It was bound to happen. Every couple of years, the FCC’s mandate for an all-high-def, all-digital broadcasting standard slides back a few more years and all the stodgy folks who swear they’ll never buy a new TV get to breathe a sigh of relief. And as usually happens with the perennial digital TV slideback, tech-heads the world over roll their eyes expectantly, as if digital TV ubiquity is somehow important to the TV-watching public at large.
Today, it happened again. The Federal Communications Commission let the mandatory date for eliminating analog-only local TV broadcasts to slide until 2012, while keeping the mandate to cease network-to-affiliate analog broadcasts during early ‘09. What does this mean for us? Maybe nothing as it turns out. One oft-named promise of digital TV has always been interactivity, yet TV is still about as interactive as watching paint dry. Above and beyond locating a program, recording it, and skipping through it instantly, digital TV hasn’t accounted for a major shakeup in the way people watch the tube.
Indeed, TV watching isn’t being changed by those pushing digital as much as it’s being changed by Internet-based entrants into the marketplace. While grandma clings to her late-model Zenith CRT, 2.0 properties like YouTube are federating highly-targeted, user-empowering video content, while startups like Vlip and Joost seek to create the interactive videotopia that’s still outside of digital television’s reach. Many people prefer to control and manage video content using the web as opposed to the TV–no schedules to follow, no Tivo to program, and just about all the video content one finds online is available on demand. The manner in which Net-based consumers do video is a far cry from Grandma’s Zenith, because the Net is much more open and organic than the limited, realm of broadcast TV.
So the net effect of the FCC’s slide on the digital TV issue may be nothing–many of us already watch digital TV. Others of us have kicked the TV habit altogether, opting for on-demand content from our favorite web sites, iTunes, or NetFlix. How do you get the majority of your video content these days?
