The PVR battle
The Shifted Librarian had a link to an article about the battle between sudios and ReplayTV. While online last night I was talking about it with some friends and some interesting points were brought up.
First off. I love my TiVo and never ever want to give it up. It has completely changed how I watch TV. But in talking last night, we went to extremes a bit. One difference between ReplayTV and TiVo is that Replay gives options to completely skip commercials. You basicly don't even know they are there. Quite handy from a user perspective. TiVo lets you fast forward through them. From an advertiser perspective, neither is that great, but TiVo is less threatening, it's the same as what people have been doing with VCRs for years.
Now, let's say Replay and similar devices were able to get significant market penetration. And then in response, advertisers become less willing to pay the huge fees for advertising (since more and more people don't even see even see them. How much would you be willing to pay for your normal television watching? How much would you be willing to spend a month for your TV to be completely ad free? For the record, I don't think this will happen anytime soon. Replay is still too expensive for Joe Q Public.
This is probably my biggest concern with all this. Networks do make tons of cash through advertising. Look at the cost of some of these shows to the networks.
On the other side, I think the arguments that are being made by the studios are lame. They are attacking it on the basis of people being able to record their own digital copy of shows like X-Files to archive, saying that this will hurt sales of these shows on DVD. IMHO, not really. In many cases the quality of recording provided on DVD surpases the quality of stuff broadcasted (even over digital cable or satellite).
I think we're in for quite the interesting trip, one that it makes sense to watch very closely.
(Damn, I ended up rambling a lot on that)
