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Television's Replacement

While pondering on how TiVo allows me to time-shift (especially valuable when it comes to watching Formula One), hearing on NPR about the rise in popularity of Internet animations, and reading on Slashdot on how television is losing out to video games, it occurred to me how television is probably going to evolve — or be supplanted, depending on how you look at it. Perhaps my vision has been thought of by others, because it seems so darn obvious, but I haven’t seen it discussed much before.

(Update 3/20/04
Indeed, combining RSS and BitTorrent technologies achieves what I’m thinking of, as already discussed on Slashdot and in much depth by Ernest Miller in a concept he calls “broadcatching,” but note that much of the discussion is pretty technical, so my take is still worth reading.)

Hmmmm… maybe I should back up a bit. Back in my post about the shifting of creative power, I reported the unfortunate cancellation of Angel, the excellent spin-off to Buffy the Vampire Slayer that had received a burst of energy this season when Joss Whedon was able to devote his full attention to it after the end of Buffy and the cancellation of Firefly (by the way, Julian Sanchez reports that the Firefly movie has been given the go-ahead — and in other good news, Family Guy will be returning!).

In searching for a silver lining, I did note that developments in film and music seemed to indicate that the barrier to entry in the creative arts continues to drop drastically:

…creative decisions once made by suits without one iota of creativity (but who had the money to fund the starving artists) are now being made more and more by the market. It’ll take a while for the market to figure out how to separate the wheat from the chaff (because there’s also much more chaff than there used to be), but ultimately, I think it’ll be a much better end result than having the suits pre-filter everything. Of course, for this to apply to television, the big cost is distribution, and video streaming over the Internet still isn’t a reality for the masses, so we’ve still a ways to go. But don’t despair, Angel and Firefly fans, I think it’ll happen in Joss Whedon’s lifetime.

Of course, those of you on the waiting list for cable modems or DSL know that those infrastructures are already oversubscribed, so it’ll be a long time before broadband reaches the masses. Although fixed wireless broadband may fill in some of the gaps, I know enough about the industry to know that it’s not going to be a magic bullet either (no matter what you do, your throughput will suffer drastically without a line-of-sight connection to a base station). And, of course, those of you already with cable modems or DSL know that those still don’t offer nearly enough bandwidth to stream video at broadcast television quality. The Internet movies and animations available are generally crude or offered at low resolutions (which means choosing between tiny pictures or pixelated pictures).

But think a bit about how TiVo is changing viewer habits. Many of you probably don’t own a TiVo, so for those that do, bear with me as I explain this (or click here to skip the next two paragraphs). Most TiVo users don’t ever watch live television or check a television schedule. Instead, the TiVo records the shows you like and presents the available recorded episodes in a “Now Playing” list. You just sign up for “Season Passes” to your favorite shows and it automatically grabs them — even if the show moves to a different time-slot. Even for sporting events, I tend to tell the TiVo to record it so I can watch it later (note, I can start watching it before it’s finished recording — one of the benefits of recording to a hard drive instead of tape).

This means I don’t need to schedule my life around the programming schedule, but watch what I want to, when I want to. I know this was possible with VCRs, but it’s much easier in that you don’t need to organize your tapes and rewind and fast-forward shows when you want to watch them out of order (like when the wife and I wanted to watch a show together and had to skip past recorded shows that one of us didn’t like). Now when we feel like watching television, we merely scroll through the “Now Playing” list to find something we feel like watching — and since we’re the ones choosing what’s going onto that list, we never have to wade through crap.

What does that mean? As people get used to the “Now Playing” interface, it means television shows don’t need to broadcast in real time, and furthermore that users don’t need enough bandwidth to stream television-quality video. This has huge implications for the cost of distributing television shows.

People will gradually forget about programming schedules and get used to new episodes of their favorite shows periodically showing up in the “Now Playing” list. This means a TiVo armed with a broadband connection (e.g. their “Home Media Option” available now) can eventually, with the right software, download television episodes off the Internet. You just sign up for a “Season Pass”, like with normal broadcast shows, and the TiVo will automatically download new episodes (perhaps like an RSS feed) and add it to the “Now Playing” list when the download is complete. Since this will all happen in the background, it doesn’t really matter how long the download takes.

Note, the technology to do this is much closer than you might think. Right now, there is already the ability to “swap” shows between receivers (held back more by resistance from content providers than by technology). Furthermore, TiVos right now (to the annoyance of many users) automatically download short promotional ads, music videos, and movie previews. So the technological capability is pretty much already there. All that’s really missing is an agreement between TiVo and a television show (not a trivial thing, I know, given the whole file-swapping issue, so some sort of DRM will probably come into play).

What does that mean? As I talked about in that previous post, the costs of distribution become much lower. This means the Joss Whedons of the world will no longer have to pitch their shows to “Pointy-Haired Bosses” at networks (who air them out of order and then cancel them prematurely for not finding an audience). Instead, creative types can pitch directly to audiences. Of course, I wouldn’t hold your breath just yet. The networks know that this model threatens their livelihood, and TiVo has been very cooperative with the networks who still have all the leverage. And of course, there’s still the tiny question of how the show’s creator will get enough money to produce the show.

But just as with the music industry, change is inevitable.