Jerry Brito writes:
... This migration of video content to broadband has prompted several analysts and pundits to predict the death of broadcast television. If the broadcast and cable networks put their shows online, and if thousands of small niche producers join them, why would anyone subscribe to cable? Why wouldn't consumers simply look up and buy the shows or movies they want to watch from iTunes or some other online service? ...
... However, don't send the flowers yet. Social, technical, and economic forces won't let broadcast TV perish. ΒΆ Watching television is a passive activity. To be entertained, you don't have to do much more than turn on the TV and surf until something good comes up. If there were no channels to surf, only thousands of programs you could call up on demand, how would you know what to watch? Sure, you could use a search engine to pinpoint a show on a particular topic, but that requires effort and knowing ahead of time specifically what sort of program you want to watch. Even if shows are available for download online, consumers appreciate the effortlessness of a boob tube with its preset package of a couple hundred channels. ...
Link: TCSDaily.
The comments in this posting can be applied to radio, too. There's palpable value to a programmed stream in any medium. Shoot -- there's value to printed newspapers (as opposed to web sites), too. There's something great about getting "caught" by a story or a show or a piece of music that you weren't planning on experiencing and didn't seek via keyword or subject area. I've got hundreds of albums of music that I've stumbled across over the years. And how many articles have I read over the years that I didn't intend to read? So the value of the streamed / programmed / selected format remains strong because sometimes we don't want to search, and sometimes (morning drive time) we'd like a low-maintenance companion rather than an opportunity to forage for information ourselves.
That said, the greatest TV discovery I've made in the last year wasn't by serendipitously flipping channels. It was a cheap download on iTunes that exposed me to the new Battlestar Galactica -- a program on a cable channel I don't get. I'm now the proud owner of the entire DVD collection (to date) and I'm waiting for the latest DVD release in a couple weeks. Sometimes it's effortless to find good content in an on-demand world, too.
Posted by: John Proffitt | Sunday, 10 September 2006 at 03:23