Monthly Archives: May 2005

TiVo and Church

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I have a theory,

Ever since the inception of TV, television has had a big impact on Church attendance. TV is an essentially static medium as far as time goes, essentially, you are bound to watching a program when it airs, rather than picking and chosing when to watch a show based on your schedule. I really do think that the inflexibility of TV from a time perspective has kept people away from church when they need to be there the most.

How many people miss church to Australian Idol on a Sunday night?

It’s only been the emergence of bittorent and other “disruptive technologies” that has allowed people to:

  • Pick and choose the content they want to see
  • Decide when they want to see it (time-shifting)
  • Decide where they want to view it (space-shifting)

Up till now, if you wanted to watch a TV program you have one of two options. Either watch it when it airs in your living room, or whereever a TV happens to be present, or record it to a static medium such as video tape or recordable DVD.

From a usability prespective, TV is perfect, you switch it on, alter the volume and change channels.

From a time perspective, TV is less than perfect, the programming executive at the TV station picks and chooses when you watch a specific piece of content.

Time-shifting – the ability to view a piece of content whenever you want to will change the way people interact with content in the future. Essentially, the content is downloaded when it becomes available and later viewed at the discretion of the user.

Space-shifting – the ability to move a particular piece of content between devices so that the content can be viewed in a number of different settings at the convenience of the user. This will become more and more prevalent as mobile media playback devices become more prevalent. Traditionally, this has involved copying to CD, tape or DVD, but has been expanded to include digital music/video players, mobile devices and set-top boxes.

TiVo was the first mass market consumer device to allow people to time-shift content easily and simply. All you have to do is bring up the show guide and select the programs that you want to save to the TiVo’s large hard disk drive for later viewing. It’s a great concept and it works. You can even erase last weeks ephisode with the new ephisode to conserve disk space. It’s easy, non-messy and doesn’t involve programming VCR’s and dealing with video tapes.

More to come soon!

Apple and sith spoilers

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I’m annoyed,

everyone is giving Apple a bad wrap when it comes to suing the daylights out of the likes of Powerpage.com, ThinkSecret.com, and AppleInsider.com.

Ok sure, these guys are big fans of Apple, but I think that trying to find out before time what Apple is about to launch just shows that their a smarty-pants.

If someone needs to get their Geek points from leeking information from Apple, then thats fine, just don’t spoil it for the rest of us! I happen to like waiting. Waiting for Steve Job’s keynotes is cool, he runs the best keynotes in the business, why do we all need to know before time what Apple is doing?

This remindes me of “Revenge of the Sith” and Star Wars fans, who are as we speak divided into two camps. One camp are the spoilers, and the other are the non-spoilers. The spoilers are willing to trawl newsgroups, bribe the production crew and generally do whatever it takes to get as much information as they possibly can about the plot and characters before the movie starts. The non-spoilers are the complete opposite. They are averse to any kind of information regarding the movie whatsoever. Even to the extent of being diametrically opposed to seeing movie trailers and any mass-marketing of the movie. They want to enjoy the movie in it’s most pure unadulterated form.

I remember a time when all I did was read press releases on the internet… I was addicted to products that only existed on paper, and when they finally came out, I had already moved on to the next cool product X about to be released by company X.

For instance, Apple OS X 10.4 “Tiger” exists, Windows Longhorn dosn’t.
Am I going to trawl websites looking for every tidbit of information relating to Longhorn? No, because it dosn’t add value to what I’m doing now. Am I going to seriously consider getting an Mac that runs Tiger? Yes, because it actually exists now, and it could actually add value to what I’m doing now.

I think people should focus on whats happening now, rather than on whats happened before, or whats coming tomorrow. Today is where it’s at, it’s where we put our hand to the plow and it’s where we get the job done.