ALMOST ALL OF MY TELEVISION watching is on demand. My house is an OD house.
I’m not saying all I watch are movies, old TV shows and kids stuff that my cable company offers via video on demand. What I’m saying is that about 80% of all of my TV watching has morphed into a near fully on-demand model.
I started thinking seriously about that just this week when I read a short Canadian Association of Broadcasters submission to the CRTC. The letter was in response to recent applications from Rogers Cable and Groupe Archambault (a division of Quebecor Media, owners of Videotron) to amend their respective VOD licenses.
Basically, the two companies want to be able to add TV shows – complete with their commercials – to their video on demand libraries. Most VOD content now is commercial-free. The CAB said it’s prepared to support the applications as long as the cable companies come to VOD distribution agreements first with broadcasters and that the commercial messages come from the Canadian programming provider.
Fair enough, I guess.
But then the CAB dropped this paragraph into the letter:
“As an increasing range of programming is offered to viewers on an on-demand basis, it will be incumbent on the Commission to ensure that VOD services continue to play a complementary role to conventional, specialty and pay services, which were licensed on a competitive basis, and to ensure that program rights holders retain control over how, where and when their programming is distributed.”
When I read this, my first reaction was “Hasn’t this ship already sailed?” If not sailed, it’s at least in port, loading more and more consumers.
I have a PVR in my house. It is the best invention since color TV, hands-down (sorry HD-lovers, but I’ll buy another PVR before I even think of an HD set). My TV world is, for all intents and purposes, an on demand one. I feel like I control “how, where and when” I watch “their programming.”
As long as I remember to record what I want to see later on (not a problem now, after a year with the machine), I can call up whatever show I want. I recorded the Lord of the Rings trilogy on TMN months ago and still have the movies on the box.
I have eight episodes of Teletubbies recorded from BBC Kids for my one-year-old daughter to see (which I call up in cases of extreme exasperation – or extreme laziness…). There are a few episodes of The Simpsons in there and I was able to watch much of the Phoenix Suns-San Antonio Spurs playoff series when I wanted.
And when it comes to scheduled programming, if I do miss something, I can always set the box to record the later viewing of the show when it airs on the time-shifted western channels out of Seattle or Vancouver.
While the system isn’t on demand in the truest sense of the words, I do feel like I’ve taken control over my TV viewing. I don’t have to tell you how often I watch commercials, do I?
No matter what the CAB says about VOD services playing a complementary role to conventional, specialty and pay services, in practice, my TV is VOD. There is no way to regulate the changes in my viewing patterns or others like me.
It’s an on-demand world.
Now, not all is perfect bliss, however. The box has space limitations, so some stuff has to be deleted over time to make room for more (and if I had an HD set and wanted to record HD, there’s even less room, in terms of hours). Basketball games or golf tournaments that run long can get cut off if you don’t take care to program the thing to record the show after it, too. Plus, there’s no way to get the shows off the PVR without some network cabling know-how.
And obviously, I can’t call up shows prior to their air date – so the broadcasters still control that. But even then, I usually tune into “live” shows 20 minutes late so I can then skip away.
With my digital PVR box tied into the VOD servers of my cable provider, Cogeco, which offers several hundred titles now and the super-easy navigation of the box, it’s an instant click-through world. TMN on demand has added a further dimension, where for most of their movies in each month, you don’t have to wait for the air date.
When my six-year-old son is watching one of his shows in real-time for once, or worse, if he’s in the basement watching television where we have no set top box, he’s frustrated he can’t skip to other pre-records, fast-forward or pause if he needs to.
He’s used to the on-demand TV world already in our OD house and I can’t see anything getting in the way of this sea-change.
– Greg O’Brien
