My television habits have changed dramatically over the past few years. I don’t watch live TV anymore, except for sports or the occasional news channel. Sometimes I watch programs on my Tivo instead. But the way I watch most hot episodic television, like the OC, a show my daughter loves, is on DVD.
My television habits have changed dramatically over the past few years. I don’t watch live TV anymore, except for sports or the occasional news channel. Sometimes I watch programs on my Tivo instead. But the way I watch most hot episodic television, like the OC, a show my daughter loves, is on DVD. That same behavior shift is happening everywhere. Over time, the TV universe has fragmented into smaller and smaller pieces as people have moved away from the major broadcast networks. Cable may have launched that revolution, but it’s rapidly being supplemented by an explosion of new technologies like DVDs, satellite, Tivo, video-on-demand, and video over portable devices. For the first time ever, viewers are now in charge of what they see and when they see it, and not a handful of big network programming executives. And the impact of that shift can be seen in the numbers. Off the ten highest-rated programs ever tracked by Nielsen, not one took place in the last ten years, and all but two took place more than 20 years ago. Consumers may be watching the same thing, but they’re watching it at different times, and in different places.What’s the next frontier in this shift? IPTV — or TV over the Internet. What we’re doing with Warner Brothers to make classic episodes available for free online through In2TV, and the announcement we made with Intel about how we plan to bring our content into the living room over their chips, are just the beginning. The original TV universe had 3 channels. Cable expanded that universe to 300 channels. But when you let consumers choose what they want to see, when they want to see it and on what device, the options become nearly limitless.