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The End of Broadcast TV as We Know It?
mattnyc99 writes "The DVR revolution is nothing that new—and neither is the Neilsen ratings company's adaptation to it. But Glenn Derene at Popular Mechanics argues that users have officially pushed us into a new era of television, wherein viewers now shape the way that networks make money, which means we'll start to see users control the way the networks choose programming. From the article: 'The systemic use of ad ratings as one of the standard metrics for assessing viewership is a sea change, and it's perhaps the sign that as an industry, broadcasters and advertisers are sailing into uncharted waters.'"
Hooray for the web!
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
No, Really. I just posted to a thread on "à la carte" cable television on this subject - it's good news for everyone, as monopolies over "viewing slots" will be no more. To a user with a remote control, a stream or a channel is exactly the same thing, but the beauty is that he can watch what he wants, when he wants.
This will also throw the TV advertising market into chaos... will ad spots become something like Google's adSense, but in visual?
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Broadcast TV is sooooooo April 2007. I though this site was supposed to be about news not ancient history. Did they dig up another Tyrannosaurus Rex watching commercials on Fox or something?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I don't have a TV. I buy DVDs and watch shows online (currently going through Heroes on NBC.com). It's vastly superior, though the video quality on nbc.com sucks. I hope they're counting my hits and basing at least part of their business model on that.
Assume that network broadcast TV is dead.
What would be your ideal programming of video content?
Would you want adhoc channels put together by others to your tastes?
Would you want just one or two key programmes?
How would you want to get your news/weather?
What about current affairs/politics?
Are long running independent serials good, or do you want story arcs?
What place the one-off?
When there are no constraints, what is the best way of getting your interest in content and delivering it?
I'm not a great television watcher, infact I don't even own a television myself.
However recently I got the chance to watch some television, while the ads during breaks were annoying, what I encountered was more annoying. During the program I was watching, suddenly some magical gradients took over the lower part of the screen and advertisements started appearing for different programs to watch and so on.
It's quite annoying and I'm glad I haven't wasted money on obtaining a TV recently.
So, my question is, how does DVR solve that?
If it doesn't, I'm pretty sure people will be seeing more of it.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
The first chooser of what we see is the Product. Shows are effectively chosen by the sponsors of a product and their choice of an audience that can be influenced to buy their product. Think about the number of "undifferentiated products" that are advertised on TV and you get some clue as to why the shows are all pretty dumb. We get to see a majority of shows that are there to attract folk who will be influenced to buy a product based on its jingle or the handsomeness of its spokesman. One of my pet peeves is the industry position that audience selection is a great democratic process where we choose what we want to watch. They don't acknowledge that the choices are made by audiences of products that can only be sold through mass advertising.
...) I am one of those crazy people who would pay good money to see more Firefly or for that matter just about anything that Joss Whedon wanted to offer on a subscription basis. I know that there are all kinds of series that attract fiercely loyal audiences that feel the same.
The good news for the dvr crowd is that there are a lot of programs across 24 hours 7 days a week and the 100s of channels. You can actually find enough shows to give yourself some entertaining tv a few nights a week.
What would really boost viewing quality would be the ability to cut out the hemorrhoid cream salesmen making the initial choice of which shows get produced. (Is it any wonder that these shows are often a pain in the
I think that the subscription series is the next step.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Do you think they've been collecting ratings all this time so they don't use them to make decisions, and now suddenly they've realized that they can use them in this way?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
God dammit Zonk what do you want me to do about it? More crap spewing. You bound to have more wrinkles than my dear dead Great, great, grand-ma.
With such things as Apple TV, You Tube and Democracy, advertisers are already finding a workable ad model. Sure, soon enough users will be pummeled with ads, if they aren't already, but compared to millions of dollars per minute for SuperBowl advertisements - alreadty, online channels reach more for very, very less and I don't see relative costs climbing to the same levels enjoyed by traditional TV any time soon.
Watching a movie in a 650x480 window isn't fun for me. I don't have a big screen taking up my entire family room but it is HD. Same with music. MP3 even at 256 kbps sound terrible. My stereo isn't top of the line but it does play 24 bit DVD audio.
I use freevo now to watch misc youtube stuff or my iPod Video as well as watch DVD's. . If I see a cool show from TV/Cable I will get it from iTunes or perhaps XBOX 360. With the exception of Monsters HD and The Kung-Fu Channel HD I really stopped watching the Dish and $70.00 a month is nuts for two channels. I wish I could just order those two channels, but apparently not so I just canceled the thing. One thing I sort of wish for is a good ebook reader to exist.You have to be a little hardcore to get the better ones (common Sony one sucks with its proprietary formats and forcing you to do lousy conversions + its small screen), as I would rather read for entertainment and find myself doing so, but the only problem is that I have too much clutter with books and like the idea of a reader especially with the long battery lives they have and the ease on the eyes vs a laptop. There is Chinese one that handles PDF as well as CHM files ( im not converting the books I have if I dont have to), but I think you have to go through this crazy process to get one (ordering from the Ukraine or some such insanity). Also the screens are way too small still, as far as I know 8 1/2x11 does not even exist (yet) which would help for the type of papers I read. I think more of us should read, so for know I am sticking with books with an eye for something done right with ebooks (hear that Apple?). I can actually feel brain cells growing by avoiding TV. So overall I think its a good thing people are getting away from it a bit.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Unless, of course, they are taking the bus too the library
Until they learn what I like to watch and start automatically searching and recording it for me I'm not going to bother with them. My Tivo used to do that... Hell, even my email learns what I like to read.
With the amount of utter crap on TV and dozens of channels, it's an essential feature.
Deleted
It may be the death of expensive cable/satellite services, but free over-the-air ATSC broadcast is the best picture quality you can get in the US right now.
I just bought a rooftop TV antenna and I know many other people who are doing the same. I'd cancel my satellite service if there were an easy and convenient online way to watch the 3 cable channels I'm interested in at a decent resolution.
Granted, I didn't RTFA, but does this new change in advertising paradigm increase the value and price of live events to which people aren't going to settle for watching it time shifted.
An example--the SuperBowl. Always considered the grand daddy of advertising costs. People aren't going to watch it 'later', so will the prices for ads during this program jump?
Other examples are shows to which people are going to want to watch immediately or be left out of the 'water cooler convesations'. Granted the Soprano's are commerical free, but what about other broadcast television shows that had final episodes--Frasier, Cheers, Mash, Twin Peaks, etc--that viewers WILL tune into when they occur. Does the advertising cost model increase for those events.
Time will tell.
"Where is my mind?"
So guess what's coming...
Content Protection and Copy Management (documents, EFF critique) a sort of super-DRM that applies not only to a single TV receiver, but pervades every device to which the protected content might be copied. Although there are reassuring words about this regime only applying to "premium" content, all the mechanisms are there to disable recording, restrict the number of devices having access to the content simultaneously and cause the content to evaporate after a certain period of time. So the broadcasters are clearly thinking about how to preserve their income stream.
Of course, we shouldn't be surprised, even public broadcasters are getting addicted to rights-management. Although you can make a perfectly good permanent copy of an off-air MPEG programme stream from any BBC broadcast, if you're part of the BBC's iPlayer pilot you donate your Internent bandwidth to their P2P service and in return receive a Windows Media file of the same programme at one quarter of the resolution which self-destructs 7 days after you first play it. It's not quite clear who this is protecting now, but it's not a great leap to suggest that unencumbered recording is now seen as an historic error by the controlling suits.
Of course, if you want TV programmes in their traditional sense, they have to be paid for somehow. The BBC, despite their current DRM frenzy, are guaranteed an income from the TV licence fee (or at least until the government decides otherwise). Advertising revenue is, though, inexorably dropping. In the UK the rules for commercial broadcasters were relaxed to permit sponsorship and, in future, product placement, but that's not going to make a huge difference to lower-profile content. There's also been a major scandal over the use of premium-rate phone lines which have been used to supplement the income stream of a wide range of programmes under the flimsy pretext of "interactivity". So the advertising model may well be doomed.
There are payment models which continue to work: pay per view (the traditional cinema model), subscription (eg cable, satellite) and the reviled but suprisingly resilient TV licence. If advertising-supported TV no longer makes economic sense, it might mean the end of broadcast TV as it's know in the USA, but it's not necessarily the end of broadcast TV in countries which have other ways of funding free-to-air television.
I suspect that applying DRM to try to shore up a declining industry is more likely to kill it off quickly, though!
yet.
Live sport.
Movies, shows, news, whatever - people love to be able to watch on demand, when they've got time.
However, live sport can't be done 'on demand'. People can, and will, go out of their way to watch a game as it's happening. Unlike a movie, it's NOT the same if you tape it and watch it later, no matter if you can skip the ads.
Live sport will keep my TV in use for a long time yet.
There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary, and nine other kinds of people.
As long as you equate a DVR to a VCR you'll overlook the SCORES of other options out there to advertisers.
... These are just the things I thought of while sitting here. This is digital content. A Tivo is literally nothing more than a PC with a shiny case and a remote control. The sky is the limit, here. Advertisers have "smart" machines in peoples hands--whether they're watching on the Tivo itself, their PSP, a cell phone, an iPod, Zune, whatever. The days of being limited by a dumb television are over.
For example...
What if, when I was FF'ing in my Tivo, what if 2 copies of every commercial were coded into the broadcast? What if it plays a commercial designed for high-speed viewing that gets displayed when I FF? It would probably look more like a banner ad on your screen than a commercial as we know it, but it's still advertising.
What if the Tivo takes product-placement to the next level, giving you the option of buying things you see on the screen right from your remote control. I imagine that at any given moment you can press a button and numbers 0-9 will appear next to purchasable products and you press the button and it will somehow connect you to that website--whether thru the Tivo itself, sending it to your TivoToGo Computer, your cell phone, whatever.
Something similar to this already exists in certain commercials where you can press a button for more info, the only difference here would be applying that technology in the shows themselves. And this can be anything from a bottle of hand lotion to a car.
What if you get an incentive for NOT skipping commercials? What if your Tivo service fee is reduced for every one you watch? Or the opposite? What if your fee is INCREASED (albeit slightly--maybe a couple cents per slot) for every commercial you skip?
What if they block you from skipping ads for the first time you watch the show? That would be similar to the DVD technology you mentioned, but would create less of a backlash among users.
What if they do more to open up their TivoToGo option but, in exchange, made ads unskippable on non-tv mediums? I'm thinking maybe even text-based ads running in a Letterbox area on your monitor or your hand-held.
This is depressing. I read Slashdot to get a sense of the zeitgeist of the software profession--what's new, what's important, what are people thinking? Evidently one of us thought some dopey article in "Popular Mechanics" was important enough to bring to the editors' attention, and the editors concurred and rewarded us all with the shocking revelation of "the end of broadcast television!" I can only conclude that either Slashdot is losing touch with the reality of the software profession, or else the "profession" has been abandoned by the educated and rational, and left to credulous, the hacks, the repairmen. Those who, armed with associates' degrees and the latest bogus Microsoft certifications, believe that their ability to copy a "hello world" program from "Learn C++ in 7 Days!" qualifies them to be software engineers or even programmers. How sad.
The next time I read about an alien invasion or Paris Hilton in the "Weekly World News" I'll be sure to post the article here.
I Pray to the FCC every night that they will finally drop the hammer on God hating communist unpatriotic Americans who zap through our God given commercials. I really want our overlords to begin arresting people for turning off their television sets. Please please please reeducate us.
Now that we're in control, I hereby abolish all DRM!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Live sporting events can certainly be (and often are) streamed over the internet. In fact, that provides all sorts of options for instant replay.
I would not be surprised to see TV eventually shift back to advertising techniques used before the networks figured out that the vast majority would actually tollerate being bombarded by advertisements 5 out of every 15 minutes. PBS has done this for years, but I can very easily see programs being sponsored by one major company. Saturday morning cartoons are largely doing this already basing their shows on toys and game, can "Subway presents: Simple Life (because you need a sammich)" be far behind? Advertisers are going to have be creative, traditional 30 and 60 second spots are dead to any that can afford it, bringing attention without being an annoying distraction is going to be key.
Well obviously live TV can't be "on demand", but that doesn't mean it can't be on the web. During the last soccer World Cup, the BBC showed *all* of the matches it had broadcast rights for live on their website, which means you can watch it pretty much anywhere, if not anytime.
this is probably why the good shows get cancelled mid-season.
I wish I had the capital to start my own television network.
I would become profitable within 1 year.
My network would be called TIN "The intelligence network"
I would only air smart television.
My advertisers would be offered 3 minute spots for professionally shot mini-movie adverts.
3 minute-spot would be $6 million.
There are only so many of them.
They're using their grammar skills there.
"wherein viewers now shape the way that networks make money"
That's funny, because I could have sworn the SEVERE STORM WARNING which started crawling during Jeopardy the other day indicated that the network cared more about their advertisers than their viewers. I'm not sure what gave me that impression, but it may have had something to do with the fact that the crawler disappeared when the commercials came on (after having displayed no information past "SEVERE STORM WARNING IN EFFECT FOR THE FOLLOWING--") and reappeared as soon as the commercials were over. But that's just crazy, right? Surely the networks care more about informing their viewers about potentially hazardous conditions than they do about offending advertisers, right?
Pardon me while I have a hearty laugh.
Many are concerned that DVR users do not watch commercials.
;)
I have had a DVR for years now and I do watch some commercials. Interestingly, I end up only watching commercials on television programs I have seen / do not care about (maybe nothing else is on and I watch an old episode of The Simpsons). Such shows I only pay half attention to and thus end up watching the commercials. However, all new episodes / shows I care about I end up skipping through all commercials.
If most DVR users are like me (and they may be), this brings up an interesting thought: Will networks begin to rely more on old episodes to bring in revenue instead of using them primarily as time fillers? -- What does this mean for networks like TBS that show little original content.
Regardless, there are still two forms of television I never skip commercials on: live sports coverage and PBS
If the ads don't get the eyeballs where they are (because of DVR's) won't the advertisers just negotiate to get the ads hidden in the shows (where the eyeballs are)? IMO, this is just another volley in the constant struggle of push vs. pull content. Business feels that they should be able to spend money to force promotional content to viewers; relying on psychology to drive sales rather than merit. The irony is that people that buy the product pay the penalty because the cost is incorporated into the goods. (sigh) Someday I'll have a nice hut on an island, learn to play the steel drums & none of this will matter.
Free TV costs money, and every time you buy an advertised item, you pay.
I do not watch Free TV any more because I hate the frequent program interruptions, and I don't want to expose my mind to this ad garbage, my brain after forty years still contains ad slogans I picked up in my childhood.
Because I do not watch TV, I would like to avoid paying for it, but it is practically impossible.
And because I pay for it I feel somehow entitled to view any movie or TV series ever broadcast on ad-supported TV, no matter what technology I use to watch it.
The same applies to ad-supported web content - I do not feel any guilty to use ad-blockers, I have pay for the content when I buy stuff.
Someone might argue now, what if everyone would avoid viewing ads?
Well, in that case we might enter a world where people buy only stuff they really want, but this is an utterly unrealistic utopia.
Regarding the electromagnetic spectrum, I think it is a scandal that it is still used to stuff mostly useless crap into people's brains. And looking at the numbers how many time people in the U.S. spend in front of a TV and pollute their mind, I doubt they will be well prepared to meet the global challenges we are facing - the failure of decision making based on knowledge of the world acquired through TV starts to become visible on all levels.
Fortunetely new technology can help to filter ads in all kind of media except public spaces, but it the battle for our attention is a dirty battle not being won by the people at large.
p.
Without order, nothing can exist. Without chaos, nothing can be created.
I cannot stand most ads. They are anywhere from 16 to 20 minutes per show. Smallville on the CW regularly has ads up to 20 minutes and a few seconds! That's less than 40 minutes of showtime! However, I'm also impatient and don't like waiting until the end of summer for the previous seasons to be available on DVD. Additionally, it's only SDTV, not HDTV on the DVDs. (Yes, HD does present a much better picture than SD.)
To get around this, I use both DVico's and MyHD PCI HD cards to record all of the shows I like. 24 and Heroes are on at the same time so I had to use 2 HD cards. I create batch scripts for VideoReDo to scan for commercials, then manually (and fairly quickly) cut them out. If I want to keep the show, I burn the MPG to a DVD or DVD-DL depending on the size. The cost of the DVD-DL for the whole season is the same as if I bought the season on DVD, plus I get it in HD and without any DRM.
As for the ads... if there are some clever HD ads, I'll watch them - once. If a movie ad is in HD and I'm interested in it, I'll watch it a few times.
Why do you people feel compelled to tell us how special you are?
How does it dissolve "time slots"? Can the DVR record multiple video streams at the same time? Do DVR's record multiple HD streams at the same time? Can HDTV broadcast in 1080p and would DVR's be able to keep up with multiple streams at that rate? If DVR's are similar to VCR's in that they can record one stream while you watch another, it doesn't seem they eliminate "time slot monopolies" any more than VCR's.
What is it with DVR's (over VCR's) that is causing a paradigm shift?
You apprently are not a subscriber to http://www.mlb.com...live sport on the web...
TV as a separate device is obsolete. All displays are now computer displays and the network really is the computer.
How many years has the music industry had to get its act together under pressure from tech? The movie business hasn't done much better, they just have a better product that's also harder to DL. Major industries in America have an impressive inertia. Even as markets are lost and advertising goes completely haywire, watch the TV industry desperately cling to outmoded models. Worse, as young viewers become untraceable thanks to DVR and BT, the industry will just blame the trend on an aging population that prefers to watch CBS.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
That show is syndicated meaning it was purchased by the station and did not come from the network. Your complaint should lie with your local tv station.
You can't "on demand" live sport - you can delay it by DVR'ing the program.
I do it all the time with racing program - it's fantastic.
Years ago, when I thought I really want to be in media, an old timer told me the only reason for programming (e.g. TV shows, music on radio...) was to keep the commercials from running into each other.
Yet, when 9 to 11 minutes out of 30 is dedicated to commercials and another one or two minutes is promos, I'm REALLY glad much of my viewing is delayed using a DVR.
In 10 years, internet television is the major content source in the world. While projects like FreeVo and MythTV provide open DVR functionality, I think the future of television lies more in projects like Democracy (although it's a desktop app) and ToxTox, which aims to be an open internet television "browser". Just like Firefox did, I hope projects like these will open up the walled gardens of settop boxes.
if it was the network, it would be for new york counties and cities, and they'd have a local weather "icon" bouncing up and down and shaking his fists in the corner of the screen.
if it were LA, they'd have live helicopter shots of low-flying Toyotas and houses sliding down hills.
but it wasn't, so it was your local network-affiliate station.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?