TV or Not TV?
I spent a couple of days at home sick recently.
I was too sick to read comfortably, and not sick enough to be entertained by what I found on TV (yes, all eighty-gazillion channels worth). Even Pay Per View didn't have much to offer. So I fired up my laptop.
Not to surf, but to watch television.
Tuning in ABC.com, I watched all of season one, and most of season two of Lost. All for free, all in streaming HD. Great video, wonderful sound, and only a small handful of :30 ads. Is this the new face of television?
If you think about it, television is already an entirely different animal from what it was when I was a child. I'm old enough to remember (yes, really, I am!) three stations with a possible fuzzy fourth if you tuned the dial (yes, dial) just right.
Then came VHS tapes - movies when we wanted them, not just once a week for newer releases, or Saturday afternoons for venerable Steve Reeves adventures. And no commercials!
And remember our first cable boxes? Complete with a funny-looking box wired to your TV. This was soon replaced with The Remote, which led to the Eternal Question: "Where is the remote?" and settled once and for all that men really do have control issues (as in, who controls The Remote controls the universe).
Cable TV utterly changed the way we thought about television viewing. Channel surfing, zapping, and seemingly infinite choices (particularly when you added in the time-shifting capability that VHS recorders added to the mix) all were causes of severe heartburn among the Madison Avenue crowd and the Big Three television stations. Imagine having once had the full attention of the vast majority of Americans on any given evening, and being able to make them watch Mr. Whipple as an added show or power, and then having it all wrested away from you with a simple co-ax cable.
I remember a co-worker at the local PBS station stunning listeners with his promise that one day soon we would be paying $75, even $100 for the pipe that brought our telephone and television into our homes, and thinking nothing of it. Little did even he know that when you added high speed internet, we would be shelling out that and more for just our wired communications.
Remember the brilliant notion that one day we might be surfing the internet on our TVs? Set-top boxes brought up illegible computer screens at excrutiatingly slow speed, required complex commands to move about, and it was a big hit with exactly no one.
But the idea that we might use our computers to deliver TV - that's another thought altogether.
The idea of "on demand" viewing is certainly nothing new.
Cable, and our ability to record programming (starting with the vhs recorder and evolving to digital video recorders and media servers), plus cable tv's "on demand" services, have given viewers much control of what they watch, when. As one pundit pointed out, music and movies have always operated on a "release" model, rather than with broadcasting's "scheduled" model. A record (album, CD, and now download) is "released," and listeners can add it to their collections when and if they choose, and replay it as many times as they choose. In a slightly more limited fashion, viewers can attend a movie when and if they choose, and even purchase that movie on DVD to play back again and again. From a marketing standpoint, there is also a lot more to be learned about the public's taste from what people are willing to pay to experience, versus what they are willing to endure for free.
Though broadcasting has moved closer and closer to a viewer- (or listener) controlled model, even on-demand had its limitations due to the necessity of having a rotation of programming available, as opposed to just about anything you want, whenever you want it.
Of course, we're not there (true on-demand) yet.
And even my lovely day of watching almost every Lost episode to date is just another step along the way.
The next step will be the installation of an easy-to-use media server in every home, a storage station that sits between your computer and your television. On this box will live the media (tv, movies, audio) that you have selected from a variety of sources and that you now rent or own. It might continue to be free (as I mentioned, ABC offers its brand new TV programming free - all you have to do is suffer the occasional brief commercial from a dedicated sponsor); you might have to pony up a modest sum (iTunes offers these same shows for $1.99 per, and they then reside on your hard drive, for you to watch, burn, or download to your video iPod); you might have them for a set period of time after which they would become unavailable (though rights management has been not only unpopular but difficult to enforce).
The Internet has already spawned user-defined music "channels," like Pandora (www.pandora.com) Radio, which users program by selecting songs or musicians they like, and then adding others the service offers up based on these initial choices. What's nice about this is that users can be introduced to new music and musicians - much the way broadcast radio functioned - but with a focus on just this user, not a class of users (not all country music, just country music a la Don Williams). Amazon paved the way for this kind of thinking with its "people who bought this also looked at" feature. Netflix relies on the same paradigm as you rate movies, and will offer up additional movies based on what it learns about you from your preferences, and the preferences of millions of other like-minded individuals.
We've perhaps already seen the handwriting on the wall where scheduled TV shows are concerned: if you're a fan of a hit series, you've no doubt already been frustrated on more than one occasion due to erratic scheduling, waiting weeks for a new episode, seeing clusters of a few new episodes followed by weeks of hiatuses, and the like. More than one person I know simply opts out altogether, and refuses to watch TV series as they are broadcast. Instead, he waits for the DVD of the series to be released, and then enjoys the entire season in a few night's watching. If you haven't had this experience yet, I can tell you it is a decidedly preferable way to watch anything but simple sitcoms - any story with a thread will make much more sense when episodes are viewed in close succession. And now that we have that choice, why wouldn't we take advantage of it?
The one thing traditional TV had going for it is similar to the same advantage radio offered: letting you sample what's new. But I can envision a world in which new shows offer pilots for free, and viewers can then buy the rest of the series episode by episode, or as a series. Word of mouth, always a potent advertiser for good television, movies and music, has become if anything more powerful in this era of YouTube, blogs, and social networking.
But whatever the future of TV, it will be far different from the days when mom, dad, and the kids all gathered in front of the television set to watch this week's episode of Leave it to Beaver.
I was too sick to read comfortably, and not sick enough to be entertained by what I found on TV (yes, all eighty-gazillion channels worth). Even Pay Per View didn't have much to offer. So I fired up my laptop.
Not to surf, but to watch television.
Tuning in ABC.com, I watched all of season one, and most of season two of Lost. All for free, all in streaming HD. Great video, wonderful sound, and only a small handful of :30 ads. Is this the new face of television?
If you think about it, television is already an entirely different animal from what it was when I was a child. I'm old enough to remember (yes, really, I am!) three stations with a possible fuzzy fourth if you tuned the dial (yes, dial) just right.
Then came VHS tapes - movies when we wanted them, not just once a week for newer releases, or Saturday afternoons for venerable Steve Reeves adventures. And no commercials!
And remember our first cable boxes? Complete with a funny-looking box wired to your TV. This was soon replaced with The Remote, which led to the Eternal Question: "Where is the remote?" and settled once and for all that men really do have control issues (as in, who controls The Remote controls the universe).
Cable TV utterly changed the way we thought about television viewing. Channel surfing, zapping, and seemingly infinite choices (particularly when you added in the time-shifting capability that VHS recorders added to the mix) all were causes of severe heartburn among the Madison Avenue crowd and the Big Three television stations. Imagine having once had the full attention of the vast majority of Americans on any given evening, and being able to make them watch Mr. Whipple as an added show or power, and then having it all wrested away from you with a simple co-ax cable.
I remember a co-worker at the local PBS station stunning listeners with his promise that one day soon we would be paying $75, even $100 for the pipe that brought our telephone and television into our homes, and thinking nothing of it. Little did even he know that when you added high speed internet, we would be shelling out that and more for just our wired communications.
Remember the brilliant notion that one day we might be surfing the internet on our TVs? Set-top boxes brought up illegible computer screens at excrutiatingly slow speed, required complex commands to move about, and it was a big hit with exactly no one.
But the idea that we might use our computers to deliver TV - that's another thought altogether.
The idea of "on demand" viewing is certainly nothing new.
Cable, and our ability to record programming (starting with the vhs recorder and evolving to digital video recorders and media servers), plus cable tv's "on demand" services, have given viewers much control of what they watch, when. As one pundit pointed out, music and movies have always operated on a "release" model, rather than with broadcasting's "scheduled" model. A record (album, CD, and now download) is "released," and listeners can add it to their collections when and if they choose, and replay it as many times as they choose. In a slightly more limited fashion, viewers can attend a movie when and if they choose, and even purchase that movie on DVD to play back again and again. From a marketing standpoint, there is also a lot more to be learned about the public's taste from what people are willing to pay to experience, versus what they are willing to endure for free.
Though broadcasting has moved closer and closer to a viewer- (or listener) controlled model, even on-demand had its limitations due to the necessity of having a rotation of programming available, as opposed to just about anything you want, whenever you want it.
Of course, we're not there (true on-demand) yet.
And even my lovely day of watching almost every Lost episode to date is just another step along the way.
The next step will be the installation of an easy-to-use media server in every home, a storage station that sits between your computer and your television. On this box will live the media (tv, movies, audio) that you have selected from a variety of sources and that you now rent or own. It might continue to be free (as I mentioned, ABC offers its brand new TV programming free - all you have to do is suffer the occasional brief commercial from a dedicated sponsor); you might have to pony up a modest sum (iTunes offers these same shows for $1.99 per, and they then reside on your hard drive, for you to watch, burn, or download to your video iPod); you might have them for a set period of time after which they would become unavailable (though rights management has been not only unpopular but difficult to enforce).
The Internet has already spawned user-defined music "channels," like Pandora (www.pandora.com) Radio, which users program by selecting songs or musicians they like, and then adding others the service offers up based on these initial choices. What's nice about this is that users can be introduced to new music and musicians - much the way broadcast radio functioned - but with a focus on just this user, not a class of users (not all country music, just country music a la Don Williams). Amazon paved the way for this kind of thinking with its "people who bought this also looked at" feature. Netflix relies on the same paradigm as you rate movies, and will offer up additional movies based on what it learns about you from your preferences, and the preferences of millions of other like-minded individuals.
We've perhaps already seen the handwriting on the wall where scheduled TV shows are concerned: if you're a fan of a hit series, you've no doubt already been frustrated on more than one occasion due to erratic scheduling, waiting weeks for a new episode, seeing clusters of a few new episodes followed by weeks of hiatuses, and the like. More than one person I know simply opts out altogether, and refuses to watch TV series as they are broadcast. Instead, he waits for the DVD of the series to be released, and then enjoys the entire season in a few night's watching. If you haven't had this experience yet, I can tell you it is a decidedly preferable way to watch anything but simple sitcoms - any story with a thread will make much more sense when episodes are viewed in close succession. And now that we have that choice, why wouldn't we take advantage of it?
The one thing traditional TV had going for it is similar to the same advantage radio offered: letting you sample what's new. But I can envision a world in which new shows offer pilots for free, and viewers can then buy the rest of the series episode by episode, or as a series. Word of mouth, always a potent advertiser for good television, movies and music, has become if anything more powerful in this era of YouTube, blogs, and social networking.
But whatever the future of TV, it will be far different from the days when mom, dad, and the kids all gathered in front of the television set to watch this week's episode of Leave it to Beaver.
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