The death of free to air?

As mentioned in a previous post, I gave up watching TV.  There was a caveat, that I would watch one or two of the best shows (where "best" is entirely subjective).  Well, the new season has rolled around and the TV is still off, but the VCR is working pretty hard.  I've got it recording the one or two best shows every week and now have eight weeks of them on tape with the intention of watching them when I feel like watching TV.  So far, I've watched one hour.

Now, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this is going to become a horrible mess, even with just two shows, trying to keep track of what's been watched and what hasn't, making sure the tape in the VCR has enough capacity, and is positioned in the right spot.  But technology comes to the rescue (or would, if I were earning money and could justify the expense) in the form of a digital video recorder (DVR).  Many of these little units (often paired with a DVD recorder) can record up to a hundred hours of TV, and allow you to pause and rewind live TV or start watching a show already in progress from the beginning while still recording the end, instantly navigate through your recordings by means of a menu (rather than having to scan through hours of programs to find the right spot), automatically select items to record using a broadcast guide, and provide a commercial skip function.  Why has it taken so long for these to be widely available?

Now, the commercial skip function is not a new idea.  It is nothing more than a 30 second fast forward that can be repeated a number of times and exists on my five year old Korean VCR.  The difference is that with digital content, it is possible to instantly skip an entire ad break of predictable length without even scanning the ads in fast motion.  Television broadcasters will have to become increasingly clever to force people to watch at least some of the ads.  My guess is that the length of ad breaks will vary more and shows will be scripted so that there can be more ad breaks.  There will be a premium on the last ad space in a break (or perhaps the last few in a longer break) as the first few will be able to be skipped more readily than the last without missing the return of the show.

As fewer people see the ads, they will become less useful marketing tools, and networks will have to become more creative about how to pay for the cost of purchasing or creating shows and delivering them to viewers.  Advertising will become increasingly insidious and difficult to avoid.  Shows will decrease in quality as they incorporate product placement to pay the bills, as seen in "The Truman Show" or "Survivor".

As people can watch whenever they want (after the initial broadcast) networks will no longer be able to use high profile shows to increase the viewership of the duds placed between them.  Whereas we may brighten up at the prospect of fewer bad TV shows, the reality is that there will be fewer good TV shows, because they are the ones that cost money to produce.  I suspect this will force free to air networks out of business or searching for a new profit model that includes either a subscription price (as with cable or satellite TV) or pay per view.

For those of you living in the US, the TiVo has been around for quite some time and provides the functions described above for a subscription.  In many areas of the US high proportions of people already subscribe to cable TV due to poor reception.  Not so in Australia, where cable TV does not include the free to air networks, but with only 2-6 free to air stations, depending on where you live in Australia, many people subscribe to cable just to have more choice.  My guess is that the growing availability of DVRs will be the death of commercial free to air TV.