The future is here, and it is "On Demand". Here in 2003, we might not be flying around in jetcars or getting meatloaf in pill form, but the jaded chorus of "200 channels and nothing on" is headed the way of the magnetic audio and video tape. And TiVo, the reigning champion of the digital age? The next "must have" now that DVD players are kicking the VHS to the curb? Brimming over with gigabytes of convenience and choice? Destined for obsolescence, or at least radical transformation. I mean, why would you put up with limited disk space and let a microchip make recommendations based on your past viewing habits if you could instead choose what you wanted to watch at any time and immediately call it up without having to worry about deleting things you haven’t watched or falling behind in your viewing? Who wants watching to be a regimented chore?
It was a letter from Time Warner Cable that quickly snapped me out of a bout of seasonal affective disorder (which is just a disease crying out for it’s own Lifetime Original Movie - "Early Darkness, the Katherine Reed Story"). Disguised as a run-of-the-mill rate hike, I almost didn’t read the second paragraph that described how my extra $5 a month would be changing the world forever. But within seconds it had dawned on me. New channels had been added. I could now flip to HBO or Cinemax or Showtime OnDemand where an interactive menu would allow me to choose from among any of those channels’ offerings. I could then hit the "play" key on my cable remote to play my selection immediately. Also, should I deem it necessary, I could pause, fast forward, rewind or stop it at will. For $5 a month (and really only $2.50 since I have a roommate)? Holy shit. Now granted, you don’t have access to the full libraries of any of these channels (yet), so there’s no Larry Sanders or Mr. Show available, but you still have a pretty wide selection of things that are in their current rotations - Six Feet Under, The Chris Isaak Show, plenty of movies and all the simulated sex pseudo-porn you can shake your stick at (some of these even feature real porn stars trying to make the jump to "legitimate" acting, which is always comical or so I’ve heard). Each channel rotates new content in every week or so, which helps make up for the fact that the current selection is limited.
For me, this is a godsend and it will be for you too. First of all, it works beautifully. Each item has a terse description of it's contents, leading players and running time. When you make the commitment to viewing, the movie/show starts within seconds. Change the channel to check the weather forecast or the score of the Mets game and it pauses for you. Switch back and it picks up right where you left off, even if you come back to it the next day or week. It remembers. Secondly, the freedom it offers is unparalleled in the entertainment world. Is A.I. boring the pants off of you? Chris Rock’s monologue not funny? That first sex scene taking too long to unfold? Skip it. Fast forward. Move on to something else. You’re no longer beholden to some silly pay-per-view system, or required to remember to tell you TiVo to record something, or forced to send Netflix $20 a month for DVDs that you keep forgetting to send back.
I have never been one to compulsively tape shows or set my VCR when I’m going to be out of the house. I rarely bought any VHS tapes, blank or otherwise. I don’t feel compelled to own or rent DVDs (in fact, I have never even had a membership to a video store). I would prefer not to have "24" of my Tuesday nights blocked out from 9-10pm as they are now by my apparent lack of Vitamin K(iefer). But I have felt the pangs of regret knowing that I missed something that I wanted to see, or upon hearing how last night's "The Daily Show" was pee-in-your-pants funny, or "man, you should have seen what Mr. Belding looked like on the ‘Saved by the Bell’ THS!" I have worried about falling behind the times music-wise and not purchasing enough CDs.
It just so happens that I'm currently reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, where in the not too distant future every movie, television show, etc. exists on a cartridge not unlike a computer or compact disk for playback on "teleputers" - the merging of the television with the home computer. Other "spontaneous disseminations" occur at regularly scheduled times in a continuation of the current system of TV broadcasting, so there's still an outlet for news, sports and serial type programming. With the exception of the cartridges, his vision may yet prove prescient. There’s no need for individual packaging or disks when you have servers (to store the array of programming) and bandwidth (to deliver it). Servers have taken grown in import exponentially. They have to be big, memory-wise, fast, and able to handle a lot of traffic without crashing. With each passing hour, they are becoming just that while at the same time they easily promote backup and redundancy. Bandwidth's incremental jumps have kept pace as well. Dial-ups will soon become the 8-track's equivalent while we ridicule those still relegated to them. And you won't need a terabyte of hard drive space or a library of CDs/DVDs in order to have a world of entertainment at your disposal - just a whole lot of RAM. Imagine having instant access to thousands of movies, TV shows and specials, and music at the touch of a button, called up from a searchable database. Watch the Godfather (letterboxed of course, or on your new wide screen, flat-panel monitor), and go right into Super Bowl III or your own personal "Barney Miller" marathon. Then listen to the latest batch of Wilco tunes, which they just recorded and uploaded 2 weeks ago and wash it down with the latest installment of "Real World: Boise". All your favorite and often accessed items can be stored quickly in your individual customizable index for rapid recall when you want it, without having to worry about file management or player compatibility.
Of course, that's all well and good, but how much is it going to cost? That's a little more difficult to foresee given how much money is at stake here. As of now, all the channels involved - HBO, Cinemax, Showtime - are of the no commercial, pay-a-flat-fee variety. I truly believe that a flat fee system is necessary in order to realize the full potential of this system. The music industry, always stodgily inflexible, is learning the hard way right now that the pay-for-play model doesn't capture a large enough audience to maximize revenues. Napster and its ilk should have been the testing grounds for a bulk pricing sort of system, but the RIAA and the record labels chose to shrink in the face of progress and rampant consumer demand and hide behind their copyrights.
Obviously, many issues will be resolved "on the fly" as the technology adapts and grows. Pricing will depend greatly on how much of the money consumers normally pour into entertainment goes missing once systems like these are in place. Most likely, people will still want to go to movie theaters. That's an experience that cannot be replicated fully in the home (with the exception of homes decked out to MTV "Cribs"-style excess). But rental and sales revenues would disappear and therefore need to be made up elsewhere. Also, people might resist phasing out CDs (yes, and vinyl too) with all their attendant artwork and packaging because sometimes it is nice to be able to hold something tangible in your hands. But given enough time, this impulse might too pass. Or perhaps album covers will become projectable holograms, with liner notes that can be displayed on your video screen while the "album" plays. Radio stations will still be there to break in the new stuff, but in a much more specialized way that we're already seeing with satellite radio. It certainly opens up a lot of options.
Also hugely importance is how to incorporate advertising revenue into a system where viewers have such a large amount of control. Already, products such as TiVo make it easy to skip past commercials quickly, if not bypassing them altogether. Advertisers won't put up with that for very long and as we are all unfortunately aware, that revenue stream is all-important in the current environment. But advertising and marketing types have proved themselves to be nothing if not creative - I have no doubt that they'll find ways to get the bang for their buck. Expect lots more program sponsorships, advertising built into the fabric of everything (running at the bottom, appearing in the corner, etc.), and a lot more product placements.
On the whole, I think these developments could have a positive impact on the smaller fish in the big pond of entertainment options as well. No doubt huge corporations will still control the production of most of the materials, but I think they will be more willing to take risks and diversify their offerings when the boundaries of choice have been expanded. A royalty system based on number of "plays" each item gets would certainly loosen the creative purse strings if they can get away with paying less to the "talent" up front in exchange for heavily back-loaded contracts that correlate more directly to popularity. And maybe that's the way it should be.
My worry is that networks and other entertainment conglomerates will find a way to monopolize the proceedings thereby slowing down the process and limiting access, but I hope that the overwhelming demand that this is sure to create - not to mention the potential extra revenue - will be enough to bypass those types of problems. Consider this: I already pay $110 per month for my Digital Cable/ Broadband Internet package. Expanded over a year, that’s $1320. If this became the nationwide standard, available in 80 million households that’s already $100 billion dollars a year. And I would most assuredly pay more per month for the freedom to choose what I wanted whenever I wanted it. Add to this some sort of "Music OnDemand" feature and I might just start signing over entire paychecks for access.
Whenever my little fantasy world becomes a reality, it will be a banner day. Setting aside any worries about mass opiation, there’s a lot that stands to be gained: no missed episodes; no malfunctioning VCRs or scratched disks; no waiting for DVDs of the "full season" or the director’s cut to come out; no summer reruns; no tapes to return. Of course, my girlfriend just got me a DVD player for Christmas so I guess I’ll have to wile away some time with that until my dream of watching every "Freaks and Geeks" episode in order, one after the other, can be achieved.
