Hello TiVo - Goodbye TiVo?

I've spent some time last year (and I hope to do more of it in 2009) talking and writing about the increasing challenge to traditional television which the growing online video sector poses - both in terms of the original content available from the likes of YouTube and Current.tv and in terms of the shared and re-broadcast television content available from Justin.tv and various bittorrent networks.

My argument in that context was that such online services are gradually becoming more convenient than television itself, even where it's enhanced through VCRs, DVRs, TiVos, iPod Videos and other time- and space-shifting devices. Well, as it turns out, younger television audiences at least in the US agree with me. The Wall Street Journal reports that a new study by Solutions Research Group found that

among a more narrow band of viewers -- 18- to 34-year-olds -- SRG found that 70% have watched TV online in the past. In contrast, only 36% of that group had watched a show on a TiVo or some other DVR at any time in the past.

That's significant, not least also because that age range constitutes one of the most attractive marketing demographics, of course. Online TV viewing has doubled in just two years, and as SRG itself puts it,

most young TV viewers are already living in a post-DVR world with much greater availability of online video both legally and also via peer-to-peer sources.

Australia, I'd assume, still lags behind such trends to some extent, due to our comparatively poor and expensive broadband services. Still, the likelihood that such US developments will eventually filter through across the, ahem, big pond might dim the current celebrations accompanying the, by some, long-awaited entry of TiVo into the local market.

I blogged late last year about the presentation by local TiVo licensee Hybrid TV's CEO Robbee Minicola at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress, in which she very enthusiastic declared that 'TV is the new black' and predicted the continuing focus of audiences on television as the 'central screen' in the house - a screen which would continue to show TV as TV, not as Internet content.

I was sceptical then, and I'm even more sceptical now - where Robbee outlined a vision where the other screens around the house (including computer screens) would be secondary and subordinate to that 'central screen', I'd suggest that we're far more likely to see the big-screen television in the living room become a multi-purpose display unit driven by any number of (increasingly computerised, networked) devices - indeed, by the digital home entertainment network permeating the house. As we enter the post-DVR world, TiVos as standalone units will have a short lifespan, I think: in future, they'll be replaced by my laptop, desktop, or iPod video streaming HD content straight to the 'television' screen. In fact, to any of them around the house, central or not.

Technorati : DVR, PVR, TiVo, streaming media, television, videosharing
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