Meet TV’s new Timelord: you

The multichannel, on-demand future is now, but we still love traditionally delivered TV

IF YOUR household is typical of many in Wales, it will have featured at least one conversation over the last 48 hours lamenting the state of modern Christmas TV. The extent to which this is a grounded complaint, as opposed to simple, irrepressible nostalgia is impossible to say. As historian Joe Moran points out, “the essence of television is its ephemerality: it is a world of flickering images, each dying at the moment it is born”. Even the compendious archive that is YouTube can only ever furnish curated exhibits of our televisual past. By definition, these are unrepresentative of the generality of our bygone viewing experience. That has blurred past us like so much scenery from a moving train; its details unremembered, its features unalterable, its passage linear.

Or this is how it has always been. Today, television is on the cusp of a cultural change as profound as any since it became a mass consumer item. Affordable and accessible technology now allows us to end one of the fundamentals of viewing. That schedule of programming, for so long something we had to obey, can now obey us. Indeed, a small but growing cohort of viewers are now capable of creating their own schedules every time they watch television. Forget the peremptorily young new Doctor Who: these are TV’s true Timelords, freed from the constraints of network bosses and station controllers.

Leading the charge in this liberation is the PVR (or Personal Video Recorder), a set-top hard drive that has taken the place of the previous acronym, the VCR, in allowing us to pluck individual programmes from their schedule and watch them at our leisure. But PVRs – the most popular of which is the Sky+ – allow us also to “timeshift”, starting programmes a few minutes or half an hour late, and pausing and rewinding broadcasts as they happen. More than one in four homes in Wales now have PVRs but, as significant as they are, they can only modify a schedule. Online services, such as the BBC’s iPlayer take things a stage further, allowing viewers to call up programming missed altogether. iPlayer now attracts over five million unique users a week, with usage booming when services such as Virgin Media allowed viewers to move consumption from the “lean forward” environment of the PC to the “sit back” experience of the main TV set.

iPlayer and its rival services from Sky, Channel 4, Five and ITV have helped to popularise non-linear viewing, but are dominated by the practice of catching-up on missed items of the recent schedule. Full on-demand services, featuring huge archives of programming and movies, take schedule-busting a stage further, and now feature in packages from the likes of BT and Virgin, as well as IP (Internet Protocol) TV services. On top of this, networks and studios are taking the first tentative steps into releasing content first on pay download services, if only to mitigate the harm caused by piracy. ITV announced this month that it has acquired UK download rights to US import The Vampire Diaries and will retail the show on Apple’s iTunes before broadcasting it on ITV2.

Other important steps await. 2010 could be the year in which the “app” – small downloaded applications – become as commonplace on main TVs as they are on “smart” mobile phones. Apps have proved successful in bridging the all-important ease-of use gap on tiny screens, and ironically could do the same on very large ones where browsers navigated by a standard remote control device have proved cumbersome. If so, we may see a blossoming of on-demand services. Then there is the long awaited Project Canvas, a joint venture between the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five to develop a common subscription-free, on-demand internet standard via the now familiar set–top box. The BBC Trust this week gave provisional approval to the project that has been dubbed “Freeview for the internet” and the Corporation’s partners believe it will future proof the free-to-air proposition.

No wonder that many are predicting a period in which the best characteristics of the internet and linear broadcasting will fuse, revolutionising the very nature of content, along with its distribution and consumption. So does this mean the end of of the traditional Christmas TV moan? Probably not.

For starters, the PVR is not killing advertising, and is therefore not eroding ad-funded programming. In fact, the evidence appears to be that viewers with PVRs watch more television, and shuttle through comparatively few ads. As a result, they are actually exposed to a greater number of commercials than non-PVR households. In a similar vein, the evidence appears to indicate that video-on-demand consumption largely supplements rather than replaces traditional, scheduled TV. And, even if you believe that these are mere transitions in consumer behaviour, it is harder to conceive of a future in which all television happens only when you want it to. Certain television, especially sports, only really works if people gather to watch it at a pre-arranged time, and news by definition breaks when it breaks. You don’t schedule either type of programming, it schedules you.

Then there are the questions of serendipity and convenience. Linear TV does something on-demand struggles to match; it allows the viewer to happen across wonderful, unexpected, off-profile content. The most intelligent PVR or computer algorithms can only ever point you in the direction of content similar to that which you have consumed, and at the moment all we have are fairly blunt recommendation lists. Linear TV is also very good at helping the viewer navigate. Even the hundreds of channels available on some platforms essentially reduce down to a mere couple of dozen brands, and it is the terrestrial broadcasters and their digital spin-offs that command the overwhelming share of audiences. The bigger the archive, by contrast, the harder it becomes to communicate such brand values. Discoverability and recommendation is a major issue for the on-demand world, and is even more so in the vast expanses of the internet where quality content may lie viewed by only a few hundred people. In the linear world the brands you trust find content for you, and they do it well.

Broadcasters are well drilled in exploiting the latter of these strengths, but there are signs that they are adapting their proposition to the former far more. The rise of so-called “shiny floor television”; programmes such as the X-Factor and Strictly Come Dancing depend first and foremost on their event status and their competitive element. It is no good watching Sunday night’s live X-Factor results show on Monday night if everyone else has digested, discussed and tweeted it by Monday lunch.  The irony of resurrecting TV formats of yesteryear (albeit with a modern narrative twist) has not been lost on many, nor has the other chosen method of making the content compelling: audience participation via the decidedly analogue ‘phone poll.

Morecambe & Wise's Christmas specials were watched by nearly half the UK population. But so-called "event TV" is still alive and well

It may not deliver the 28 million viewers that famously tuned into Morecambe and Wise’s Christmas specials in the 1970s, but the likes of X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent are delivering audiences that peak as high as 19 million. Given that Eric and Ernie’s only competition was ITV and BBC2, while Cowell and co are up against over 400 other TV channels – plus the wonders of the internet – it is evidence that free-to-air linear TV can still hit the spot.

But it will not thrive on a diet of shiny-floors, sports and news alone. Broadcasters are working hard to give other formats can’t-miss status, and are bound to find new ways to make us tune in at a certain time. But drama, comedy, reality programming and most other genres simply lack the same live, scheduled compulsion. Conversations about whether we saw the last episode of Lost are being replaced by discussions about which season we are up to. Nobody expects everybody else to be on exactly the same episode of Come Dine With Me. The buzz around the The Wire was created by box-set viewing rather than the tiny audience who saw its first UK run on FX. These are consumption habits ideally suited to an intensification of on-demand TV.

The compromise, at least in the medium term, is therefore a television ecology in which the schedule becomes the bare bones of our viewing experience; a few must-see events coupled with news and sports – and the rest filled in with back-to-back US imports streamed or downloaded on demand, together with whatever archived and new originated UK programming takes our fancy. The TV schedule will remain a feature in our viewing – and our Christmas arguments – for some time to come. Increasingly, however, it will be something we dip into instead of being immersed in. Doctor Who might be facing the End of Time, but the rest of us will merely see it slackened off.