A Current Affair with Ray Martin aired a feature story on the future of digital television, declaring that it is here right now!
The article showed how you can pause Live TV with the excellent Foxtel IQ set top box (part owned by PBL – Channel Nine) and also mentioned how you can also record live TV to a hard drive with a PVR (Personal Video Recorder).
However one of the most popular features and one that has made it a huge success in America is that you can set a TIVO (name of a popular U.S. PVR device) to set and record all of your favourite shows onto a hard drive and then burn them to a DVD.
Perhaps “THE” most popular feature is actually programming the devices to skip TV commercials or dub them out of recordings altogether, both of which A Current Affair failed to mention in their story and with good reason!
TV Networks in America have been battling with ways to make commercials viewable to the public so the millions of owners do not skip them when recording shows. They need to do this to try to halt the shift away from traditional advertising to mobile phones and the Internet.
This is just another example of how the Internet and technology is transforming traditional media and why the decade from 2010 onwards will see a sharp decline in the power of Television Networks and Newspapers in the advertising medium. Graeme Samuel of the ACCC has already warned TV and Radio that a survey showed that consumers aged between 18 and 34 years do not read newspaper and are watching less television than ever before.
What is a media magnate to do?
As for Radio Stations – Ever Heard of Satellite Radio? Good Bye!!!
