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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.'"
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
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"
Perhaps to check the spelling of "to"?
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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!
You are too kind; I just did what any pedantic git would have done in my place.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
"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.
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.