- In September of 2004, "The Los Angeles Times Magazine" printed this material (under the title, "The End of Television As We Know It") as a featured essay. Since the link to the L.A. Times version requires people to pay for it, and since writers own their copyright on material that the Times prints, I'm putting it up here so that it can still be found by people who still ask me about it. I can't say that every word is accurate, even thought it's only two years later, because things are changing so damn fast. But here it is nonetheless...
Most nights in our house, I’d like to think everyone in the family – two parents and three kids – is present and accounted for, but that would require a room-to-room search. It was so much easier keeping track of people in the nuclear family I grew up in. Eight o’clock meant prime-time and that meant everyone gathered in the living room huddled around our hot new “technicolor” TV watching the same episode of “Mannix” or whatever was on. The last time that family groupthink happened in my own house was, well, I can’t remember when that happened…
Anyway, it’s not really technically “television” we’re watching these days, and we’re not really “watching” it so much as interacting with it, and the prime-time “network” part didn’t get decided and scheduled in offices in Burbank or Los Angeles but here, at our house, by us.
On Bryce TV, I’m glued to my computer monitor, streaming selected evening news clips from six different sources, simultaneously Googling how to turn the “Poseidon” cruise ship upside down and still keep it floating, and writing this essay.
On Jackie TV, my wife, also a screenwriter, is engrossed in a DVD on the bedroom set of a feature that bombed at the box office which she rented by putting it on her Netflix “rental queue” so that it was mailed to her when first available.
On Jake TV, our just graduated high school senior is playing the latest incarnation of “Final Fantasy” on the PS-2 in-between watching “The Daily Show” on a VHS copied from the TiVo, all while working out on the elliptical trainer, because the older TV nearby actually still plays VHS.
On Leslie TV, our teenaged daughter has a movie selected from the DirecTV homepage, downloaded off the satellite, now screening with her posse on the big screen downstairs.
On Jordan TV, our 12 year old is finishing last week’s episode of “Monk,” then switching to “Smallville” fifteen minutes late so it’s already been recorded on the DVR hard-drive and he can skip through the commercials.
My grandmother was born into a world where there were no airplanes but she lived to see man walk on the moon. By comparison, many of us today were born into a black-and-white, three-channel, no remote, single household TV world, and are living to see an overwhelming change in how we look at whatever it is we see on whatever monitor we’re seeing it on.
Back when my father chaired our TV universe from his barcalounger, we used to have network loyalty because it was easier than getting up to change channels. We used to buy certain products because we saw their ads while waiting for the show to start up again. If we missed a show, we had to hope it would re-air in the summer and we caught it then. If you missed a movie, forget it, you had to wait for college and hope you could get it in a film class. Quaint, isn’t it?
Today, my youngest probably has as much control over his viewing options as CBS patriarch William Paley ever did. Everywhere Jared turns, he makes choices -- about what he wants to watch, when he wants to watch it, where in the house he wants it, and on and on. But there’s a lot more than good old-fashioned TV competing for his interest.
In our technology-crazed house alone, his attention can get hijacked by an i-Pod (major and mini versions), cell phones that take photos or download music or send instant messages, Game Cube, the CD stacker, X-Box, broadband network, wireless this and that, Playstation 2, TiVo, DirectTV, Netflix, the big screen, five room TVs, five desktop computers, one laptop, cable, satellite music, and all the piled-up screening tapes and DVDs sent out every year for the Emmys and the Oscars.
There’s so much stuff coming at us so fast, from so many different
angles, it’s safe to say the most shocking thing is the sight of our
oldest son, Jonathan, now exhausted from his time on the elliptical,
curled up with… gasp… a good book. He’s our household anomaly. Did you
know that the number of Americans who even cracked open a book of
fiction in the last year was only 46 percent? And that was down ten
percent in twenty years? Not all that surprising, though, as we see
this avalanche of options rolling down the hill toward us.
Broadcast pundits have been trying to get those of us in the biz to call these new viewing choices by the important sounding phrase of “convergence.” Around our house, though, the only thing converging is kids on my home office with outstretched palms looking for cash to buy DVDs, CDs, PCs, music downloads, new cell phones and every other new piece of hardware needed to play all the software.
For me, it’s not a state of convergence that we are entering in this digital age but something a little more metaphysical. All the information overload is ganging up on our senses and coming together into something else:
The Blur.
By that, I mean the lines and boundaries which used to keep things in
their nice little compartments are washing away like a sand castle at
the beach. Yes, we have phones that are cameras, computers that are
TVs, and televisions with satellite music, but it’s really more than
that.
In the military, soldiers have a phrase to describe what’s really happening versus what the generals are telling them is happening – they call it the “ground truth.” When the press release says we’re winning the hearts and minds and the boots on the ground are taking incoming fire? That’s ground truth.
The corporate view often heard is that DVRs or Digital Video Recorders won’t catch on with the masses. Don’t take that bet. The ground truth, in my household, is that people are willing to embrace a new technology or a new anything faster than they used to. Cable took a while to catch on, but satellite TV is going gang-busters. The VHS took a while, but the DVD had ‘em from hello. If you have one of these DVR devices, then you already know how you consume television has changed. You no longer watch the same way that you used to. The VHS promised time-shifting, but the DVR finally delivers it.
With the DVR, you become a network programmer, picking a little from here and little from there, then watching it in whatever order you want. My family has become passionate about our TiVo. Nobody ever says in our house, “What’s on TV tonight?” We do, however, check to see what’s on the DVR. Even when I was chairman of the TV Academy, I usually had no clue what night my favorite programs were on. A good night of television might be “24” (Fox/Monday/9pm), “CSI” (CBS/Thursday/9pm) and “Sopranos” (HBO/Sunday/9pm). But I had to check the network websites to tell you that. In the DVR world, times are irrelevant.
That giant sucking sound you hear is not just jobs going to Canada. It’s the shattered pieces of the old system going down the drain. The scramble is on today to see what will replace it. That’s why Microsoft’s Bill Gates came calling on Hollywood in October with a glitz-fest that packed the Shrine Audiorium. Gates dreams big. He only wants to put Windows at the center of entertainment, both behind the scenes and in consumers’ homes. He knows if he doesn’t grab it quick, somebody else will.
In the late Brandon Tartikoff’s memoirs, the whiz kid network programmer called his time in television “the last great ride.” It wasn’t all hyperbole. His time at the helm was the last time a network programmer could claim to be completely dominant. Today, Les Moonves, the head of CBS, still rakes in the bushels of ad dollars like Tartikoff did with his Cosby-and-Cheers-fueled viewing frenzies. But CBS’s hit “C.S.I.” only pulls in about 16 percent of American homes with TV sets. This means, if you do the math, that about 84 percent of these homes are doing something else. And this is the #1 show. We’re so far past the days when we all watched “Bonanza” together.
So what does that mean for the future? Television, you all know, is run by people who make their livings telling other people what to watch and when, while cramming in more and more ads to pay for it all. Plug in a device that short-circuits the system and watch out.
Already, the lines between advertising and content are more blurred today than ever. Increasingly, the ads aren’t just between the programs anymore, they are in the program. It isn’t just “I-Robot” that has the Fed Ex robot making the delivery, product placement is in your TV shows. Just ask the starved “Survivor” munching on his bag of Doritos. And, by the way, while we’re zapping past all ads on our TVs, have you noticed the one place where the number of ads increases all the time and you just can’t get away from them? Your local Cineplex.
Kids, especially young men, spend over twice as much time playing videogames and surfing the Internet as they do watching TV. Other than his daily dose of Jon Stewart, my oldest son only watches Japanese anime he TiVos or gets from Netflix, preferring instead to play web-based role playing games with friends all over the world or participating in a LAN fragfest. He’s at USC on a track to major in Videogame Design because he’s been raised on participatory stories, not the old linear ones that mom and dad write.
My teenage daughter watches TV, instant messages her friends, listens to music and does her homework all at the same time. Television has competition for our kids’ attentions, even as they evolve to instinctively filter out whatever input they don’t want to focus on.
My neighbor and friend down the street works at Sony Pictures. He says one of the next big things for SONY is the “media server.” Meaning a single hard drive somewhere in your house that stores all your digital clutter: your digital music, your digital films, your digital videogames and your digital TV shows. Then all this content gets distributed to whatever monitors you have wherever you have them. Eventually, you’ll have access to every film ever made, every TV show ever made, every videogame ever made, and every song ever recorded. On demand.
Here’s what I want to know. Will kids who can no longer appreciate the difference between a broadcast network and a cable network or a pay network and a satellite feed really appreciate the distinctions we currently draw between all these delivery systems? My daughter is an MTV fan, but to her, that cable network is on a par with CBS – they both come over a TV set, which is just a monitor to her. Throw out all the frustrating-to-open DVD boxes, the CD jewel cases, and pretty soon it’s just a screen with choices on it, like computers. It’s one giant, indistinct, amorphous hard drive of blur.
That’s the future. And the future is pretty much here, no matter what anybody tries to tell you.
When viewers can skip a commercial, the chances are they will. 43 percent of DVR owners say they use the machines not to time-shift and watch a show at another time but to start late so they can fast forward through the commercials. So when digital video recorders and media servers have penetrated enough households, what exactly is the business model that pays for the commercials that pay for the programs we write and produce, which pays our salaries, which feed our families? Former Coca-Cola executive Steven Heyer told an Advertising Age conference last year that “…if a new model isn’t developed, the old one will simply collapse.”
The best model to replace what’s on the way out may be TiVo meets iTunes. As another friend of mine says, it’s all coming down to who “aggregates” the bill which winds back to Bill Gates and his vision of “subscription based models.” Oh, broadcast TV will have ads for a few decades – maybe – and the lower income consumers will watch them. The higher income households with DVR’s will have to pay to download their content. People have a certain figure in their head that they’re willing to pay to bring content into their homes and use it on their monitors, provided that number doesn’t get too outrageous. Our media bills will look more and more like just another utility bill. You consume a lot of water and electricity, and you pay more. You consume a lot of digital downloads, it’s gonna cost you.
Will there be advertising? Naturally. As for what it will look like, and how you’ll get it, I’m going to have to get back to you on that. But we can say this much –the Last Big Thing was the 30-second commercial. Watch a few fading away in your rear-view mirror. They may not be around forever. Something for a major nostalgia night at the Museum of Broadcasting. Or maybe something you can access from your Windows Media Center’s “My TV” folder.
There is one huge positive role model out there. Remember Bob Hope? He survived and thrived through vaudeville, radio, movies and television. He knew his content and he molded it to the ever-evolving delivery systems.
Well, those of us in entertainment have been writing and creating content since the storytellers gathered around nice, warm campfires. And we will be doing that for as long as there are people who want to know what the folks are like on the other side of the river. Just don’t forget to throw another download on the digital campfire.
Whatever’s playing on your network tonight, I’m sure it will be just perfect -- for you.
