Ow.

It hurts to admit it, but I really blew it when I recently raved about promise of online videogame TV.

I didn't even recognize that I might have made a mistake until I ran across a recent Forrester Research marketing report. The report found that while 25% of online households have expressed interest in podcasting, only 2% had experimented with audio downloads but did not listen on a regular basis and a mere 1% of households actually download a podcast onto a player.

For most new tech trends a 1% percent adoption rate might be admirable or even encouraging. However, podcasting is a nerd darling. On tech blogs and nerd-news centers podcasting been proudly crowned the Wave of the Future™. Currently, the search site PodNova is tracking more than 55,000 different podcasts.

Yeah, 55,000 channels and apparently nothing's on.

As often happens when I read a marketing report, I take stock of my life. Using Google Desktop to check out the last two months of my online viewing I pulled out the following stats:

• Number of individual sites visited with interesting podcasts: 46
  
• Number of podcasts started: 2
  
• Number of podcasts listened through: 1 (FatPixels Radio)
  
• Number of podcasts downloaded to my Ipod knockoff: 0

• Number of hours spent on videogame websites: Countless
  
• Number of game videos downloaded: Dozens... if not into three digits
  
• Number of watchable online videogame TV programs I know of: 12
  
• Number of online videogame TV programs I watched: 0
  

It's the last one that gets me. I spend countless hours on enthusiast press sites, and I pull up gigabytes of game videos and I actually watch more G4TV than a sane man should.

Still, I just haven't been motivated to invest half an hour to watch one of the many fine online videogame broadcasts. I'd wager a guess that the vast majority of enthusiast press readers would say the same thing.

It's easy to judge which web technologies are going to find mass acceptance by looking at which ones you're still using on a daily basis months after you first discover them.

Digg.com? Yeah, it's sticky.
RSS Newsreaders? Can't live without one.
Gmail? It's indispensable.
YouTube.com? It'll be around until the MPAA shuts it down.
GoogleVideo? Not unless it gets better.
Online Videogame Broadcasts? Uh, oh.

Until online videogame broadcasts become indispensable too, I can't imagine them reaching the levels of acceptance needed to justify their costs. To make matters worse, the problems are not necessarily creative, but rather fundamental.

One fundamental issue is that online viewers have been programmed to expect total control over what content they receive. Anything less is unsatisfying.

When readers go to a website, they have complete control of the content they receive. They pick the site, they pick the individual stories, they pick the files to download and they ignore everything they don't want.

Now, imagine if the only way that they could read their favorite website was to download a proprietary reader that cycled through the stories while they wait for the ones that interest them to arrive.

That's what it feels like to download a pre-produced 20 or 30 minute online broadcast. Until online viewers are given a slick, intuitive and almost invisible mechanism to control their own content, video broadcasting simply won't be a part of their regular viewing.

(Note: GTTV.com has already addressed some of the issues listed below with some clever and innovative technical solutions that allow viewers to surf through different stories on each broadcast. The broadcast gets a free pass on this one.)

Enthusiast press websites are, for the most part, news sites. Even the sites that focus on reviews, previews and features are providing new bits of "news" for their readers each day. Online readers have once again been programmed to expect news in the most convenient forms possible.

To convince online readers to get hooked on regular videogame broadcasts, the sites must make them believe that the benefit gained in the jump from print to video is worth the effort of a download. To make the choice tougher, most online readers have already made the conscious decision to chose webprint over TV or other methods to get this kind of specific news. That's why they're at the website in the first place.

For 99 percent of enthusiast press articles, print tells the story more quickly, more succinctly and more easily than video. Readers can browse, skip around or read the whole article. Plus, if the story links to a specific video, the readers once again have total control of their content.

Video broadcasts in their current form just aren't convenient and until they are comprehensive, navigable, and user controlled, online viewers will continue to find it much easier to skim web text.

Finally, I have only experienced one videogame broadcast (Consolevania) so rewarding that I would choose the video over the host website's text sight unseen. It's a tall order to expect content so creative that it overcomes convenience and control hurdles, but that's the one sure thing that what will motivate readers to become viewers.

Plus, even if an online broadcast is the best video ever created, the websites still need to convince uninitiated viewers to give the video a try. If great written articles demand great headlines, videos must be sold with headlines and straplines that are simply at another level.

If anything, I see the opposite right now. Many videogame broadcasts are linked with headlines or content lists so dull, my laptop switches to sleep mode whenever I call them up. This has to change.

So, I was wrong.

As they stand today, I just don't see any online videogame broadcasts controllable, convenient and tantalizing enough to make me a regular viewer... and I'm an easy mark.

Hopefully someone will prove me wrong this time as well.

Media Coverage is an opinion column. The opinions expressed in this column are solely the opinions of the columnist and are not necessarily the opinions of GameDaily.com.