The New York Times has a piece on the impact that digital video recording, on-demand offerings, and web video services have had on advertising budgets for prime time television slots.
Apparently if people aren’t actually watching TV during prime time, it makes advertising “trickier to measure and pitch to marketers,” resulting in less ad revenue, giving the networks “no choice but to adapt.”
Boo hoo.
There are about a dozen shows set up to auto-record on my TiVo and of those shows, I might be able to tell you the exact time and date that two of them air (The Office is on at 9:00 on Thursdays and America’s Funniest Home Videos is on at 7:00 on Sundays — or is it 8:00?). I have no idea when new episodes of the rest of my shows air. I don’t know the day or the time.
So the question becomes; does “prime time” even matter. Sure it does. It matters for sports events and it matters for people who don’t have digital video recorders, on-demand, or internet access. Once they die off, though, (old people, not sports) television networks might as well make everything on-demand, with new episodes being made “available” at a certain day and time.
Your comments about knowing when shows air is so correct. I was asking my wife what day her favorite show is on, she was watching it on TiVO, and she had no idea, she just finds it on Tivo once a week and watches it there. As for me, I could watch The Office whenever I want, but I look forward to 9:00 every Thursday because it’s part of my routine. Although I certainly don’t feel like I HAVE to be there because of my DVR, it’s still what I want to be doing at that time. I guess that makes me an old timer.
Yeah, Boo hoo. Times change. If you can’t keep up, then it sucks to be you. Don’t blame the DVR. Don’t blame the VCR. Blame the inability to change with the times.