Delegates at the UK’s most important TV industry conference voted on scenarios for 2010 and plumped for the end of linear, time-bound TV (3 years earlier than my 2013 stories…)
[scenario] 5 Death of linear TV: Broadband internet and personal video recorders (PVRs) grow rapidly and films and sports become available online causing broadband penetration to reach 35% and undermining pay TV. PVRs in 35% of homes mean that viewers watch 40% of programmes at different times and skip the ads.
How they voted: 39% of the delegates decided that the death of linear TV was the most likely scenario”
Petafloptimism 
I’m annoyed but not surprised this discussion, especially with the “Death of the Scedule” conclusion is still being reported. There’s not going to be the ‘death’ of anything anytime soon, especially in this country.
Point one: An important and often forgotten fact is the social aspects of TV watching. This simple fact is most often forgotten by young, busy, single media people who watch little, if any, TV themselves. Hello – you are not your audience.
Point two: PVR’s frankly do not work very well for groups of more than two people, and then hopefully they have similar tastes and favourites. That’ll be the ‘P’ in PVR then. Beyond that and you really need to have individual (broadband powered, not digital recording probably?) TV’s in seperate rooms, but then you are losing the social aspect again. While working (ha!) in ‘Future TV’ at razorfish Matt and I came up with some interesting uses for this community conflict.
Point three: People *like* being fed. Decision making is not conducive to relaxing and watching TV. While the DVR magically transforms one from a couch potato into a ‘power viewer’, that’s not an attractive proposition for many people. Schedules give people a strong collective cultural timetable that has become ingrained over many years. Disturbances to that are not welcomed. I would speculate that “active viewing” probably accounts for less that 25% of the TV experienced in UK homes. Making the assumption that this will increase dramatically with new technology is naive and ignores powerful behavioural motivations.
Anyway, thats enough comment for here! Couple of interesting links:
Why do people watch TV?
Challenging assumed levels of TV ad viewing.
Voting on UK TV’s future
Attendees of a Royal Television Society gathering voted on the most likely scenario for TV in 2010.