TV is the New Reading

Everything is everywhere

Soon, everything will be everywhere.

Google’s purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion proves that someone, somewhere, is interested in the amount of traffic generated on a site where people make up their own videos.

Add in high-quality digital distribution, the burgeoning presence of DVRs, TiVo and satellite radio, the online availability of most network programming and some basic cable programming and you have to conclude that the way people watch television is poised for a signficant shift.

People will still make time to gather to watch their favorite shows on the big flat-screen television – you don’t make that kind of investment to just ignore it. But video iPods make it possible to watch quite a large amount of programming wherever you want to and the viewership is further fragmented – along with the fact that a PC connected up to broadband means access to hours and hours of network programming on any monitor.

I tested that theory last week. And even at the low-power PC I’m using to compose this column I am never more than two minutes away from watching an entire episode of NBC’s tragically canceled “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” – unavoidably interspersed with advertising.

I checked, and I couldn’t actually download the SciFi episodes of “The Dresden Files” and “Battlestar Galatica” I missed because the Oscars ran long last weekend. But this is less of a problem because both shows are repeated several times over the course of the week, which I’d suspected was the case.

Huge shift

Even so, this marks a huge shift in the way people watch television. Even the concept of “watching television” has to be reconstructed as “consuming media” in the wake of these changes. Because when information is distributed, recorded and viewed differently, our relationship with it changes. Our interaction shifts from the “must-see” appointment model where everyone gathers at one place and one time to take in their favorite shows as they are broadcast to a much more casual approach where viewers can decide to watch whatever they like whenever they want to watch it, limited only by their memory cache and the busyness of their lives.

Meanwhile, if you’re reading this column in our print release, you will also be able to find it shortly – and quite a lot of other information besides – at (www.minotdailynews.com).

Basically, digital distribution allows you to interact with the media and the information important to you to whatever extent you wish.

Not a bad set of inroads to make from people recording each other on their cellphones and uploading the resulting information to an increasingly popular site.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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