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I was reading an article on iMedia Connections about the impending switch from Digital to Analogue (Australian spelling intended!) TV today and it sent me navel gazing. Such a geek thing to do!

So many old media concepts have been smashed in the last few years, a relatively short period of time in the scheme of things. Think about the decline of the music CD. I’m old enough to remember records, and I was an avid fan of the digital cassette tape. Remember them? Well, now the CD is dead too.

Instead of thinking about music in terms of CDs and albums, we can buy tracks online. It’s a seismic shift and it caught the "old school" music industry well and truly unprepared. Their entire business model was blown away and that meant that jobs, profits and people took a shellacking!

Now, it’s time for "prime time" to die!

You see with digital media, people choose what they want to watch (more like be involved with) and when they want to watch it. The death of prime time is already happening for two reasons:

• Personal Digital Recorders (PDRs) - Allowing you to time shift programs
• More significantly, the shift to Internet.

When Analogue TV switches off and Digital TV takes over, the pace of change will accelerate for TV oriented companies. That’s because digital makes on-demand programming possible, and that in turn kills the idea of TV ad placement.

As we all know, the problem that Media companies and TV stations face is that people don’t want to watch ads.

On the other hand old school marketers love ads. Think about those agencies that make the ads for the multi-million dollar ad spots around the NFL Superbowl in the US. Think of the TV rights and dollars that go along with those spots that are under threat as people consume more online.

Consumers have also demonstrated that they don’t want to set their schedules around the TV. In Australia, Neilsen Media reported that Australian now spend more time online than watching TV.

In Australia we’ve already seen old stalwarts like Kerry Packers Channel 9 falling apart at the seams. They’re struggling to deal with the fact that consumers stopped watching the 6:00 news. Their entire business was built around it in fact, but now they are reeling.

Channel 9 recently surprised us by cancelling it’s late night news program. The market has left. They can now get the news online, and they are increasingly waking up to the fact that the "newstainment" being shoved down their throats in not real.

Channel 7 isn’t as far ahead as it would like to think it is in adapting to the change either. It was heavily criticised for it’s pathetic single channel online coverage of the Olympic games. It showed that they still think like an old media company. And then there’s the castrated Tivo PDR that they launched in July. Channel 7 disabled the Ad skipping feature of the Tivo to force you to watch ads. Dumb old school thinking that the market will punish.

What is certain is that the old media business will soon have a new look. It could be the look of a ghost town. Look out for the tumbleweed.

Even if the change is not so drastic, the impact will be significant. What will this mean for commercial and political systems that rely on it so much?

Strangely, at the root of it are all the geeks who made the Internet work. You probably wouldn’t want to release these geeks to the light of day, but without them and their technology none of this could have happened.

And the credits roll something like this:

• TCP/IP
• HTTP
• Web Browsers
• Netscape
• Internet Explorer
• 56k Modems & Dial Up Internet
• MP3
• Quicktime, Real Media, Windows Media
• Napster
• Alta-Vista
• Peer to Peer file sharing
• Broadband / ADSL
• Google search
• Video streaming
• Firefox
• Flash
• DivX
• Bit torrent
• You tube

Got anything to add?

25° in Melbourne yesterday became 10° today. Just great!

Check out the www.stuffthathappens.com blog…

Some good advice for perfectionists from Derek Gehl of marketingtips.com. If you are a perfectionist, these tips will resonate strongly with you. As a perfectionist, I have a tendency to get distracted by irrelevant details and that ultimately leads to failure. So this article really resonated with me.

In summary, his tips are:

Strategy #1: Be realistic about what you can achieve

Strategy #2: Set strict time limits for each of your projects

Strategy #3: Think of failure as a learning experience

Strategy #4: Celebrate your successes

Strategy #5: Don’t be afraid to admit you need help

Well worth a read here: http://www.marketingtips.com/freenewsletter/index.php?article=205

I particualry liked the tip on celebrating success. Perfectionism often only allows us to see the faults. So, after reading these tips, we’ll keep pressing on with the imperfect and appreciating it for what it is.

It has only been legal to record TV in Australia since late 2006. Of course, for nearly 30 years most of us have had video recorders, then DVD and hard disk recorders that don’t really have any other purpose but to record TV shows.

Video recorders have been freely available to buy the whole time, despite the fact that it was technically illegal to record TV with them (which is what we all did). So in 2006 the law changed to allow “time-shifting”.

What that means is that:

• You can record a program to watch later by yourself or with members of your household
• You can also record the program from the internet, but only if it’s a live broadcast (simultaneous with the TV airing).

That’s it. That’s all you can do legally.

A commenter on an article about Internet TV over on IT wire - which quoted a Cisco study that shows that 59% of Australians watch TV on the Internet now - asked the question, “Is it illegal to download shows that have already aired in Aus?”.

The author of the article Alex Zaharov-Reutt pointed to the thin pickings of legal, downloadable TV content in Australia. Most popular shows are not downloadable, and few of the downloads that are available are even full episodes. So the commenter reasoned, if the show has been aired on free TV, surely I can download it legally?

What you still can’t do legally:

• Record a program and watch it at the same time
• Record a program to watch again and again
• Download a program from the internet after it has aired on free TV

Check out the Australian Copyright Council’s information sheet about recording TV here:

It seems that we have been spoiled by free to air TV for too long. Now that Australians are leaving the TV and spending more time on the internet, we seem to expect that everything is free over there too!

What we forget is that free to air TV is supported by advertising. It’s easy to forget that advertisers pay high prices for TV ads and some of that money buys the copyright to actually broadcast the TV show.

But this model doesn’t work on the internet. The reason it doesn’t work lies in the following comparison:

It’s just painful. I can’t bear the thought of paying to watch a TV show. Connecting the thrill of watching The IT Crowd or Desperate Housewives with a dollar departing from my wallet just destroys any pleasure that’s in it for me. Especially when it has been free to watch TV ever since the box was invented.

But the reality is, if we want people to spend their lives creating great TV shows, then someone has to pay them to do it… And if we want content on demand, on the ‘net and downloadable at any time, then we’re going to have to pay for the privilege.

Hmmm. Maybe it’s time to stop watching TV and go for a walk outside instead.