The End of Broadcast TV as We Know It? 91
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
This will also throw the TV advertising market into chaos... will ad spots become something like Google's adSense, but in visual?
Part of the new wave (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No, Really (Score:2, Interesting)
I can only imagine shows "coded" to let a server know which ads should go where at playback... but that would mean having a (very turn-offable) connection to the show's server. Would they try to scramble show content (with a 'playback' key) to make you have to connect to their server? I don't see that flying either.
The future will be (albeit maybe DVR-recorded) "à la carte" streaming. It's the only way advertisers can get at you when you watch what you want.
A question... (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:Part of the new wave (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Product-Audience-Boredom (Score:3, Interesting)
There are at least two kinds of TV with completely different models for revenue. One of them is where the content, the show, is the "product" to be sold. It will be well suited to adapt to pay-per-view internet channels. The other way is where the "product" is the viewer herself. The TV channel is essentially using the TV shows as bait to lure enough eyeballs to the TV so they can sell these viewers to advertising. American broadcast TV is for the most part using the latter model and this model doesn't cope well with DVR and pay-per-view, so it will be declining in favor of the first model. A variation of the first model is the pay-per-channel model a la HBO, but with internet streaming TV being feasible, this model will decline in favour of pay-per-view.
I also predict that we will see new TV business models in the future. One possible development is TV show access being given away as freebees to patrons of *another* product. For example, when buying a certain brand car, you could get access to the next season of Sopranos.
Re:Part of the new wave (Score:3, Interesting)
Except for "live" events like sports, news and a very small selection of entertainment programming, I think we are on the verge of a major revolution where instead of being tied down to a broadcast schedule, we can get programming by either downloading it to a home server machine or by the on-demand playback through your digital cable box. That essentially makes the whole idea of prime time television obselete, to say the least. Also, with DVD players so widely used, don't be surprised that we will start seeing TV series done specifically for DVD distribution, unfettered by FCC censorship regulation; they could also be distributed through a service like NetFlix or Blockbuster Video's new DVD rental system.
Re:Off Topic (Score:2, Interesting)
It's also worth noting that the spectacular growth of Wikipedia was largely fueled by the decades of built up frustration caused by the glaring and persistent inaccuracies that riddle "proper" encyclopedias. The primary function of encyclopedias was not to be well-written but to look good on the shelves of families who never opened them.
And lo, there came DRM, abiding in the shadows... (Score:3, Interesting)
So guess what's coming...
Content Protection and Copy Management (documents [dvb.org], EFF critique [eff.org]) 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!
Subject (Score:3, Interesting)
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.