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.'"

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Yeah, yeah

[nagora]

Wake me up when the ISPs actually have the bandwidth to do this without kicking me for downloading a day's worth of broadcast quality programming. Sometime arount 2015 should do.

TWW

Re:No, Really

[speaker of the truth]

OTOH the answer would probably be machines which do exactly the opposite: Automatically skip everything with the "don't skip this" flag, thus automatically removing ads.

I know exactly what you mean. I went and bought a new DVD player that did exactly this.

Oh wait, I can't buy a new DVD player that does this. What makes you think television would be any different?

Re:Ads during programmes

[TrashGod]

I'm dreading the day they start running 719x575 "banners" over programmes...

The TV Guide Network (TVGN) has been doing this since day one, and it's growing. If the guide part is the program, then the ad part is now over 75% of the screen.