Late morning coffee notes: I read "next" by Michael Lewis last night. Very cool book, particularly the chapter on Jonathan Lebed, the invidual investor that copied Wall Street's insider game to amass over $800k in trading profits (he was forced to pay a third of it to the SEC as a fine). Here is a copy of the chapter online.
Unfortunately, the book did fall down when he got to TiVo and it's implications. Here is a copy of this chapter online. Michael rightly points to why TiVo represents a massive threat to TV as we know it. People can skip commercials and time-shift viewing (which breaks prime-time programming -- flattening programming into a commodity delivery service). However, makes the mistake in believing that granular data on viewing habits (provided by TiVo) will provide a major improvement in advertising yields. Frankly, what I watch doesn't have much correllation with what kind of soap or car I buy. The new granular data on viewing habits will do little save TV execs from eventual commoditization. Also, a better commercial is just as likely to be skipped as a bad one by a PVR user.
What really is going to be the nail in the coffin of the TV networks is what happens when TiVo begins to offer:
1) Synthetic programming. Basically, right now, you can search for programs you are interested in, but the search interface is difficult and klunky. The solution is to aggregate programming from multiple channels based on an area of interest: comedy, food, sports, etc. Through time-shifting it will be able to offer a steady beat of the "best of television" on new channels. This would make it much, much easier to search for programming that fits you interest or to veg in front of the TV on a steady diet of what you like best. With a couple easy click you could probably delete programs from the synthetic channels you don't like. It is also very likely that TiVo will introduce a sponsorship spot at the start of every program that you can't fast forward through, "TiVo's Commedy Connection Channel brought to you by: xxx."
2) Archives. Within a five years the average TiVo user will have enough storage space to archive thousands of hours of TV programming (and potentially music since there are so many cable/satellite music services available today -- although I don't own a music channel, what does it look like on TiVo?). It's very likely the interface will start to look more like a P2P directory. With titles grouped show, genre, date, etc. Complete collections of popular programs like Star Trek, Buffy, and Seinfeld will be stored on viewer TiVo boxes.
3) Networking. Despite TiVo's reluctance to network, it is likely that this will happen either through an aggressive competitor (Replay -- anyone have the realtive market share for these two systems?) or Microsoft (Apple to a lessor extent). I personally think that the PC (Microsoft) will suck in PVR capabilities (offering a lower price for the service, more flexibility, and a greater capability), but I am not sure exactly how they will do it.
4) DVD capture. This is a little hard to do know, but it is likely that the "analog" hole in DVD playback won't be filled soon. With thousands of hours of storage on a PVR, it's likely that people will store rented DVDs this way. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
12:26:47 PM 
|
|
