I really dislike watching TV. I went cold turkey in 1989 when I went to university. Before that I was a certified TV addict, receiving the standard-issue dose of BBC 1 and 2 each day, with some dabbling in Channel 4 at weekends. (I gave up video games too in 1992, and now just watching Half Life makes me feel motion sickness, and Tetris gives me the trembles.)
What really turns me off is the linear nature of TV, the lack of control, and the emotional manipulation. I feel like The Gimp, trussed up and passively ready to please.
Anyway, there’s a whole bunch ‘o stuff on mobile and IP TV today. Here’s the nuggets. First up, The Economist, with a very straight-laced report on the telco roll-out of wired and wireless TV:
There is going to be a tremendous amount of turbulence, driven by the convergence of telecoms, television and media,” says [Andrew Cole, of A.T. Kearney].
Uh, oh. 501 Bad Concept Error. See here for what I think about “convergence”.
James Enck muses that Sky TV’s hook-up with Blinkx search technology will make viewers aware of the more interesting peripheral content around the packaged TV shows, and draw attention away from the TV:
Looks like the TV industry is warming up to internet distribution models, though, bear that I am, I have to question whether this will generate incremental viewing, or in the case of subscription services like Sky, will mark an incremental step towards pushing viewers away from the core TV offering.
Next in our star lineup, via Arts & Letters Daily, is a long essay on why personalised media (TiVo, iPod, etc.) is destroying the cultural value of art, devaluing shared experience, and stultifying critical thought:
In the process we are encouraging the flourishing of some of our less attractive human tendencies: for passive spectacle; for constant, escapist fantasy; for excesses of consumption. These impulses are age-old, of course, but they are now fantastically easy to satisfy. Instead of attending a bear-baiting, we can TiVo the wrestling match. From the remote control to TiVo and iPod, we have crafted technologies that are superbly capable of giving us what we want. Our pleasure at exercising control over what we hear, what we see, and what we read is not intrinsically dangerous. But an unwillingness to recognize the potential excesses of this power—egocasting, fetishization, a vast cultural impatience, and the triumph of individual choice over all critical standards—is perilous indeed.
You’d think that someone in the teleco product planning departments would have got round to reading Content is not King by now — they’ve had four years to spot it. Why the sudden rush to deploy the dying medium of TV? As major league baseball demonstrated, you don’t need a carrier or TV network’s blessing to distribute premium video content.
Let’s put these trends together. What I’m thinking is that there’s a possibility that TV is the next smoking. It just happens to cause death of the brain, not the lungs. Losers watch TV. That TV is crap will become the received wisdom. Cool people don’t watch TV. Giving TV to young kids will be like smoking during pregnancy. It happens, but it’s shameful. Anyway, British kids are too busy taking real narcotics and shoplifting to have time for TV.
Video killed the radio star, but the Internet won’t kill the video star. Fashion will.
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