The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Television executives must shudder every time they turn on the news or open a newspaper. It must seem to them that they are absolutely surrounded by groups of people trying to knock them off of their well constructed pedestals. For 50 years TV has been king of all media in North America, but its time, as we know it, is coming to an end. First on the list of dangers to traditional TV lovers are things like TIVO and Bell Express Vu PVRs that let you time shift what you watch. Using these technologies, you can record your favourite shows and watch them at times that are more convenient for you. You can save them and watch the same shows endlessly. The problem with this, as far as TV people are concerned, is that viewers who own these technologies rarely watch advertisements. If you have the opportunity to fast forward through them, you will. Ads are what pays for TV. If you aren't watching them, companies won't buy them anymore. This leaves the networks with no source of income. The second major problem for the networks is simple: we are all watching less TV. While most people still watch too much, the amount of television-based media we are consuming has been steadily falling for the last five years. But we aren't spending less time with media in general; we're just spending more time online. With sites like YouTube, Joost, and Google Video allowing us all to become not only consumers of video, but directors and producers, online video traffic is booming. So much so that the latest studies estimate that over 10 per cent of Internet traffic is to YouTube, and that over six minutes of video is uploaded to that site each and every second. While a lot of it is terrible garbage (thousands of 30-second clips of people doing stupid human tricks), there is also a lot of content now online that is difficult to find anywhere else. Recently searching for a documentary from the early '80s that I wanted to buy to use in my classroom, I instead found the entire thing on YouTube. Combination The combination of these two technologies - TV and Internet - is also right around the corner. Apple has a product called Apple TV. A small box that sits on top of your TV, it is a streaming video machine that will take content from your computer and allow you to watch it on your TV. For example, I subscribe to a video podcast from National Geographic. A few times a week they send out a five-minute nature video that my kids and I love to sit down and watch. If I had an Apple TV, instead of all huddling around my laptop, we could simply stream it to the TV and watch it on there. So combine the ease of use factor (all done automatically and wirelessly, no more cable to hook up than a DVD player) with the ease of subscribing to content at places like iTunes and YouTube, and you begin to hear the death bell for traditional TV a little bit louder. Certainly there are still blockbuster shows that a lot of people watch. But once you get beyond these few, people's viewing habits rapidly fragment onto less traditional channels like TSN, Discovery, and Tech TV. So the time is completely ripe for online content to move to your regular set. There are enough quality shows that you can easily subscribe to, that you can watch when you want, however often you like, and you can watch them on your television or take them with you on your laptop or iPod for when you are traveling; you aren't tied to a single place any longer. While traditional TV isn't dead yet, it is in a lot of danger unless it reinvents itself. ([email protected])
