Not so fast
But not everyone agrees with Barnett's assessment, and numbers for video snacking seem hard to come by.
YouTube, the 800-pound gorilla of video sites, boldly declares that all times are primetime, saying it doesn't have publicly available data on when viewers are watching content. A YouTube spokesperson added that the site's audience is a global one and the concept of primetime is both dated and irrelevant.
According to comScore, one of the few firms able to give specific data on video consumption by time of day, there is a midday peak, with 37 million unique viewers looking at web video in the midday block. By comparison, comScore reports that the web's total video audience is about 19 million in the morning, with about the same number of viewers in the evening.
Cory Kronengold, director of marketing and communications for Tremor Media, a firm that specializes in placing ads in videos, confirms that there is a midday spike. But, he says, midday viewing is hard to quantify because of the geographic spread, and the spike occurs across all ad formats.
"I’d hardly call it the 'new primetime' because it's video snacking -- people watching news clips, the latest webisode or viral hit," Kronengold says. "They are blasting through more web pages and getting more ads, but not necessarily mimicking the primetime 'lean back' experience. Maybe its primetime for webisodes."
Pavlov's dog?
And then there's Break.com, the male-focused video portal-turned ad network. Break.com CEO Keith Richman says his site has actually seen a midday spike in the past, but what's happening now is actually a "flattening out of the day."
"We're seeing more people at all times," Richman says. "The peaks are much less than they used to be. From a marketer's standpoint, you want a specific person and you want to know the time that you're going to reach them. What I think [is happening with online video] is that marketers have a longer period of time over the day, rather than saying Thursday night primetime."
According to Richman, Break.com updates four times per day (10 a.m., 1 p.m., 4 p.m. and 10 p.m.), but he says that's got more to do with users developing viewing habits than publishers and marketers creating an artificial primetime.
So, perhaps it's the viewers that want primetime back. Or, if not primetime, something akin to a "regular time" when they can incorporate online video into their everyday habits. While that's good news for the medium -- the idea that web video is routine as opposed to a novelty -- it's hardly a sea change away from the on-demand world and back to a more temporal consumption pattern.
But there's another school of thought that says it's not the users who want their primetime back. Instead, it's reach-challenged marketers who are longing for the days of a primetime audience.