Spoiled by the speed of the Internet, consumers now want everything, pronto. When you can bank, shop, chat and download the new Beck CD on Saturday morning in your jammies, it seems silly to have to wait for a Thursday-evening appointment to watch a favorite TV show. Soon you won’t. Within 10 years consumers will get instant gratification by pressing the remote of their “television,” the by-then-nostalgic term for the computer-driven home-entertainment appliance.
We’re entering the age of Entertainment on Demand. “The future is about more choice, more control for the consumer,” says Lee Masters, the CEO of Liberty Digital, the Internet arm of cable-television titan John Malone. “Whatever you are interested in watching, you’ll be able to access.” All the major broadcast networks, cable networks and studios are preparing for a future where the consumer calls the shots at home. Roughly 2 million PCs today have the high-speed Internet access necessary to watch high-quality video. By 2008 there will be 57 million PCs with that capability. “It won’t matter if you are in a cabin in the wilderness without electricity or on top of the Empire State Building–you will get all the video, audio, data, whatever you want, with a device you pull out of your back- pack or purse,” says media analyst Jimmy Schaeffler, CEO of the Carmel Group.
A deeply personal TV market where folks watch only what they want whenever they want? This must be the long-anticipated end of the broadcast networks, right? Wrong, says Scott Sassa, president of NBC West Coast: “Most people will continue to watch programming in a pattern that allows them to be current.” NBC will grow through “brand extension,” Sassa says. “You are now a viewer–we want you to be a member, then a user, then a buyer of NBC programming and merchandise.”
“Branding” actually makes sense in a point-and-click TV world. “Networks are a convenient way to categorize programming,” agrees Sony Corp. of America chairman Howard Stringer, but the big broadcast networks aren’t the brands with clout. “MTV and HBO are the models for the future. Channels like Nickelodeon, where they have crafted a singular identity–that’s what will work,” says Stringer. The democratization of entertainment may even improve programming, says Stringer. “Dramas will look more like carefully crafted mini-series, and comedies will be written with more time and care instead of the weekly race to fill the time slot. We will have to create something more memorable to rise above the noise.”
Want a little taste of the entertainment-on-demand future and have several hundred dollars to spare? Order the newest video toy, the Personal Viewing System, with brand names TiVo and Replay, among others. It’s a computer hard disk with a brain, easily programmed to capture all your favorite programs to be played back at your leisure. You’re a John Travolta fan? This baby can record everything he’s in this week without your ever having to check TV Guide. And it’s smart enough to build your personal profile and anticipate shows you’ve never heard of but might like. “It’s part of the inexorable trend toward the merging of the television and the computer,” says Bob Leighton, president of Encore Entertainment Group, a pay-cable service that has invested in TiVo. “It’s the end of appointment television, outside of live events like sports and news.”
Sony’s Stringer is just as bullish on the new recorders, but it’s no surprise that this hardware manufacturer and studio owner touts the technology inside the Sony combo PlayStation-DVD player. As of this year’s holiday season only 270,000 of these recorders had been sold. Carmel Group, an industry analyst, predicts that this time next year 860,000 units will be in homes. By 2004 more than 7.25 million will be operating.
But by then the need for time shifting may already be obsolete. Why bother recording shows when everything you want is just a point and click away.
