Hal,
Here is an interesting story from todays NY Times.
nytimes.com
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July 5, 1999
Will This Machine Change Television?
By BILL CARTER
A new, innocuous-looking consumer electronic device known as a personal video recorder is not much different in nature from the video cassette recorder, and very few of them have been sold to date.
And yet, an increasing number of executives at television networks and advertising agencies have their ears nervously on alert, wondering if the tiny rumbling noise now coming from this machine is really the first, faint echo of a seismic event, one that will reshape the economic landscape of the television industry.
They are also wondering if the best approach may to be co-opt these machines, adopting them for their own purposes by going into business with the companies selling them. Little has been said publicly about the coming of the PVR, and several senior executives at broadcast networks and big advertising agencies said in interviews they knew little or nothing about the machine. But for those who have looked into PVR's and what they can do now and have the potential to do, the reactions ranged from acknowledgment that significant changes are coming to predictions of nothing less than the end of conventional television as it has existed for a half century.
Certainly the executives at the two companies pushing this new technology, ReplayTV and Tivo, are not hesitant to predict a dramatic impact from their machines, which use the equivalent of a computer hard disk and are able to store between 14 and 30 hours of television programs and record many shows at the same time. The machines do not permit viewers to build libraries of shows, but they can be hooked up to existing VCR's to make copies. ...
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It goes on and is quite interesting.
A couple of points for us.
1) If advertisers need new venues for their products a natural place to look is Internet video.
2) Any perturbation of the TV landscape will probably shift some of the money towards new paradigms (like TVontheWEB).
3) The ability to have personal video players is a prelude to a structure similar to the music industry and this will change the distribution channels, the price structure, content providers, etc. It can only be viewed as an opportunity for Web TV.
We seem to have ringside seats the creative destruction (Schumpeter) of the TV industry.
Thure
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