What happened to just plain watching TV?
On June 20th, ABC Family is launching it’s new TV series Kyle XY, on the iTunes Music Store for free. Users will be able to download the pilot for 6 days at no charge, until June 27 when the show makes it’s television debut. After the show launches on TV, each episode will be the available for download at the normal rate of $1.99 on the iTunes Music Store.
OK, it's not free HBO. And it's really a promotional gimmick rather than a new distribution method. But it's an indicator of another giant industry reacting to the changing consumption of media online. Big media moves like a big dinosaur. If TV is T-Rex, then the record and film biz moves like an ultrasaurus. And they'd better move, or it will be time for another extinction.
The video game industry, despite many Americans (like myself) who ignore it, is now overtaking the movie industry in profits. Think about that.
Americans' viewing habits are changing rapidly. A decade ago, broadcasters held their breath when they saw that digital television threatened to wipe out ordinary commercial TV. It didn't happen, or at least not as quickly as predicted, and the industry had a chance to react and make some changes.
Digital video recorders (DVRs) have only managed to penetrate around 8% of American homes and some studies show that despite industry fears they have actually created a small increase in the total numbers viewing the top primetime broadcast shows
Video on demand (you pay to see the same "free" top network shows) also has potential - people want shows when they want them, where they want them and seem to be willing to pay a reasonable price to get it. Despite rumors, not everyone in the U.S. is downloading movies using BitTorrent.
The video iPod and full motion video cell phones are also here. Personally, I can't imagine wanting to watch TV on either for more than a few minutes, but, gadget-hound that I am, I seem to be part of a shrinking group of viewers.
The adoption rate is slower for technologies that require people to make a purchase every month, i.e. services, but tech toys and appliances have always had a market. 25% of American households had no one employed during the Depression, yet radio sales were tremendous. And despite the high price of early televisions, post-war baby boomers bought a lot of TV'sAnd in the 1980's video games, cable TV, VCRs, home satellite receivers, modems, answering machines and PCs all found huge audiences and altered our viewing habits.
Radio was going to kill newspapers; TV would kill radio and movie theaters; VCRs would kill film (again) and TV; DVDs would kill film (again) and videotape... and yet we STILL have good old radio (albeit with satellite and podcasts), TV and movie theaters.
We know that these technologies have changed our students and their expectations for how they get content and there is no reason we shouldn't expect that trend to continue.
As NJIT prepares to launch its own iTunes U site in the iTunes Music Store this July, we are all trying to guess what will be in there by the summer of 2007.
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