Slow TV is a term used to describe a genre of TV that consists of continuous coverage of an ordinary event. It’s called slow TV because of how long the broadcasts last and because the content is, well, slow. This genre was made popular in 2009 by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation when they decided to broadcast a 7-hour train journey through the country. It was viewed by over 1 million people.
Last year, Australia broke into slow TV with their 17-hour broadcast of a train making its way through various major cities. The program averaged more than 400,000 viewers.
This may sound boring. In some ways, it is. But slow TV is designed to be calming. It’s the perfect combination of beautiful scenery, historical facts, and constant movement.
Now we know what you’re thinking. You don’t have a train or beautiful countryside to broadcast hours of footage from. We get that. But we want to talk about how you can apply the concept of slow TV to your business and make it marketable.
Making Slow TV Work for Your Business
We recently jumped into slow TV with one of our clients, Swift Paws. They offer lure coursing machines for dogs, so we set up a 4 hour stream of various dogs running the course. Since dogs should only run the course for less than two minutes, there were a lot of pups involved!
This is how we drew people in. Dog lovers could tune in as they pleased to watch these pups run around a park and have the time of their lives. Owners who participated in the video could tell their friends to tune in and keep an eye out for their dogs, and customers who had questions about the product/their orders knew Swift Paws was online and available to provide answers. When it was all said and done, we had almost 2,000 views! Here’s a screenshot from our insights:
We had great engagement. We reached almost 4,000 people organically from a page with about 1,600 likes. There was a lot of good conversation going on in the comments and our average watch time was around 20 minutes.
Now, how did we make it marketable? For starters, we had the Swift Paws website info and logo onscreen the entire time. We also had a few “Did You Know?” facts pop up onscreen throughout the video. To engage with our viewers, we also were very active in the comments section from the Swift Paws account. We answered questions and had conversations with their viewers and loyal customers.
The major takeaways for other businesses are to brainstorm if you have something relevant for slow TV content, make it branded, include information that establishes your business as a thought leader in your industry (prove you know what you’re talking about), and then engage with viewers and build relationships in the comment section.
If you want to check out the Swift Paws video, it’s still published on the Swift Paws Facebook page where it’s still gaining views.