Cord Cutters Suffer the 'Paradox of Choice'

What would happen if someone took your TV service provider away for a week and left behind one of the trendy Over The Top (OTT) boxes in its place?

That is what Hill Holliday did recently with five Boston-area families. The company removed their standard cable boxes and gave them an Apple TV, a Roku, Boxee Box, Xbox 360 or Google TV. The results should give the MSOs a smile. Most of the families reacted negatively to the experience, feeling immediately the absence of the constant flow of automated TV choice. The biggest and most obvious shift for consumers was from passivity to lean-in involvement. Virtually all of the OTT boxes required that the user choose each and every TV experience. It turns out that for many people TV viewing is something of an experience that lives somewhere between lean-back passivity and on-demand super-choice. "I don't want to have to think about it," one subject said. In fact, as Hill Holliday synopsized at their site, "As with 'the paradox of choice' phenomenon that describes how broadening the range of options leads to a decrease in overall consumption, we saw how families gave up on watching TV altogether when they couldn't decide what it is that they wanted to watch." None of the OTT solutions seemed to have an answer to the problem of having to decide always what to watch next.