TiVo Opens a New Window on Our Screen Time -- and It Won't Be Pretty for TV
If you want to look at the future of combined Internet and TV viewing, one of the best places to look will be TiVo's planned enhancement to its StopWatch ratings service that will measure when people who access the Internet and TV through one screen are ditching one for the other.
Though the data will only be limited to aggregate viewing from a handful of TiVo-enabled online video services -- such as Blockbuster and Amazon's on-demand offerings and YouTube -- it will nonetheless be an important window into media consumption behavior that is bound to become more prevalent in coming years, and to a certain extent, already exists.
While combined Web-TV offerings have been a, well, pipe dream for more than a decade, it looks more likely than ever that accessing the Internet from the same screen as the TV will finally become common (and yes, vice versa). Even as we grow accustomed to our smart phone being an Internet device, we're also at a place where, technologically speaking, there is online video content that we might actually want to watch on TV. Back when Microsoft bought WebTV Networks in 1997, the Internet was a relatively static, stationary medium. Now, offerings like Google TV and Apple's rumored upgrade to its TV service may jump start the market.
So what will come of TiVo's research? More than you'd think. Even though the number of sites accessible through TiVo is small, one dynamic we'll see is that people will check out what's online because they can. As cable has shown us, people tend to check other content out, simply because it's there.
Of course, as the data rolls in on how people spend their media time in front of these Internet-enabled TV, TV will not fare well. Previously, it's mostly been measured in a vacuum, which has been kind to the medium as a whole, even as it has shown things like a gradual shift from network TV to cable. Add the Internet onto the screen, and the multi-tasking so many of us already do -- with laptop on lap; TV across the room -- and that behavior becomes measurable. During commercials, we're already grabbing for the mouse -- if not the remote. But now we'll start to know just how prevalent our toggling between mediums is.
Related: