I’m in the process of finishing up my thesis and won’t be posting links today; instead, I’d like to share this excerpt from the conclusion of my thesis containing my prognostications on the on-demand future of media. Keep in mind that the thesis is a cultural history of cooking/food shows, which should explain certain references that will likely make a little more sense in the overall context of the paper. I’ll post a link to the entire thesis when it’s completed, but in the meantime, your thoughts are welcome.

Over the next three to five years, as the USA completes the transition to digital broadcast signals, it’s likely that the volume of food-oriented programs will continue to increase. At the same time, it’s likely that more broadcasters will follow the lead of forward-thinking companies like Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, News Corporation and NBC Universal by offering full-length, on-demand streaming versions of programs on websites like Hulu.com and MarthaStewart.com. Special made-for-the-web segments are likely to increase in volume as well; some of these kinds of videos are already cropping up on BravoTV.com, where visitors to the Top Chef website can view bonus clips called “Choice Cuts” that are either specifically made for the Internet or that were cut from the broadcast episodes.³³ Wisely, the networks are learning to monetize these clips by pairing them with short unskippable advertisements that play before each segment.

In ten to fifteen years, though, it is conceivable that Americans will begin to see a massive shift in the way that we all watch television. It is unlikely that the actual term “television” will vanish from our lexicon (witness, for example, referring to content on websites as “channels,” which is a direct reference to television), and it is equally unlikely that our computer screens will replace our living room television screens, but the method of delivery for the shows that we watch will change drastically. Three recent inventions are specific harbingers of this paradigm shift—the CableCARD, TiVo and the newly released Apple TV.

It used to be true that watching cable television required the use of a bulky cable decoder box that decoded the scrambled cable signals and delivered them to a television set. That is no longer true with the development of the CableCARD, a PCMCIA-type card that slips into the back of a digital television or a CableCARD-compatible DVR. The card does all the work that the cable box used to do without taking up any of the space. Plus, newer versions of the technology are on the horizon; today’s CableCARD only permits one-way transmission (from broadcaster to viewer), but proposals have already been made to make the next version of the card capable of two-way communication. This will enable video-on-demand services, interactive program guides and pay-per-view capabilities with nothing more to change than a single credit card-sized card.

The other advantage to the CableCARD is directly related to its size—if a device, such as a TiVo, can accept two or more cards at the same time, it allows multiple channels to be viewed or recorded simultaneously. TiVo already offers two different models that can record two channels at once, which means that the element of scheduling and being chained to the clock has been totally removed as an obstacle to viewing television. In effect, the owner of a TiVo or other DVR can essentially forget what time television programs air, because all of his shows will be ready and available whenever he wants to watch them. It’s a kind of quasi-on-demand arrangement—a true on-demand service would, in theory, be limited only by the release schedule of new episodes of popular programs.³³ Nevertheless, the notion of television scheduling as we know it today is slowly but surely vanishing, and one day programs will no longer compete head-to-head in particular timeslots—instead, we’ll have much purer metrics that show us specifically who watches what and when.³³

Before a truly on-demand world can be possible, there’s still the limiting factor of delivery. The United States is unique in that we are one of the few countries that does not have a truly “public” network funded by a television tax, the way the BBC operates in Britain or RTP in Portugal. Television in the USA has always been viewed as a commercial industry with advertisers and broadcasters profiting the most from its distribution, rather than as a service that citizens have a right to access. That is why many households in the USA pay for cable TV, while others do not—there is no “broadcast equality” in this country; either you have the money to access cable, or you don’t. Nearly 60% of all households in this country voluntarily paid for cable TV in 2006, but that still leaves roughly 40 million households watching only the major broadcast networks. In theory, the Internet has the power to equalize that gap, and that’s where the relatively new Apple TV comes into play. The Apple TV, introduced in 2007, is a kind of wireless bridge between a home computer and a television set. It allows users to rent movies (in high definition, no less, featuring Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound) from the iTunes store at a reasonable price. The newest version of the device has even eliminated even the computer from the equation; with just a remote control, a viewer can rent a movie through the Apple TV’s interface and watch it without leaving the couch.³³ The movie is downloaded from the Internet and vanishes from the device once the rental period is over. This, in many ways, is what an on-demand future will look like—with a slim set-top box connected to the Internet, we’ll be able to simply click at any time and view whatever movie (or TV show, or segment) we want. Of course, the price for broadband Internet access is still a limiting factor (and our broadband speeds pale in comparison to other countries—we pay twice as much for connections that are a twentieth the speed of those offered in Europe and Asia), and is the primary reason broadband adoption has decelerated rather than quickened over the past five years.³³ Plus, there are still areas of the country that, shamefully, don’t even have access to broadband Internet connections, short of paying for pricey satellite receivers that offer abysmally slow upload speeds. Still, these matters are bound to be resolved before too much longer—if and when consumer rage reaches a fever pitch, Congress will act and the glass ceiling placed by ISPs over our broadband connections will shatter.

All of these developments are positive ones for consumers, but not great news for today’s massive media monopolies that produce the bulk of the programming that is available on television. My point is this—in an on-demand world, today’s major players will be unable to survive unless they make major changes in how they do business. That, plus what will undoubtedly be a proliferation of new media production companies based largely on Internet delivery of content (through the Apple TV or whatever equivalent we ultimately end up with), will mean that new shows of all stripes, including hundreds, if not thousands, of food-oriented programs, will be available 24 hours a day. The sheer variety of options available will be mind-boggling, so while there are certain to be popular shows that do extremely well (a Good Eats of the future, perhaps), there will be plenty of smaller shows that will continue to attract niche audiences (maybe a Daisy Cooks! equivalent).

I can easily envision the day where ultra-hybrid programs like Gordon Ramsay’s F Word are exceedingly popular, but I also think that on-demand technology will allow individuals to search for recipes using their remote controls and then select a particular celebrity chef from whom they’d like to learn how to make the dish. Gordon Ramsay’s clips for the Times point to this sort of development—after all, what’s stopping Alton Brown from recording segments using similar recipes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s website, or Paula Deen from recording her own version of the segments and posting them on her own website? As long as there are niche audiences, there will always be a demand for this sort of reinterpreted material, especially in the culinary world where the same recipe prepared by two chefs may taste radically different.3

1. BravoTV.com, “Videos: Top Chef,” NBC Universal, http://video.bravotv.com/player/?id=225996#videoid=227887 (accessed March 19, 2008).333
2. In a true on-demand world, there would probably still be devout fans of particular programs that would watch shows the moment that they could access them with their remote controls. This would not, however, be true of the vast majority of the viewing audience; today’s research regarding individuals with DVRs at their disposal seem to indicate that most people watch programs that they record the same day, but offset from broadcast times by several hours. Nielsen Media Research, “Nielsen Reports DVR Playback is Adding to TV Viewing Levels,” The Nielsen Company, February 14, 2008, http://tinyurl.com/2vnfpf (accessed March 19, 2008).333
3. Many people complain today about the “junk” that the networks continue to air—I think everyone has said at least once that in spite of having well over 100 channels, there is oftentimes “nothing to watch.” In an on-demand world where ratings no longer measure head-to-head performance of programs slotted against each other, one of two things will happen to the development process. Assuming that major “networks” still develop the majority of the programming that Americans watch, it is conceivable (and likely) that producers will be offered short-term contracts of five to eight episodes (in much the same way British broadcasters operate, referring to these modular groups of programs as “series” rather than “seasons”) instead of committing to entire 22-episode seasons. The other possibility is that today’s major networks will cease to produce the bulk of the programming that we watch, and that a “long tail” model will kick in. That model, a power law distribution described by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, basically states that every piece of content has an audience, no matter how small, and that the benefits outweigh the costs of simply making every sort of content available rather than choking down on production. If the production of programs in an on-demand broadcast world is no longer the responsibility of five major “networks,” it is likely that the diversity of programs will increase exponentially—there will, at last, truly be something for everyone. Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” Wired, October 2004, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html (accessed March 19, 2008).333
4. “Apple TV: Movie Rentals,” Apple, http://www.apple.com/appletv/rentals.html (accessed March 19, 2008).333
5. Michael J. Copps, “America’s Internet Disconnect,” Washington Post, November 8, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/07/AR2006110701230.html (accessed March 19, 2008).333

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