The television medium is always in the news !

A steady growth in ad revenues boosted by sudden windfall events - like World Cup Cricket or Football or elections, televison is quite clearly the preferred advertising medium for most products. (Notwithstanding the Indian Election commission's recent decree to disallow election advertising on Indian channels!)

Surely, television (as we know it today) is under no immediate threat from any other mass medium. So how does the Internet medium changing the face of television ?

A Technology called DVR
Digital Video Recording (DVR) is a term used to describe the technology used to describe recording of audio-visual content on digital media so that they can be easily replayed, paused and even edited.

Sounds innocuous ? Now if you apply DVR to live TV broadcast, you can actually re-model your TV programming without involving the content owner ! DVR technology permits you to :
• decide the shows you want to watch later (piecemeal if you so desire)
• replay them backwards in slow motion
• skip TV commercials
• edit content and
• rewind a live TV telecast

Now that has a profound effect on the viewing habits of the television viewer. Something that definitely affects broadcasters / content providers. And especially for advertisers. Provided that we can record what the viewer does with the recorded content.

The TiVo Service
U.S. based TiVo is the creator of a genre called television services for DVR - or live television program recording. The service operates a Digital Video Recorder (DVR), which is like a VCR but with a hard drive. It digitally records up to 140 hours of your favorite shows automatically, every time they're on, without the problems associated with videotape. Hard drives embedded in DVRs store data from broadcasts, letting viewers pause live television temporarily and to review a scene or event. The service also allows consumers to find and record movies by a favourite director.

Ideally offered as a service that is either bundled with a broadcast platform or a cable operator, TiVo can also run without collaborating with a cable operator - by relying on its own TV Program Listing Database (available using a low band width internet connection).

Riding on its arrangement with satellite TV provider DirecTV which offers TiVo for an additional $5 per month, the subscriber base of TiVo has grown to 1.3 million as on January 31, 2004. Despite this, TiVo has yet to reach an agreement with cable operators, who control 60% of U.S. households. Perhaps, this is so because each cable operator wants to set up his own TiVo like service.

For example, TimeWarner Cable is selling recording capability through its digital-cable set-top box, while Charter Communications offers a product through its Digeo division. And Comcast has tied up with Gemstar-TV Guide for access to its interactive programming guide. While it appears that each cable operator may ultimately have deals with more than one DVR service, what is refreshing to note is that, cable operators are finally accepting the concept.

Today TiVo has many competitors like Replay TV, MythTV & others who are trying to capture slots into the TiVo space !

TV Viewership, Spot Monitoring via extended services like TiVo
In June 2003, TiVo launched their service for TV Viewership Reporting. TiVo's audience measurement tools give broadcasters and advertisers the first opportunity to analyze second-by-second specific viewing patterns within television programs.

Data is collected when each TiVo DVR makes its daily call to the company's Broadcast Center each day to retrieve and download TV Listing information.

If successful, TiVo's measurement capabilities will leverage features of its electronic service to collect data and offer the television and advertising industry tools never available for analyzing specific viewing behaviour.

The Final Word
The impact of DVR on television programming as well as commercials is expected to be significant. Broadcasters & advertisers need to understand this, so they can adapt content and advertising strategies to the new television medium which is inter-twined with the Internet.

Program listings picked up from web-sites. Individual viewer data transmitted via web-sites. Instant & indepth viewership analyses. And new technologies like Unicast Video Commercials (broadcast quality advertising with interactive screens) which can be hosted on web-sites and played back after each commercial at great speed.

Television is about to mutate (along with a little help from the Internet) to an altogether different experience !