In a wasted breath, CBS asks for eyes

CBS to “Jericho” Fans — Watch It In Real-time When It Returns – Slice of Scifi

In return for bringing “Jericho” back to TV screens for an abbreviated season to wrap up the loose ends of the show, CBS is requesting that fans watch the show when it airs, rather than using some time-shifting device, like TiVo or downloading the show from the internet, as the majority of the viewers did last season.

I think they might get a bump in viewership, but it won’t be nearly what they’re probably hoping for. The problem is that the world is fundamentally changing, but the networks aren’t keeping up. They run their business by measuring the people who actually watch the show live, the way they have since they came up with the idea of measuring these things, decades ago. That worked fine when people didn’t have a choice – they either watched it when it was on, or they missed it. Then Video Cassette Recorders (VCRs) came along.  If you had something else to do when a show actually aired, you could tape it and watch it later, thus the era of time-shifting arrived. You still had to invest money in tapes, though, which eventually wore out, and you could only squeeze 8 hours on a tape, so there were downsides to that. Now, though, we have the digital equivalent of VCRs: DVRs (and their popular brand names like TiVo). Everything is recorded to disc, which won’t wear out, the user-friendliness of the technology makes it simple for most people, and costs are low. If you’re willing to look a bit, plus wait a little after air time, almost every TV show is even available online for free – though in most cases the legality of that distribution is questionable, at best. Besides that, the culture has changed to the point where technology has become second nature to us, there are more channels than ever before to choose from, and we’re all too busy to sit still for an uninterrupted hour anyway, so the popularity of time-shifting has sky-rocketed.

So why are the networks holding so tightly to their old measurement systems? There are a few reasons:

1. Networks are huge corporations, and changing any established fundamental process in a large organization takes forever.
2. It doesn’t just effect the networks… advertising agencies are neck-deep in this process, too.
3. They can’t figure out how to accurately account for time-shifting, even if they want to.

They’re in a tough spot, honestly. Any way they go, they get in trouble and probably lose money. There are some solutions (micro-payments and direct distribution being the most popular I’ve heard), but they’re not a slam-dunk. Still… you gotta do something, network guys, beyond pleading for the world to play by your rules. Increasingly, the world is gonna say “no,” as time-shifting technology gets even easier to use and even more ubiquitous than it already is. It’s not a fad, it’s a full-on culture-shift, and if you’re on the wrong side of that fault line, you’re going to fade into the past.

[tags]culture shift, time-shifting, dvr, TV, Jericho, networks, Neilsen ratings, micro-payments[/tags]

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