Glancing Askance: Wait for it

By MARC WOLLIN

While most of our TV consumption comes via various on-demand streaming services, there are times when I’m not so much settling in to gorge but rather to graze. 

While watching the small TV in our kitchen I like to nibble a snack as I go next channel, next channel, next channel to see what is out there. It might be comparing and contrasting different viewpoints (CNN, MSNBC, FOX), seeing worlds I know little about (FanDuel Racing, Willow Cricket, Zona Futbol TV) or simply to marvel at what draws an audience (“My Strange Addiction,” “Vanilla Ice Goes Amish,” “Best Funeral Ever”).

Our new set top boxes enable me to do that just like the old ones. They replace the equipment we had had for 15-plus years, and are different in several ways. They are smaller, the size of a small paperback as opposed to a coffee table book. They are a completely different technology, working not on cables but Wi-Fi. And they are far more versatile, offering up menus and previews of multiple options and sources.

That said, the associated new remotes have all the usual controls, including an “up” and “down” rocker switch enabling me to stroll back and forth in the viewing neighborhood. But because the upgraded technology treats everything as a stream and not as a linear channel, pushing “up” doesn’t instantaneously move me to the next channel. There is a small delay as you can almost see the internal browser initiate a sequence of instructions as it switches to the next feed. We’re not talking minutes. We’re not even talking seconds. We’re talking a beat or so, a hitch in the step, a lag in the flow. And that infinitesimal interruption in the space time continuum? It’s highly annoying.

We have all come to expect that everything will be available to us immediately if not sooner, no waiting. If it’s not there we swear at it and quickly move on to other things. That’s not just personal experience or anecdotal reporting talking. One of the pioneers in video delivery over the internet is Ramesh Sitaraman, a professor at UMass Amherst. More than a dozen years ago he did a study as to how long viewers would wait for a video to load before they gave up. Based on data from 6.7 million unique viewers, he and his team showed that if a video takes more than 2 seconds to load people start dropping off. By 10 seconds, more than half have said bye-bye. And that was more than a decade ago. Our “c’mon, c’mon!” syndrome has only gotten worse. 

Researchers have traced the cause of that impatience to our online world and its “instant-nese,” and it’s oozed out from there. We’re impatient for everything, no matter the arena. A United Kingdom study showed that respondents expect to pick up their luggage after a flight within 13 minutes, and expect any customer complaints they may file to be answered within two hours and 18 minutes. Waiting in line makes people bonkers: after just 30 seconds we are ready to switch to another line. Even dining out tests our patience: On average, a person will only wait 14 minutes for food to arrive at a restaurant before they get agita. Similarly, they will wait no more than seven minutes for drinks to arrive at a bar or they’ll consider heading down the street to another establishment. In spite of all that, 95 percent of those same respondents believe patience is a virtue, even if they don’t have it.

We are so impatient that researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Chicago quantified that we would pay more money sooner vs. less money later, or work more now vs. later just to be done with something. They also found that “the distress of waiting intensifies as the wait nears an end.” Wrote lead researcher Annabelle Roberts of UT, “When you expect the wait to be ending soon, you become more impatient closer to that expectation.”

So it seems that it’s as much about frustration as it is about actual time. Often another second or minute or day won’t make a big difference in the actual scheme of things. But the waiting, as Tom Petty says, turns out to be the hardest part. I concur. I’m not asking for much, just asking to see what’s on channel 624 after 623. NOW!

Marc Wollin of Bedford tries to be patient, but often doesn’t succeed. His column appears weekly via email and online on Blogspot and Substack as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.