Skipping, Time-Shifting and the Status Quo

My semi-casual observations of opinions on usage of PVRs/DVRs sets them into three camps:
1) Industry analysts who group all PVRs together
2) Pundits and bloggers who insist that PVR=TiVo
3) Those who like to look at these devices by interface class

The last one seems to be shared by maybe a dozen folks in the world. I am the only one who writes about it I know of (tell me different and I'll link and subscribe to them).

See, TiVo &mdash and all of the Dish PVRs &mdash have a commercial skip feature. In general, they are pretty much immediately reactive, and make sense. Lots, and lots and lots of others (like most given away by CableCos) are not. They are sorta terrible, slow to react, and provide a jumpy fast-forward feature, at best. These are more like using a VCR than anything.

The results of this study seem possiby skewed by this misunderstanding. Or maybe because the study organizers have never seen a PVR (having worked with researchers, not that big a stretch). They claim that most users don't skip commercials (except older folks). This bears out other studies where PVRs aren't scary (to ad-revenue based broadcast businesses) because commercials are still watched.

But I see usage, in my anecdotal experiences, as almost entirely divided along device functionality (or interface class) lines. People with terrible DVRs watch TV like always (static). They periodically watch like they have a VCR (turn on a recorded show and watch it without much pausing or fast-forwarding). People with good PVRs watch TV with almost complete time-shifting, skip intros and title sequences unless they are very engaging, and watch very few commercials (but go back to watch good ones on purpose).


As an aside, I think this is a typical trend of a certain kind of research:

Male, female, age. Demographics can only serve so much. This is where marketing and usability/UX diverge.

Here's another reason broadcast TV is stupid

We don't want much programming, at all, from the big 3-4 networks. Mostly A&E, Discovery, Bravo and the like. And lots of Netflix. But there are a few shows But last night there were lots of storms. So when we go to watch our guilty-pleasure show tonight, we don't have it. We have, instead, a solid hour of bright graphics and talking heads. And being a major network show, they will not re-run it for 6 months. Instead, what if these guys just stuck to the warning crawler, and maybe there could be some sort of "weather channel." An entirely other issue, so far beyond this, is how I do not care in the slightest about breaking news or weather /days later/. The PVR makes the whole sense of every bit of data as a single raster image with attached audio signal stupid. Wouldn't data overlays be smarter, and by default anything that expired is removed? Too bad no one thought ahead that far when making up HDTV standards, or anything.

I love 1080

I have always been a tad of a naysayer about HD being the Second Coming. Our old TV was very good quality, attached to good equipment and calibrated (not ISF, just my Avia disk, and an SPL meter for the audio). So when we got the new TV the change in DVD quality was negligible. Though the big screen was nice. Yes, I've seen top-of-the-line monitors playing HD or BlueRay disks, and they are only a bit better, I think. Well, backing up, mostly good equipment. When we got the new TV the dish looked like crap. Something about the extra resolution available, the display technology, the ability of S-VHS to display the signal or...something, just made it look awful. All the JPEG artifacting is just super-visible. Even in the menus, for some reason. So, today our Christmas present to ourselves arrived. With several guys, each with their own truck, and lots of ladders. Just 5 hours later, its done! Revelation. Its SUCH high quality I cannot believe it. You know how some shows (say, good ones) have a certain look? Well, I don't even recognize some of them (like Law & Order), because I had gotten used to the awful quality of NBC OTA to the local Dish site, then compressed. Also, neat system. Entirely aside from some specific UI neatness, we switched from two PVRs to one. The one in the living room is on the same circuit as the one upstairs, and there is data on multiple frequencies flying about. Watch any show, on any TV. Neat! Interesting point regarding my opening about high quality products is that the installers said this was by far the nicest monitor they had seen. Everyone else has "Samsungs and Sanyos and /Vizios/" (emphasis not added). And, this is by no means the top of the line panel. I guess not too many people have the money for the top products.

What happened to the dream of hypermedia?

Cast your mind back, to the days before the internet even, when anything was possible. Hypermedia (by whatever name) was going to link all information to all other information. Don't understand a phrase? Just click and look it up. A reference to a scene in a movie? Just click and see the clip. But with all the interactive sites, and widgets and plugins and flash players and everything, I have had this experience maybe half a dozen times. A way to get close is the best Wikipedia has to offer. Clicking about their universe can be very enlightening in these cases. Its often much worse than this, with broken links, or a page with hardly any links at all, or stoppages due to digital media protection. I was thinking of this in the car while listening to an NPR story on rockabilly. NPR does a good job with this. They offer (after a brief delay) plain-text transcriptions of the story, a podcast of the whole show as aired, and a bunch of links to listen to related stories and some of the music referred to in it. But how often am I disappointed? Weekend shows are often distributed by others, with restrictions including a total inability to download them. Much of the music in the story is unavailable for listening at all. And its not really hyper. Music is not linkable from inside the audio story. I think similar thoughts when using my PVR. On the off chance I accidentally see an ad, and want to pursue it, I have to transcribe it, sucking it in with my eyeballs and keying it somewhere else, probably on another machine entirely. This is true even for an ad for another show, where I have to search on the PVR, then type in the name of the other show. The systems are still glorified VCRs, with little or no awareness of the content (except the CCI-byte... hmm, again, no hurdles to getting DRM in place...) And why should this be? I am really not sure. Its trivially easy to come up with ways to monetize these sorts of interactions. Want me to watch the show? Auto-pop the search field with the ad info. Want me to buy your music? Let me listen to it stream, and link to an online store (or amazon if I must buy the CD). All in all, much more believable as a revenue stream than most internet technologies I see floating about.