For many, the most difficult part of housesitting isn’t unlocking a tricky deadblot or locating an unfamiliar lightswitch in the dark. It’s figuring out how to find the show you want on TV.

TechDirt points to a thought-provoking essay by Ernest Miller titled Die Channel. Die! Die! Die! In case the title was too subtle for you, the focus is on the concept of “channels” and why they may be a dying delivery mechanism for content.

But we love channels! We want our MTV/C-SPAN/Cartoon Network/Sci-Fi Channel/ESPN1/ESPN2/ESPN Menthol/etc.

Fine, but have you considered the following?

• Searching is a chore. As the channel line-up grows larger and larger, program guides have gotten more and more confusing. There’s little standardization among cable companies and manufacturers and the number of buttons on the remote keeps growing.

• You’re not taking full advantage. Sure it’s nice to know you have the most channels of anyone on the block, but the average cable viewer only watches about 16-18 out of 100+ available channels. The rest is just clutter.
• 30 minutes is about 27 too many. Despite what the networks would have you think, there’s no ‘magical law’ that says TV has to be viewed in 30 and 60 minute increments. Consumer research and the Internet have taught us that people’s attention spans typically last much shorter. More thoughts in this essay on The Long Tail Blog.
• Happy with your cable company? Enough said.

So this goes back to some of the points we touched on in February with our Let’s Get Vertical post. Just as RSS has evolved to help those whose bookmarks have gotten too many to handle, so will a solution come about for those with too many cable channels to watch efficiently (yes, we’re aware of how silly it seems to aspire to watch Aqua Teen more efficiently).

Seriously though, TiVo is a start but it’s still not cutting it. Viewers are still tied to broadcast times and unless you have one of the fancier units you can’t watch a different channel other than the one you’re recording. Not to mention the whole ‘backlog’ issue, where programs keep piling up and you can’t go out in public for fear of finding out what happened on last night’s 24. We’re not exactly sure what can be done to make more time in the day, but let’s hope someone’s working on it…

This entry was posted on Friday, June 3rd, 2005 at 4:52 pm and is filed under SEM: Paid Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.