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Intensive vs. Extensive TV watching
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Posted by: dmdeane

I searched and didn't find anything, so hopefully no one has posted this yet. Interesting article mentions TiVo, speculates on intensive vs. extensive TV watching. Worth thinking about when engaging in the "time shifting" vs. "channel surfing" debate.

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http://www.techreview.com/magazine/may01/jenkins.asp

Digital Renaissance:
TV Tomorrow
By Henry Jenkins
May 2001

Don't assume the future of television has to revolve around the interests of channel surfers. Imagine getting more, not less, from the shows we watch.

I read Phillip Swann's TV dot Com: The Future of Interactive Television with the same sense of looking across a vast cultural divide. Swann, the former publisher of TV Online magazine, thinks interactive television should and will be designed for channel zappers: "Few viewers today can sit through an entire program without picking up the remote and checking out another channel."

In Swann's future, variety and magazine shows will almost entirely displace dramas, and the few remaining series will be shrunk to 30 minutes or less, reflecting dwindling attention spans. VCRs will be "shelved forever" once the hard drives for personal videorecorders "expand to permit consumers to store dozens of hours of programming." Swann devotes an entire chapter to the silly idea that viewers will want to disrupt the flow of Ally McBeal in order to buy, right then and there, whatever Ally happens to be wearing.

I wish I could dismiss Swann as an eccentric, but similarly bad ideas are circulating in Hollywood too. The future of interactive television is being designed by and for people who don't care for television. One researcher brags he can compress any show into half its original length. In his perfect world, television might consist of nothing but coming attractions. According to Swann, "People will start watching TV shows the way they read books: a little at a time." Such plans reflect an impoverished understanding of television viewing and a lack of interest in the medium's aesthetics.

Historians of the book make distinctions between intensive and extensive readers. In the older manuscript culture, a reader had access to only a few works but read them closely and over years. With the rise of printing, this intensive reading was theoretically displaced by extensive reading: readers read more books and spent less time on each. But intensive reading never totally vanished. Ask around and you'll probably find someone who rereads Gone with the Wind or The Lord of the Rings every year.

Television enthusiasts have the same desire for intensive engagement. The new media environment encourages some restless viewers to channel-surf. But it also supports prolonged involvement with series. The VCR produced a nation of video collectors. When the full run of The Simpsons spans hundreds of hours, why be satisfied with a technology that can only hold a few dozen episodes? We are more likely to use TiVo—a personal interactive television service that uses a digital recorder—to watch television and use videotape (or some equivalent storage medium) to archive it.

The availability of such digital recorder-based services may partially "liberate" us from the network schedule, yet this does not spell the end of "appointment" television any more than videotape rentals decrease the length of movie lines on opening night. We watch television in part so we can talk about it, and we want to see it when everyone else does so we don't have the good parts spoiled by other people's big mouths.

TiVo wisely targets both extensive and intensive viewers. It allows us to pause a live TV broadcast, do something else, and return to watching where we left off. But we can also book "season passes" to favorite series. The technology tracks down episodes wherever the network moves them.

While Swann imagines shorter and shorter series, the history of television drama suggests growing complexity, more elaborate story arcs, more back story. Among the current ratings champs are serialized ensemble dramas like ER, The Practice, and The West Wing—series Swann concedes would not survive in the media environment he describes.

But I believe interactive television could support even more serialization. Imagine a world where reruns could be downloaded, enabling latecomers to catch up on cult serials. Imagine being able to click on the screen and replay scenes from earlier episodes that reveal back story—say, all the scenes from The X-Files dealing with the disappearance of Mulder's sister. Imagine annotations by both fans and producers. Imagine a new economics of television that supports many more shows, where a series with a small but committed group of intensive viewers—which couldn't cover the overhead costs of broadcast TV—could thrive via a download medium. In other words, imagine getting more, not less, from the shows we watch.

Undoubtedly, there will be new media forms that reflect the interests of channel surfers. But don't assume this represents the only direction for tomorrow's television. Swann envisions a future marked by diversity of media choices and yet a sameness of viewing styles, an audience eager to buy Ally McBeal's skirt but not to watch an entire hour-long episode. As I said, we inhabit different realities.

Henry Jenkins is director of the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT.

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dmdeane@rcn.com

Posted by: arjay

Not exactly the most upbeat prognosis for the future. I hope it's only partially true.

I find however that I often prefer watching half hour and one hour shows instead of movies on a regular basis--as long as they're entertaining shows. My favorite evening of television is NBC Wed. nite. (or at least it WAS before that weak link got in there.) I go out of my way to watch that block of shows as aired.

Watching endless movies would be rapidly become a blur. TV's smaller screen in the home environment does, for me, tend do encourage watching shows rather than movies. Two or three movies a week is about tops.

But that's it as far as shorter shows for this TV watcher. I would strongly dislike anything shorter than a half hour, and would omit game shows and "reality TV" almost completely. The magazine shows like Dateline are OK sometimes, but they're a prime example right now of an hour show that could be reduced by half without losing anything--all that stupid promo teasing in those shows--when you subtract the commercials, is there more than a half hour left?

Posted by: Serra

If this is the future of TV, then there is no future that includes me! I'd give up TV if that world came true. I can't stand short shows, they suck. I as a rule, never watch shows shorter than an hour. Half hour shows just lack any depth. I'll take well written shows over crap any day. Too bad the world doesn't understand Buffy. Great show, only 2.6 million people bother to watch it, but 11 million will watch Friends.

Posted by: DJRobX

I think the world doesn't understand a lot of great shows on the WB (Roswell, etc..) http://www.avsforum.com/ubbtivo/smile.gif Speaking of which, UPN bought Buffy!

-- Rob

Posted by: tivomatic

quote:
<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by dmdeane:
...the history of television drama suggests growing complexity... </font>

Exactly. Do not worry about the future. If TV history has shown us anything, it's that both people and their viewing habits are becoming more complex.

The future, undoubtedly, will offer more choices, and more control, rather than less.

In the future if you want to instantly find "what was that show where John Wayne picked his nose" you will be able to do that.

I'm not worried about what a bunch of Luddites speculate.

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Philips 30-hr 2.0.1.z16

Posted by: dmdeane

quote:
<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">
If this is the future of TV, then there is no future that includes me! I'd give up TV if that world came true. I can't stand short shows, they suck. I as a rule, never watch shows shorter than an hour. Half hour shows just lack any depth. I'll take well written shows over crap any day. Too bad the world doesn't understand Buffy. Great show, only 2.6 million people bother to watch it, but 11 million will watch Friends.
</font>

What? The Simpsons suck, lack depth, are crap? Surely not. Time constraints can force writers to be more creative. Certainly The Simpsons writers have learned how to cram more jokes, gags, references, and other humor into a half hour (more like 20 minutes after commercials) than any TV show out there. There are plenty of good half hour shows, although I do tend to watch more hour long shows myself (Babylon 5, Crusade, the various Star Treks, X-Files, Lone Gunmen, documentaries on the History Channel, Biography, Charlie Rose, Lonely Planet, etc)....but that's my own taste. It's true there's a lot of crappy sitcoms in the half hour category, but they aren't all crap (Sturgeon's Law, and all that).

My own opinion is that the ever growing number of channels on cable on satellite, plus the ability to timeshift effortlessly thanks to TiVo, ReplayTV, UltimateTV, and all the others sooner or later to show up, are bound to encourage further proliferation of shows for all manner of tastes. I expect that we've reached the max in regards to formulaic half hour sitcoms, though. Longer shows with more depth do tend to thrive when their target audience can get at them easily, which TiVo and the rest make possible. That should mean more variety and more TV execs willing to take risks on "non-mainstream" shows. Ultimately both the intensive and extensive TV viewers should be catered to, in such an environment. "Everybody wins", or so one hopes.

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dmdeane@rcn.com

Posted by: Fofer

Funnily enough I recall making an observation in these forums that after only a few months of TiVo ownership, I was noticing my attention span while watching TV was *increasing.*

Why? Because I would always have entire shows for me to sit down, focus on, and watch.

Whereas previously, there was nothing on, and I was *forced* to channel-surf.

Time-shifting allows the ease and flexibility to relax and watch entire shows.