Last week’s Entertainment Weekly has a big article on the ratings for this year’s Oscars ceremony, which were the lowest they’ve ever been. I can’t find the exact article on EW’s website, but here’s one that covers roughly the same ground.

There’s a lot of stupid conclusions people are making about why less people are watching the Oscars. For example:

Some of these movies are just too difficult for a mass audience, frankly. And if we have moved into an era where there’s this dichotomy between big popular studio movies and smaller pictures for more specialized audiences, we may just have to get used to smaller audiences [for the Oscar telecast.]

I don’t buy it. Most people have never tuned into the Oscars to watch their favourite movies win awards, rooting for the ones they feel close to like they would their favourite football team. Instead, they’ve traditionally tuned in because it’s a spectacle: a long, star-studded, gala event with jokes, dancing, montages, shadow puppets, etc.

And the reason the ratings are declining is, I’d argue, due to a very Gen Y shift from passive viewing to active on-demand acquisition of content.

The thing about this year’s Oscar’s ceremony is that, even if I missed the entire show, I can still easy view all the best moments. As early as the next morning, youtube was full of them. I can spend a half hour, see all the best stuff, and not feel like I wasted four hours of a Sunday night sitting through the award for Sound Editing.

It’s a smarter way of accessing entertainment, and the Y generation is doing it in incredible numbers. From downloading a show via iTunes to skip commercials, to using Tivo to record events and allow us to skip around, the motivation is to be entertained on our terms.

This is an attitude that will extend to your workplace, too. Your Gen Y employees will be likely to grumble about that all-day meeting you have planned: why can’t you just e-mail out some notes that they can view on their own time? Why sit in a room together and create that proposal document when it can be broken up and tackled in smaller, more valuable pieces?

Asking Generation Y to sit in one place for a long time will always be a challenge, and it doesn’t have (that much) to do with shorter attention spans and trumped up ADD diagnoses. Instead, it’s more a quest of defiance of tradition, always asking this question: why do it that way when we can do it this way, faster, and get the same result?

Photo by NMCIL ortiz domney. Licensed under Creative Commons

Tags: itunes, media, on-demand, oscars, Technology, tivo