The Slow Death of Prime Time Television

The other night my wife and I did something we haven’t done in a few months. We watched an episode of CSI that wasn’t first recorded on our DVR. Watching it live means that a) you have to sit through fifteen minutes of commercials b) there seems to be some really lousy commercials out there. The one thing that caught our eye the most was the number of infomercials we saw on a program that is running in prime time. Of course this is something that you would not have seen a year ago before the bottom fell out of the economy. With the huge plummet in ad sales, television is being forced to plug that empty inventory with those cheap direct response spots and infomercials. A year ago you would have had to stay up at least past 11pm to see a Sham Wow or a Snuggie commercial. Not any more. Television however has bigger problems it will need to deal with in the near future as it searches for a new model of scheduling and measurement. Soon all homes will have a DVR or some similar time shifting device and this will be end of prime time TV as we now know it. TiVo is getting ready to provide us with a glimpse into how the audience will be measured in this new era of time shifted TV viewing. TiVo is planning to sell its users viewing habits to advertisers. They will provide second by second breakdowns of the shows TiVo user’s record and the commercials they watch… or skip.
Stay tuned...

UMG and YouTube: The Chicken or the Egg?

Universal Music Group's partnering up with YouTube and their parent company Google to showcase their video content is a good move. For one thing it shows that UMG are remembering history rather than avoiding it (anyone remember Napster?). A centralized system for consumers to access the label's content makes good sense.The big question ahead is are more people going to come to YouTube because of the available “higher quality” videos made available through UMG, or are the visits to the new stand alone music site called Vevo going to be the result of YouTube users accidentally stumbling across it? For now I would place my money on the latter of the two just because of the sheer amount of content available to wade through. One thing however is certain and that is a new albeit "still a little frosty" spirit of co-operation seems to be emerging between two companies/industries that have been at odds with each other from day one. Suing your consumer base because they are breaching the old rules of distribution doesn’t work. Finding a new model that address the way people access content in the 21st century does.