Will Digital VCRs Change TV?

schnucki writes "A new, innocuous-looking consumer electronic device known as a personal video recorder is not much different in nature from the video cassette recorder, and very few of them have been sold to date. And yet, an increasing number of executives at television networks and advertising agencies have their ears nervously on alert, ... " Its the NYT so you need a free account, but its decent piece talking about the impact of ReplayTV and Tivo on TV industry. Personally I think this is an intermediate step before we get to full, on-demand broadcasting over the net, but its a great step. RIP Network TV.

Change the advertising

All the talk of how the networks will have to change revenue models in response to this got me thinking about a similar market, where advertising is also very important to revenue and are easily skipped.

Magazines. I don't actually subscribe to any anymore (thank you, internet), but I used to. It's really, really, really easy to skip past/ignore ads in a magazine. Yet I and many other readers paid attention to them enough to feed the magazine's employers. Why? Because the ads were interesting! I would read ads because they were cool, or because they had a product that was neat, or because I liked the company, or because I wanted to buy something.

Maybe networks/advertisers should take a clue from this. There are the occasional ads on TV that I find interesting and actually watch, but by and large the majority are complete and utter trash, treating me like my attention span is measured in seconds, my IQ measured in singles, and my sole decision in whether to buy something is whether or not it's "cool".

To the advertisers: If you don't want people fast-forwarding past your ever-so-expensive commercials, make the commercials something people want to watch. The reason they aren't effective is because people would rather do something else; change this. It's possible. How many people watch the Super Bowl as much for the kick-ass ads as for the sport? I know I do, and I know a lot of people that talk more about how funny the latest Budweiser/whatever ad was than how awesome that last-second touchdown/whatever was. C'mon, you ad agencies, surely your people are creative more than once a year!

To networks: you kill shows that have bad ratings, maybe you should start killing sucky ads too. If you show better ads, more people will watch them, and you can get away with charging more. You are in control of your content. Exercise that control, make it clear that you won't accept just any trashy ad, and you won't have to worry about devices like this because people won't want to skip the ads. You can't force people to do anything, remove the need.

My view on recording from TV...

I feel that recording off TV should never be impeded, and that networks should have nothing to worry about.

Recording gives programs more exposure. It used to be that you couldn't watch more than one program at a time. Now that you have a recording device, you can record what's on ABC while watching something on CBS, then watch what you recorded off ABC later. Both networks benefit.

Fast forwarding over the commercials? Yes, some people do that, but you can still see the ads as you fast forward. At least I can. Also, a lot of times I don't bother, and can still hear the ads while I'm working on something else (just like I would if I were watching live)

People trading tapes and recordings of programs someone missed? This shouldn't be a problem either. The program gets more exposure. The ads that are there get watched again.

Recording PPV movies? this shouldn't be an issue either. You already payed for it, you should be able to record it. Of course, distributing the recording could be considered illegal, but then so is making a copy of a commercial videotape and distributing that. Nothing changes here.

The day they start finding ways to prevent recording off TV, I will start finding ways to circumvent it. Macrovision on DSS dishes? I'll have a macrovision killer permanently installed. I refuse to have my right to record infringed upon.

Violate This!

Hmm, enough mis-information from you!

Try this:

We are distributing all our modifications to the Linux Kernel as part of the GPL on CD for $24.95. That covers the cost of the CD, shipping, and the time it takes my dear friend Dave to dupe the CDs.

We have no immediate plans to distrubute the code over the web, but will reconsider once we move our website to a more robust server in the near future.

On the CD you will find minor modifications to the Power PC kernel, v.2.24.

This is available to anyone, not just people who purchase the TiVo service.

Please email me if you have any questions.

Regards,
Richard Bullwinkle
TiVo Webmaster
[e-mail]