Broadcasting’s Days are Numbered

My current TV service provider is Virgin Media and for the purposes of this article I will use them as the example as I have little experience of the services offered by the main alternatives, BT Vision and BSkyB. Freeview doesn’t really count in this discussion as it is broadcast via UHF and satellite and thus is unable to provide the service available on Virgin Media.

A few years ago Virgin Media added two services to their system called “Catch Up TV” and “TV Choice”. Initially they weren’t very comprehensive and the idea was a little odd as it wasn’t like just sitting down and watching what was broadcast, instead you choose what is on TV. You don’t record it, don’t wait for it to start or download, it’s just there to watch (and pause, rewind and fast forward) whenever you want.

Catch Up TV basically stores all the even vaguely popular shows from the last seven days or so of television. Over time this has expanded to include more and more channels and more programs from each channel and it has now reached the stage where I simply never have to record things anymore. I can watch whatever I want, whenever I want. If someone asks me if I watched a great show last night which I didn’t even know was on, well I can watch that. One touch recording doesn’t come close. Some of the more popular series, such as Doctor Who, get the honour of having the whole series stored with each new episode added as it is broadcast.

In some ways TV Choice is even better. It has literally hundreds of TV series available in their entirety, ready to watch whenever you like, no downloads, no recording necessary. I was able to watch Black Books series one, two and three at a rate of 2-3 episodes a night until I had seen the whole lot. The children’s TV selection is amazing too. My kids often don’t watch the kids’ channels any more. My five-year-old son loves Pingu and at last count there were over 40 episodes of it stored in their library. TV Choice is like having a free video library in your house.

Now you might be thinking that sounds expensive, but it’s included in Virgin’s XL television option (£21 per month for 160 channels) – there is no charge per video or view. I haven’t rented a video for over a year! My wife and I are still working our way through every episode of every series of Father Ted.

One of the complaints about cable and satellite television services are that there are too many channels and too many repeats, especially with the sudden explosion of “+1″ channels which show the same programs on a one hour delay. It seems that the obvious way for things to go is to have less than 10 quality broadcast channels and then have all the other channels become program packs in the on demand system. No need for any “+1″ channels then. Programs would only repeat if you chose to repeat them.

My kids are growing up in a world where television programs are on demand, not sequenced and scheduled by broadcasters. For them the program schedule will in many ways be a thing of the past. The “Record” button will be rarely needed. We grew up watching television that was controlled and scheduled by the broadcaster, if you couldn’t watch a program when it was on you had to record it. The next generation can grow up in a world where the program guide is mostly unnecessary, recording TV rarely happens but they watch everything then want whenever they want to.

How nice it will be if when you subscribe to a channel you just have access to all the programs. No trying to find things in the schedule, no setting recordings or reminders, no worrying about storage space on the harddrive, or things not recording because the video was unplugged by the kids. Just a few quality scheduled channels and a news channel or two, everything else could be on demand.

Image via Wikipedia

Oh one more thing, a suggestion to Virgin: There is so much in TV Choice it would be nice if they could mark which shows you have already watched so it’s easier to work out which episode is next when you come back to it a few days later.