Seriously. Motivated by this thread wherein a good many Dopers state that they just don’t watch TV any more. They’re happy to watch the programs – on DVD – but the disadvantages of TV have stopped them from watching it “live” any more.
Said disadvantages include:
[ul]
[li]Commercials[/li][li]Having to organise your schedule around the TV, instead of vice-versa[/li][li]Commercials[/li][li]There just isn’t much worth watching on nowadays[/li][li]Commercials[/li][li]The intrusiveness of elements like station IDs, pop-ups, etc[/li][li]Commercials[/li][/ul]
I’ll admit that it’s been quite a while since I turned on my TV, myself, other than to watch a DVD. In fact I watch most programs nowadays on my computer, via Bit Torrent. (I realise this is more than a little morally suspect, but hey, I may as well be honest about it up-front.)
So … if more and more people aren’t watching TV any more, because they’d rather watch the programs on DVD … what does this mean for the future of TV? If viewers drop, advertising revenue will drop, which probably – in the short term,at least – means even more frenetic advertising, more product placement in TV shows … and more of those advertisements on the DVD that you can’t skip past, of course.
(Apropos of those ads you can’t skip past … does anyone else just put in a DVD and not turn the TV set on for a few minutes, so the player’s had time to get to the main menu without you having to watch all the crap that comes first?)
Anyway. ultimately, it seems to me that all this is a vicious circle, and TV can only be the loser. So … is there hope? Or is TV beginning to die?
A forward thinking pundit a few years ago coined the term “mouse potato” because she believed that people would spend more time vegging in from of their comp screens than their tvs. Ican’t recall the pundit’s name but her surname might be popcorn.
I don’t think TV will die though. Radio and Cinema weren’t destroyed by the advent of television and I don’t think the advent of time-shiftable media and net connected computers will be the complete death of television. TV will find a niche that other newer media cannot fill. Maybe.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation however no-one watches television, it having died out in the 21st (I think) century.
I’m with That Group… I follow a ton of TV shows, and I love watching them, but other than live sporting events, I don’t watch anything in the time slot that the network shows it in.
The 30-minute sitcom and the 1-hour drama are definitely not dying. There are still great shows being made for the television audience. Plus, with the rise in popularity of the “reality show” and the resurgance of the prime-time gameshow, there is no end of programming in sight.
A lot of us in that other thread note that we watch just as much tv as most Americans, we just watch in a different way. I think the Internet is changing the way we watch/think about TV too. I honestly only watch Lost when it is on just so I can discuss it online the next day. No one I know IRL watches it. Television is definitely more discussed now than it was before - it’s not just for watercoolers anymore.
The question is…is television advertising dying? DVDs, DVRs, pirated digital television shows, iTunes and network Web sites are giving the public a chance to watch television without advertisements (in the middle, at least) and the public is responding. We are showing we would much rather watch television on our own terms. We’d rather watch for the content and not be “taken out” of the shows with ads.
Advertisers are the ones who are going to have to change, not television studios.
Television programming is dying. The old model of a corporate-derived format of shows and times is on its way out, and with it, effectively, goes commercial television. There won’t be any “channels” as we think of them today. Instead of tuning into a network, you’ll download shows directly onto a hard drive in your cable box. Probably for a small fee, or perhaps a monthly subscription to a service, as there won’t have commercial breaks to pay programming costs any more. There’ll be some live feeds for news and sports, and big live events like the Oscars, but “television” will mostly resemble the iTunes store.
That might not be a bad thing – I can name a bunch of programs I’d be subscribing to on the ITMS, if they were available where I am.
But what happens when your legal downloaded programs start including advertising as well? I seem to recall reading somewhere that this has already happened, though I can’t find a cite, so I may be mistaken.
A lot of the complaints you have are taken care of by DVRs, which really do revolution television viewing. If my TiVo magically dissapered and I couldn’t get another one, I would most likely stop watching tv, probably downloading my 3-4 favorite shows.
I’m hopeful that if TV does start serving shows a la carte, that it could mean the strengthening of good, but unpopular shows. A show like firefly or arrested development, for instance, has a die-hard audience that would be willing to pay more for the show than a fan of Generic Sitcom #3012 would pay for theirs, making a viable way to sustain quality but niche (are people who don’t like excruciatlingly boring tv a niche?) programs that would otherwise fall because of the complete reliance purely on the way the ratings system currently works.
It would be nice to think so. My suspicion is that programs like Firefly – however high-quality they might be, and however die-hard their audience may be – might have significant trouble attracting enough people willing to pay to watch them for them to survive. The fate of the movie would tend to support this, though of course the two situations are not the same.
My feeling is that we are approaching a point where the TV market is going to change drastically, however hard it may fight to stay the same; and that ten years from now, while it may not be dead, it will look very different…
I find network TV impossible to watch. There are simply too many commercials-if CBS puts on a good movie, by the end of the movie, there will be 5 minutes of commercials for every 10 minutes of movie. That’s why i watch the cable channels-and surf away when commercials come on.
I think the TV execs had better watch this trend-I get so annoyed with commercials, i go out of my way to avoid them (mute button).Too much advertising is counterproductive-it turns you off.
I’m with SenorBeef on this one, I’m much more likely to be watching on DVR than live. Those rare occasions when I watch live I’m so annoyed by the commercials that I’ll deliberately pause it long enough to get some “time in the bank” to let me skip the ads.
I realize that people like me are killing television, but honestly, just me watching the commerials isn’t enough to help, and I’d be a fool to watch them if I didn’t have to. Probably 10 years from now it’ll be all pay TV.
I don’t follow a single show on television. Most of my watching is confined to sports or the business news. On very rare occasions, I might watch a movie repeat on cable if I’m doing something else at the time.
For me, it is not only the endless commercials, but the advertising pop ups as well as the constant weather updates. I know this has been a lousy year for weather in Dallas with the ice storms earlier this year and the storms/floods this year. But, I can’t stand the half screen or the running trailer at the bottom.
Lots of shows still capture the public imagination, and networks make ass-loads off that.
The endless stream of reality shows cost nothing to produce.
Even if more and more people are waiting for DVD’s to come out. . .the original runs of shows themselves are the marketing campaign for the DVD’s. Shit, how would you like to run a marketing campaign that actually MADE you some money.
Besides, I think that TV writing is probably better than its ever been right now. Sure, you can point to a million examples of networks just ripping off other examples of what works, but on the success of shows like Lost, Sopranos, maybe Heroes. . .networks seem more willing to put out stuff that takes some creative chances.
Of course entertainment in the form of moving pictures will continue to be popular. But more and more people are becoming accustomed to watching what they like, when they like, without interruptions. There is almost nobody who doesn’t markedly prefer this to the old-fashioned way of checking the schedules and making sure that they or their video recorder are present at the allotted time. So the profitability of traditional TV channels will decline. You’ll be left with a couple of categories of old school TV:
Stuff which people prefer to watch live. News, sports, cultural events like Live Aid.
Shows viewed by people who are not inclined to seek things out, but will happily accept whatever is put in front of them. Dumb gameshows and reality TV probably still have a future.
Nah, you’re not killing television, you’re just making the advertisers work harder, which is something they don’t want to do.
Advertisers complain loudly that DVRs are killing their business. The truth is, they know that we zip through commercials now, so they have to find new ways to advertise, such as product placement in the movie or show itself, or getting the product mentioned by the characters, or digitally inserting ads on the football field, or whatever. There are loads of ways to get the message out, and I’m sure there are tons that we haven’t even though of yet. But, doing such things is a lot harder to do and arrange than making a 30 second spot. They’re just mad that they have to find new ways to get the same job done, rather than doing things the way they’ve been doing them for 60+ years.
What I think a lot of the DVR fans are forgetting is that even if TV moves to a on demand-only type of service, there still has to be a “premiere time” for when something is first available to download.
I imagine there will be plenty of people that will want to watch a show “live” that way so they can see it as soon as possible.
Yes, but if it’s harder to do through TV advertising, then TV advertising will become less profitable. Think of how carefully crafted the TV commercial is these days. They sweat blood over giving it just the right tone, making it appealing to just the right markets. Very difficult to do that with product placement or scrolling banners in football games. And couldn’t you do something similar on websites, or even in print? The ideal medium for advertising, TV, is becoming less useful to them, and no amount of inventiveness can stop that.
I think in the short term, advertisers are going to have to become more creative and entertaining, like, say, advertisers everywhere else in the world.
I’ll backtrack from my thirty-second-jumping to see a good Jack-in-the-Box ad.