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Whose side is TiVo on?
On a discussion list last week (I'm writing this on 9/5/2001), the subject of TiVo's future came up. While everybody seemed to agree that TiVo was a wonderful product that in some cases even changed people's lives, there was some disagreement about the larger context. Like, was TV still nefarious anyway? Bob Frankston was especially vocal in this regard. (Here's one of his essays along these lines.) I wrote my own rant yesterday. Oddly, I've had more compliments in private email than on the list. Not sure why. In any case, I decided to put it up here where a larger number of people can read it.
My $.02. We should remember that the customers and consumers of television are different populations. TV's customers are its advertisers, not its viewers. When we speak about the "market" for television, we should be careful not to confuse viewing with the kind of direct influence enjoyed by real customers in real market relationships. When we pay nothing for a program, we exert exactly the same amount of influence over it. In the world of commercial television — the kind supported by advertising — programming is just bait: chum on the waters. The real seared ahi and poached salmon in this market isn't the programming. It's us. We're the fish the advertisers buy at TV's real marketplace, which is mostly a conversation between agencies and media buyers and sellers. The crowning irony is that advertisers don't know if they were getting poached halibut or fried plankton. The prices they pay are for ratings numbers — "points" and "shares" of various demographics — that are derived from tiny samplings based on the most rudimentary methods, especially compared to what is knowable via direct connections like the Net provides. An old saying in advertising is "I know half my money is wasted, but I just don't know which half." This is a self-deluding lie that in a largely dishonest business passes for aphorism. In fact nearly all advertising on TV and radio is wasted. The system is massively inefficient. The Net is many things, but for business it is a vast bazaar that renders consumers obsolete by making them customers. On the Net, the relationship between buyer and seller is as direct and conversational as it needs to be. In the conversation we're having here, the improving diversity and quality of TV programming is a red herring -- and a very attractive one. The two hundred and some channels we get on our Dish 500 system (for, like $30-something per month) is amazing, and contains some outstanding "content." But the real issue is one that Bob brought up, and continues to bring up: What best facilitates relationships between supply and demand here? And what are we gonna do to build it? For the seventy years or so that commercial broadcasting has been around, the supply side has been completely in charge of its relationship with programming demand (not advertising demand, which is another matter). You consumed what they let you consume, when they let you consume it. TiVo only changes "when" part. The menu of "what" is the same. So is pretty much everything else. Make no mistake: TiVo is an instrument of Supply. The money behind TiVo is glad to buy TV ads showing viewers throwing TV executives out the window, but TiVo will never install anything that poses a threat to the relationships between media and their real market partners: advertisers. And that's why it's doomed. Look at the MUTE button on your remote control. That one button testifies to a negative demand for TV advertising. Outside HSC and QVC, we want less of it, not more. Not "better," either. Would you watch more of 20/20 if you knew the advertising would be more appropriate to you, personally? Is such a thing even conceivable? New! Improved! *Personal* insults from Toyota! If micropayments were possible, I believe, many of us would gladly watch everything on a PPV basis if we could do without the ads. But that's a hypothesis the Big Media supply side never wants to test, because they depend on the inefficiencies built into the current system. And that's also why TiVo will fail. Its backers won't let it do what it needs to do to truly serve the demand side for programming (excuse me, *content*). Evidence: <http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2585728,00.html>
More reading (or, ranting):
<http://doc-weblogs.com/2000/06/12> Relationship with Demand, by the way, is why Microsoft will kick AOL's ass. AOL is deeply vested in the traditional advertising model. Thats why they bought so many traditional media. Microsoft might give a shit about that model, but not a big one. Microsoft is much more interested in having real market relationships with customers than in aggregating a zillion "consumers" to "target" with "messages." That's why MSN Messenger will clean AIM's clock as well. AIM is about aggregating eyeballs to sell to advertisers. MSN Messenger is about providing benefits of all kinds that people might really want. I say this, by the way, as a certified Linux advocate who knows how to knock Microsoft with the best of them. Real markets — the bazaar-like places where buyers and sellers get to talk and develop relationships and where power is rather evenly distributed between supply and demand — is natural to the Net and anathema to Broadcasting as Usual. And for all the good it does, TiVo is on the broadcasting side, which is lining up with Hollywood and other bigtime content producers to regulate the living shit (that's you and me) out of the Net. I don't think they'll succeed, but there will be a busload more Dmitry Sklyarovs before it's over. Also smoking corporate bodies lying beside the late Napster (which had 60 million users — a number that concerned its murderers not in the least) Freeing those people, mostly still unaccused, is more important than freeing up time for more, or better, TV.
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