is TIVO Killing TV
Personally if you own a color television and pay for a programing service and are not using TIVO then I just dont understand you. I dont get you and I dont think we can ever see eye to eye on any issue. hehhehe But seriously I would not go back. -Oh maybe to the days of the antenna on the top of the house. My dad out even in a storm twisting the metal poll in the wind until he got the “thats it!” from the watcher at the door. My Dad who’s favor adage of the day was “If I ever get to lazy to tell my kids to get up and change the channel then I’ll buy a TV with a remote!” Back to the days of fuzzy sketchy images from 3 channels (maybe 4 on a clear night) that were paid for by advertisers and completely free to us -as long as we sat through the commercials every 10 minutes.
But did we? Did we watch commercials? or did we hit mute and talk or run the restroom and/or kitchen and busied ourselves with other errands until we heard the world altering call “its back on”.
So now the advertisers are saying that TIVO and other DVRs (are there others? -really there arent yet) are killing network television! Why? - because no one watches the commercials anymore. I still stop down for my favorites like the Gecko and the PC vs. Mac ads. As well as Movie previews and upcoming show information. But other than those exceptions the images of baby diapers and cleaning solutions go whizzing by like ZOOM ZOOM. -on a side note for the longest time I was only a middle weight FFer. Fast Forwarding at mere medium speed of the second gear of the TIVO accelerator, but no more! I have graduated to dangerous but high satisfying 3rd tier! Super Speed! Thats right I have developed the art of fast forwarding through commercials and processing the flashing images, making split second decisions to validity of the content and BOOM pressing the play button just in time to reveal the soft black fade-in screen of my preselected prerecorded program. Thank you my parents are proud… especially my Dad.
The future has already happened but they still want to complain. They want it both ways I guess. Advertisers have already moved into the shows with product placement and badges on the corners of the screen. I speak for my fellow brothers when I say you can have our TIVO remotes when you pry them from our Cheetoe stained hands! We will not go quietly into the night, we’ll just get netflix accounts and only turn the TV on for Sports Center and to see what Krammer is pushing.
and thats my 2 cents.
Here is some one elses: TIVO is Killing TV
-thanks to TIVO, CHEETOES and NETFLIX for their generous support of this blog.
June 27th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
TIVO is the best thing since the invention of the Television. I understand that show producers have to get paid for their efforts. I would rather the advertising be tightly integrated with the programming so I don’t have to watch what they want to show to get to what I want to see. I am in favor of product placement and badges (so long as they are creatively used). If there is an issue with the sponsor trying to rewrite content to put their product in a favorable light then that is something the producer will have to deal with. As long as there is a direct response way to measure a shows success (like TIVO) then there would be a way to tell what works and what doesn’t. This would give producers more power to go push back on advertisers and say, “no we’re going to do it this way because we have information that says it doesn’t matter to you, but it does matter to the story”. Television is in a transformation period and that is uncomfortable for the currently established players. That may be so, but wake up boys because it’s time to pay attention to the changes and react or your going to be left behind.