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That precious hour
By jpenston | May 16, 2007 |
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Ten days ago, quite unexpectedly, my wife had a baby. Of course, I knew she was pregnant, but the little guy wasn’t due until the end of May so we weren’t ready - I’d managed to paint the ceiling of his room, but not the walls. He didn’t have anywhere to sleep or any clean clothes to wear. It was all a bit chaotic, as I’m sure you can imagine.
All’s well that ends well, but all this meant that I was unable to write anything last week as my job suddenly became Chief Entertainer for our two year old son. They say that it’s easier the second time around and they are right - looking after a newborn is infinitely easier than looking after a two year old…
On Monday night this week I got a bit of time to myself. Not much, but between 8pm and 9pm I managed to catch a bit of telly. Fortunately for me, there was not one, but two programmes that I wanted to watch. Unfortunately for me, we don’t have a Sky+ box and my old VHS recorder let me down badly when I tried to tape the Australian Grand Prix a few weeks back so I have consigned that to history. So I had to make a choice: did I want to watch Panorama’s programme on Scientology or Dispatches’ character assassination of our next Prime Minister, Gordon Brown?
Again, last night (Tuesday), I had an hour to myself. A precious hour. An hour I had worked hard for all day. But what was on? Nothing!
(Strictly speaking, that’s not true as I have hundreds of channels, but there was nothing there to float my boat and I ended up watching Hugh Grant’s truly dire American Dreamz on Sky’s Comedy Movie Channel)
So one night I miss something I would like to watch and the next I’m forced to watch Hugh Grant pretending to be Simon Cowell because there’s nothing else on.
“A sample of one”, said an industry expert when I described my problem to them. “The best thing about television is that it is not interactive”, and while I agree with them to a point, I can’t help feeling that what I experienced last night (not for the first time on a Tuesday night by the way), would be enough to convince me to go for a genuine time-shifted / catch-up TV service. Given how precious my time is now, I would be willing to pay for it too - on a subscription basis, not pay-per-view as the last thing I want to do after reading The Gruffalo for an hour is to analyse whether watching X is worth £Y.
So why don’t I get a PVR? Jolly good question that - maybe I should - but I can’t help thinking that this just adds one more problem to my already busy life. A PVR requires planning and foresight which is something most people with kids are short of at 8pm. For sure, I would have been able to watch Lewis Hamilton’s debut in Melbourne a couple of months back because I would have set the thing to record (as I tried to with the VHS), but you don’t often get a programme like that, that you know you are going to miss and want to watch enough to get off your backside to do something about.
I am talking about that veg out time. That precious hour, when you really don’t want to think “if only I’d set the PVR last night”, when it would be so much easier just to go “back” through the programme guide and find something, anything, better than is on offer right now.
If you are the BBC, ITV or C4, making quality programmes, why do you want to restrict your audience to those that happen not to have anything better to do when your work is aired? Don’t you think that more people would actually watch your stuff if they could do it on their own terms. Maybe they would watch less imported tosh and maybe Sky have more to lose than gain from on-demand?
Clearly, the BBC and C4 are with me on this. The iPlayer is horribly caught up in bureaucracy, which is a shame because the BBC have most to offer when it comes to quality programmes. C4’s 4oD is available now, so as part of my research into this article, I have caught up on the half hour or so of the Dispatches programme that I missed when I switched over to Panorama on Monday.
The quality of the 4oD download was good. The file was 348 MB for 48 minutes of film, which is very slightly under 1 Megabit per Second. Interestingly, it was 48 minutes because the 1 hour broadcast had been stripped of the adverts - which I consider peculiar in the extreme. Surely, here is a great vehicle for ads to help pay for the service provision. Although, with the ability to fast-forward in the current media player, you might not expect people to watch them…
So I watched the re-run of Dispatches on my PC and as I worried about whether my country was going to end up with a control freak as its next leader, I also considered some research that I had seen from CacheLogic into online video watching habbits. Was I happy with watching TV on my PC? Yes, but it was “during my lunch break”: I would not want to do this at 8pm during my precious hour of veg out time. I didn’t last night… I watched Hugh Grant “acting” the twit instead.
The picture quality was equivalent to broadcast TV (and better than Joost, which runs at around 700kbps). You have to download the 4oD application which has an embedded Ioko Kontiki P2P client, which obviously aims to spread the distribution burden.
I checked my download with Wireshark (fka. Ethereal) and found that over 90% of the data was coming from Ioko’s own network, indicating that the seed file had not been distributed sufficiently to allow P2P to have much impact on Ioko’s (and C4’s bandwidth costs). I’m sure they weren’t helped by the fact that I turned off my 4oD client as soon as the download had finished in order to save my bandwidth cap. This all meant that someone on BT’s Central Plus that had been receiving data from me, had to find somewhere else to get it from - probably back to Ioko…
It is also interesting to note why I wanted to watch Panorama. Like many other visitors to the BBC’s web site I had been intrigued by John Sweeney’s tirade at Tommy Davis (official BBC version). As a blogger with an emphasis on online video, I was further intrigued by the use of video by the BBC to promote their programme and the use of YouTube by the Church of Scientology to counter the position taken in the programme - Scientology getting its retaliation in first.
So whatever your views, whether or not you believe we are descended from aliens or not, you can now make your views known to the world and with a bit of time and effort (and £2,000 of electronic equipment). I have no doubt that there will be a lot of long term fallout from this very high profile example of an electronic propaganda war.
On demand allows me to fill my precious hour with something I want. But it’s not just about me, it’s also a vehicle for advertisers who want to reach me. Consider for a minute how much you have learned about me by reading this article and hearing what I like to watch.
Put yourself in an advertiser’s shoes and ask yourself how good a profile you could build of me if you could monitor what I watch when I really do have a choice. The uplink on an IPTV service is pretty much ideal for transmitting such detailed one-to-one demographics back to you, the distributor. You could be pretty sure to “know me” with a picture of my likes and dislikes over time. You can hit me with what can genuinely be called targeted ads. And, because you are in control of the content feed to my TV set, you can place personalised ads, just for me, that you know will be most likely to get a reaction from me. Even when I am watching The Bill, just like everyone else.
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Topics: 4oD, IPTV advertising, catch-up TV, targeted ads, timeshift TV, video on demand |