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Anyone who knows me knows this is the year of the dentist. Besides the fact that I’m graduating, and soon will be moving, I’ve also been spending an absorbent amount of time at the University of Pacific’s School of Dentistry. Let me use this moment to slip in a public service announcement, kid’s brush your teeth! I can’t complain too much, I have an awesome senior student dentist, and you can’t beat the discount of a dentistry school, considering how much work I have to get done.

But I digress. Yesterday, as I walked into my dentist’s station he asked if it’s all right if we listen to the game (St.Louise v.Philly) while he worked. To my fascination, he had the game streaming live on his laptop thanks to MLB.com, while the Yahoo Sports page was up with stats on all the games playing next to my dental files. Of course I didn’t mind, I was completely distracted at this whole set up. I was interested in seeing how an average Joe uses streaming platform to watch a broadcast program.

I’m always told my opinion on this whole idea is some what skewed by the fact that I work in the industry while getting my B.A. in Broadcasting. Strip that all away and I am a consumer too and I know what I like. And I love the concept of watching my TV on any new media platform that makes it convenient for me. As for my dentist, this was the next best thing to being in St. Louise watching in the stadium. In the opening session of a broadcasting symposium which was recently held at SFSU, VP Broadcast Distribution for CBS, Inc., Brent Stranathan talked about the concerns of cannibalization with putting broadcast programming online.

As I sat in my dentists chair waiting for the Novocain to kick in, it occurred to me this isn’t cannibalization, this is two people who would normally be chatting about the weather now are talking about the game, scores, and stats. And I’m not even a baseball fan. Watching the stream with a critical eye the first thing I did notice was the miss-use of the commercial brakes. I was sitting in a dentist chair in San Francisco watching a commercial for a tire service in, well honestly, I don’t even know where this was streaming from but I know this wasn’t for SF. Working in commercial radio and television I know there are ways of coming out of the national satellite streams in order to play local commercials, so why weren’t we doing this today online? Maybe the technology is too new, maybe the old way of advertising isn’t evolving fast enough? And this was a subscription stream, is it really fare to make people who paid to stream a show watch the commercials. Sounds like double dipping if you ask me.

Ok, so I know I don’t have all the answers…yet! But I do know there’s money to be made here people. Especially since I went to the dentist needing some work, and walked out watching two major league games (well passivley watching/listening…I mean, come on, I was at the dentists). That and the elevator version of Seal’s “Kiss by a Rose” in my head. But that’s another story.