Advertising Age's Jack Neff offers a fascinating take on the long-term impact of DVR (Digital Video Recording), only exacerbated by the Hollywood writers' strike: In a nutshell, what if the entertainment industry never recovers--at least not in its current form? One big beneficiary, of course, will be cable news, because news is not scripted. News, like sports, demands to be watched in real time.
As Neff puts it in Ad Age:
Could the writers strike foreshadow life without advertiser support for scripted TV programs?
A media world without scripted programming -- something more likely as the strike drags on -- may start to look a lot like the coming world of heavy DVR penetration that could render ads on scripted TV shows largely powerless. If the strike forces advertisers to shift their focus to live and reality programming, it will effectively lift the curtain on a future in which live events command the biggest ad bucks and dramas and sitcoms lose much of their cachet. After all, if advertisers find effective ways to market without those scripted shows -- today or tomorrow -- some may never come back.
Dramas and comedies, the programs most affected by the strike, are the programs most vulnerable to time shifting and ad skipping by DVR users, according to research by TiVo and Information Resources Inc., which have been jointly tracking the behavior of households using DVRs for the past three years.
What's relatively immune to DVR-ing, by contrast is news. Breaking news. No point in recording that--you want to see it happen, when it happens.
