Scheduled Television is Dead
28 November 2006 06:48 AM | Peeves and Irritations
I recently became a Comcast cable TV customer. Comcast has a feature called On Demand, as part of their digital cable offering. To use On Demand, you select a clip, TV show or movie from a menu and it starts playing. If you get interupted in the middle of watching, it will remember were you left off for about 12 to 24 hours. Nice. What is even better is that a lot of the content is available for free. Did you miss the NBC or CBS news? You can watch it when you want on demand, not on the television network's schedule but when it is convenient for you.

There is nothing new about on demand television. People have been using Tivo and other digital recorders to time shift TV programs for some time. But frankly I would not use such a device because there is not enough good programming left on TV to justify the extra expense of a digital recorder. With few exceptions, I no longer actively seek out particular shows for watching - I just sort of channel surf until I find something good, which is sort of a passive approach.

I guess there will always be some demand for scheduled television, but as we all get busier with our lives, I suspect that on demand TV, delivered either by digital recorder, DVD, cable or iPod will become the growth market for video entertainment in the future.
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