May 23, 2002

Good PVR issues summary

Posted by Scott at 02:12 PM

Amy Harmon has written a good article summarizing why PVRs are so enticing to consumers and the moves advertisers are doing to fend against them. (Websurfers new to the NYT online site will need to register...sorry)

Dismissed until recently as too expensive and complex for the average consumer to set up, DVR's are now a fixture in more than a million United States households - about 1 percent of the total - a number expected to grow to 50 million over the next five years, according to Forrester Research.
[...] as the popularity of the digital technology begins to undermine many of the basic assumptions that have governed the television business for decades, broadcasters, cable programmers and advertisers are scrambling both to resist and to adapt to people who can rearrange schedules and skip commercials at the press of a button.
[...] To win [in court], they need to prove that the machine is fundamentally different from the VCR, whose distribution was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1984 after a similar challenge by the entertainment industry.
Lawyers for the companies now argue that the court's endorsement of consumers' right to "time shift" television programming in the 1984 case was based on the assumption that copyright holders would not suffer significant financial damage as a result.
[...] "We've trained people that you can buy things at 3AM in the morning in the nude on the Internet and make a call to anyone from anywhere on a cellphone, and the idea that CBS is going to determine when I watch `CSI' flies in the face of that trend," said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research. "TV networks are going to have to figure out how to make money from a TV viewer that is not nailed to the chair waiting for the commercial to end."
On a different note, Jane Chastain wrote a nice article about our local U.S. Senator, Bob Smith, and draws analogies to the classic movie, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washtington". Bob is facing a serious challenge this year with a more "establishment" opponent, John Sununu, son of the famous Sununu.

Not only did our house hit the market this week, but a house down the street from us also just entered for the exact same price. Knowing that house, it can only help the sale of our house if anyone does a back to back viewing of the two homes. Ironically it was our current house and that other house down the street that we were deciding between seven years ago. "You have now entered a dimension not of sight and sound, but of mind..."

Comments