ARCHIVE - What'd'ya know... TiVo not killing TV...
Archive: Wed Nov 4 18:22:18 2009 Title: What'd'ya know... TiVo not killing TV... Mood: apathetic Music: a state of Trance Official Podcast Episode 079 - Armin van Buuren
When TiVo and other Digital Video Recorders were new, the TV industry went insane with lawsuits and hysterical rhetoric about how DVRs were going to destroy the world!!!
Industry analysts claimed that DVR "potentially threatens the very lifeblood of how television is funded and how it's used for marketing and advertising."
Of course, what was really happening is what always happens when new technologies come along that change things: New companies talk about a "brave new world" that the tech offers, old companies fear for their very life and fight tooth and nail to avoid any change.
We saw it with VCRs, cassette tapes, radios, and every new technology to ever come forward.
Via an EFF posting, it seems that once again, history has shown that new technology improves things rather than destroys everything.
This weekend, The New York Times announced that "DVR ratings now add significantly to live ratings and thus to ad revenue." Yes, new technologies disrupt things and sometimes business models have to change, but I, for one, am getting tired of the moral panic, doom-and-gloom we hear from the likes of MPAA, RIAA, TV and Movie studios and basically anyone wrapped in the old industry. History has shown them time-and-time-again to be wrong.
"I forsee a marked deterioration in American music...and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue—or rather by vice—of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines..." -John Philip Sousa on the Player Piano (1906)
"The public will not buy songs that it can hear almost at will by a brief manipulation of the radio dials." -Record Label Executive on FM Radio (1925)
"But now we are faced with a new and very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the videocassette recorder." -MPAA on the VCR (1982)
"When the manufacturers hand the public a license to record at home...not only will the songwriter tie a noose around his neck, not only will there be no more records to tape [but] the innocent public will be made an accessory to the destruction of four industries." -ASCAP on the Cassette Tape (1982)
