Why I don't watch broadcast TV (cont.)

About a week ago I noticed an advert on one of the major channels here for the new version of the lizard-tastic V. It looked fairly interesting, but my overriding thought was: "Yeah, it looks good but there's no way I'm watching it on your channel!".

Even though I've been downloading most of my TV for a good few years now, it was my reaction to the V trailer to that made me realise how my viewing habits had irrevocably changed. I know for a fact that I'm not alone. I also know for a fact that if people don't watch broadcast TV then investment is ultimately going to suffer, quality is going to take a nosedive and decent content on TV will probably enter the halls of legend. So, why don't I watch broadcast TV?

You may argue that, with the prevalence of cheap reality shows, quality content on TV is already becoming a thing of the past. However, right now there is still a wealth of excellent creative TV being made - if there wasn't then I wouldn't be using up my bandwidth allowance every month! Still, there's no such thing as a free lunch and I'm growing increasingly aware that if I want shows like Dexter, Doctor Who, Lost, Law & Order: UK, etc, to continue then I need to find a way of putting my penny in the pot.

At present I happily download all these shows and figure I'll pick up the DVD/Blu-ray at a later date as a way of providing some recompense. Recently I've read that this doesn't really cut it in terms of ensuring that a show stays on the air. Also, more often than not I end up not buying the DVD at all.

So, what's the answer? It's simple: the broadcasters have to forget everything they ever knew about television and start again from scratch! They can lead this horse to water but they can't make him drink - and the herd is growing. There are a number of reasons why I've moved on from broadcast TV - all of which are helpfully detailed below - but the real killer is that I would quite happily pay to watch TV (the programmes I'm interested in watching, at least) but right now there's not really a workable model that will allow me to do that.

The key to everything is choice, and you'll realise that as I go through the four points below that choice is at the centre of each and every argument. Broadcasters need to recognise that viewers now have the choice of how to watch their TV and, more importantly, whether they even watch traditional broadcast TV or not.

Adverts

I can tolerate adverts to a degree - that is to say, I can tolerate them as long as I can ignore them. Adverts that jump up and shout at you tend to do little more than alienate audiences. How many times have you visited a website, had a video start playing loudly or, worse, take over your screen, and then simply left that site entirely? True, there's not quite as many channels competing for your attention on TV as there are sites on the internet, but the principle's the same: if your advertising irritates me I'll turn to another channel, leave the room, or just switch off. Either way, you've lost me.

Back in England I could put up with the advertising on the commercial channels because there was always a certain routine: ads would play at regular intervals of 20 minutes (more or less), or halfway through if you were watching a half-hour show. This meant I could usually predict when I'd be able to make that cup of tea, or nip to the toilet. (It also meant I knew when to get the remote control handy so I could turn the volume down, since once upon a time someone, somewhere thought it'd be a *terrific* idea to have adverts twice as loud as the programme you're watching - and I don't care about compression and dynamic range: louder is louder, FACT!)

Unfortunately in Australia the TV advertising mentality is based more on the US model, which dictates that you should stuff your programming with as many adverts as possible. To make things worse the first half of an hour-long will be largely unsullied by adverts, but once you cross that that point the advertising breaks will increase in frequency and length through to the end of the show until you realise you're spending more time watching advertising than actual programming.

This particularly frustrates me because most US hourlongs are structured with act breaks specifically designed to provide a natural pause in the narrative so you can go and shove some adverts in. These act breaks go completely out of the window on Australian TV, making the adverts even more jarring than they usually are.

Perhaps the greatest insult to Australian viewers is that this method is obviously designed to exploit the first half hour to draw you into the show, thereby ensuring that you're more likely to stay tuned when the advertising starts in earnest. When a viewer's already invested half an hour into watching something it's almost guaranteed that they're not going to waste that investment by switching off before the end, not matter how many adverts they have to put up with (or how little respect you show them by doing this in the first place). Unfortunately, since I don't like being treated like a moron I choose not to watch in the first place.

Now, I'm not completely ignorant of the fact that advertising dollars fund most of our TV channels. My rationalisation is that I more or less completely ignore adverts (if I want to buy something I'll read reviews, not look at adverts) so those advertising dollars are largely wasted on me.

Also, advertising (as a necessary evil) should simply be there to supplement the show. Over recent years the mindset among broadcasters seems to have shifted to the point where the creative content is just something you wrap around the adverts, and an inconvenient wrapper at that. I find that somewhat obscene: the funding should never dictate the content. (Many years ago I worked for a magazine where, appallingly, the advertising department was actually given oversight of editorial. Once that happens you stop being a respected publication and simply become yet another brochure.)

Having grown up in England I grew up with the BBC. I pretty much took it for granted, while complaining at the unjustness of being *forced* to pay a license fee just to watch TV. Now my attitude has totally changed. I would jump at the chance to pay for something as brilliant as the BBC. If I only had that chance!

Personal time shifting

Now we move into an area that's a little more out of my control. Since my wife and I had a child the hours in which we can actually sit down and watch TV have been vastly reduced (to maybe an hour or two at the end of each day). This means that anything aired before about 8:30pm, by which time my son will have finally agreed to fall asleep and grace us with his absence, is pretty much out of viewing bounds for us. And even if something watchable does happen to be broadcast during those precious hours while my son's asleep, then it'll still have to compete with all the other crap that needs to get done, along with the likelihood that I'll have some other DVD/Blu-ray/download to catch up with.

I hear you say 'video recorder' and 'dvd recorder' and, even, 'TiVO'. However, I have no intention of getting any of those things: I don't really need to when the internet is like one giant PVR. Furthermore, broadcasters are starting to latch onto that unavoidable concept of constant internet availability with services like BBC's iPlayer and ABC's iView. These services are almost certainly essential to the survival of traditional broadcasters in the future, but they still need to go a lot further. I can, for example, download every episode of The X-Files from torrent sites, but for the most part the official services don't provide anywhere near that depth of catalogue. (This point is perhaps moot since I can quite cheaply buy every episode of The X-Files on DVD, but you get the idea.)

Additionally, by insisting on 'geotarding' these services (for instance, only UK visitors can use iPlayer, only US visitors can use Hulu, etc) the copyright holders are fighting to protect a commercial model that is simply no longer compatible with the global reach of the internet. On the web everything is available to everyone all the time - it might not be the way a lot of companies want it, but frankly they're outnumbered.
It bears mentioning that if the BBC offered a paid subscription service for international users I'd probably snap it up in a heartbeat.

Erratic scheduling

Perhaps one of the biggest reasons why I stopped watching broadcast TV in Perth is that the broadcasters can't even seem to stick to a basic schedule.
In the UK if a programme is scheduled to start at 9pm it'll usually start within a few minutes of that time, if not on the dot of 9pm. If you sit down at to watch a TV programme in Perth at its scheduled time you'll often end up watching at least 5 minutes of the previously scheduled programme, often more. If you're lucky the programme you sat down to watch will start only about 10 minutes late. (Obviously if you've set up your PVR to record that programme you'll need to add at least 20 minutes to the recording time or you're going to miss the end, which happened to me enough times to put me off recording anything - so perhaps that's the intention!)

This just isn't good enough. TV is not that new anymore, it's not a guessing game. These broadcasters are professional corporations who, at the very least, should be capable of airing their shows when they say they're going to air them. The only excuse for shows missing their scheduled airtime should be cataclysmic breaking news or a major live event unavoidably running into overtime.

Unfortunately erratic scheduling doesn't end there. It's certainly not endemic to Australian TV, but broadcasters here seem to have no compunctions about shifting a show around the schedules or stopping it altogether if the ratings aren't satisfactory. A good example is Torchwood, which Channel Ten first start showing at 9:30pm on Mondays. When the ratings didn't meet expections the rest of the series was summarily bumped to midnight on Wednesdays (and it was probably just pure good fortune that the channel didn't stop airing the show completely).

This is far from the only example, and even if a show maintains its position in the schedule you can usually expect it to be bumped from week to week if something 'more important' such as Big Brother or Australian Idol is on. And if you think I'm the only one who has a problem with all of this read the comments here: http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2009/09/commercial-tv-scheduling-is-a-joke/

Broadcaster loyalty

This really ties into the above point, but I feel it's significant enough to warrant standing on its own. Broadcasters rely on a certain degree of loyalty from audiences. This is why you have lead-in shows - a programme that's deemed just the ticket to get you sitting down at the right time to spend the rest of your night tuned into the same channel.

I'd argue that this works both ways: if we're expected to show any sort of loyalty to any one channel then that broadcaster has to reciprocate and treat its audience with respect. No broadcaster has the right to expect an audience to continue watching when it can't even stick to its own schedule, or when it airs shows at a different time or day each week, or even when it tries to claim that a mid-season episode is a season finale (as has happened with Heroes in the past).

I simply don't feel that my viewership is respected by the major commercial channels here in Perth. Therefore I choose not to be treated like a brainless commodity: I choose not to watch.

Where's the alternative?

What is clear, at least to me (and probably to millions of others, most of whom presumably don't work in broadcast TV) is that the TV viewing environment has irrevocably changed and those who are currently pulling the strings need to realise that (to labour a metaphor) Pinnochio is doing as he pleases and no longer has strings.

TV audiences now have the power to control what they watch and when they watch it. For this reason I can't help feeling that the traditional idea of a broadcast schedule will be dead within a decade at the most. Perhaps broadcasters do realise this, which is whey they're cramming the schedules with cheap reality TV and abundant advertising while they still can.

In any event, the model of the future will almost certainly be TVs that connect directly to the internet and download programming on demand. Most forward thinking companies are already dabbling in this area (step forward BBC, ABC, the UK's Channel 4, and various others).

Choice is the key, so at the same time why not protect revenues by giving viewers the choice of paying a nominal fee to watch a programme (no more than a dollar, or maybe two for repeated viewings) or watching it for free with advertising embedded.

Sure you can keep the broadcast schedule for those who prefer it, but if that's the only model you have then money is going to be lost. If money is lost then people are going to have to stop making decent programmes somewhere down the line, and if the only content that ends up being produced in the future is cheap reality crap then you can count me out.

p.s. I'll be following up this post with a more detailed look at some of the alternatives that are currently available so, as they say, stay tuned!