A Jaded Opinion on Recorded Television
Sunday, September 20, 2009 by Jon Meoli
Back home in America, TiVo is almost a decade old and nearly every household with digital cable (which is all television will be broadcast in in the near future) has some form of DVR. And while it's no longer a matter of life and death when a commitment keeps you away from your favorite show, the reality is that the benefits of these services don't change the fact that it's better to watch things as they happen in real time.
Two posts before me, it says that ten years from now "appointment television" would be dead, but for that to be the case we would have to live in a society where nothing was culturally relevant. Other than because they enjoy them, people watch television shows to be able to discuss it with other people.
A few years ago, HBO tried a "watch at your leisure" experiment with the final season of The Wire, their critically acclaimed drama about my adopted hometown of Baltimore. They would put a new episode up On Demand at Midnight on Monday, allowing people to watch any time before airing that episode Sunday night. The results were poor. Some people watched right away, others waited until it aired Sunday, but nobody knew when to talk about it. Sometimes having a choice doesn't help. While programs that allow people to watch shows on their own schedule certainly helps the viewers, the show will still have the most value if you watch it when it originally airs.
Great post. I guess it's the tension between an appetite for convenience versus the 'water-cooler' culture in which having media in common to discuss is part of the fabric of modern society: something akin to Benedict Anderson's notion of 'imagined community', perhaps.