same level of scale; in fact, the same level of demand was now fulfilled on a much larger scale. In other words, technology made it possible to use fewer resources per unit of output. We’re seeing this happen with AI as well. We have more energy-efficient computers and data processing than ever, yet this hasn’t reduced electricity demands. Instead, we are getting massive expansion in cloud computing, smartphones, and artificial intelligence data centers. More energy efficiency has led to more energy consumption. A paradox!

The same mechanism applies to attention, and as soon as you understand it, you can’t stop noticing it all over the entertainment industry. The more we are able to consume, the more we do—and while this has been a boon for technology companies, it’s also what’s crushing Hollywood institutions. For most of media’s history, content designed to pass the time has been expensive to produce and difficult to distribute—a radio license, a printing press, or a cable slot were necessary. This cost barrier limited the amount of background content that could be available at any one time, and therefore the amount of people’s time it could take up. This friction played right into Hollywood’s hands, giving the gatekeepers (namely, studio executives) tremendous power over what we were able to see. When distribution became effortless and frictionless—with infinite feeds, autoplay, algorithmic sorting that never runs out, and a supply chain made up of clips that cost almost nothing to produce and nothing to distribute—the ceiling didn’t just rise, it vanished. Just as Jevons’s coal engines behaved, the response wasn’t slight. Everything, everywhere, seemed to happen all at once. People didn’t just take in a bit more short-form content and then go about their day as normal. Instead, they completely reorganized their day and social capital calculations around it, and it became the most important cultural influence of our time, just as cheaper coal wasn’t used any more efficiently—it was used everywhere and all the time, because the friction that had previously limited its use was now gone. It’s even gotten to the point where the sum of the clips are actually greater than the whole.

The part that should cause anyone who is still planning a media budget on the basis of appointment-clock logic to feel uneasy is this: Over the past 10 years the industry has removed friction since it was believed that removing friction would yield pure benefits. This has meant more access, more creators, more choice, and greater democratization. What it has in fact done is provided the ambient clock with an unlimited supply of fuel, enabling it to burn through hours that had previously been allocated.

The Evidence Is Making the Future Inevitable

You really needn’t accept this on trust. Just observe what the incumbents are doing with their own product road maps. HBO Max, a brand based entirely on the idea that you should wait for things, since it believed that scarcity and prestige were one and the same, has recently introduced a vertical, short-form video feed within its app. ESPN has its “Verts.” Others are coming. This move isn’t an attempt at diversification; it’s the companies confronting their own obituaries, analyzing their own attention data and having, in real time, the insight as to which kind of clock their own subscribers are actually living by. They’ve been visited by the ghosts of industries past warning them of what’s coming for the future.