[opendtv] Extremely long and incredibly complex / How DVDs are changing the way we experience TV
- From: Monty Solomon <monty@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: undisclosed-recipient: ;
- Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 01:08:33 -0400
Extremely long and incredibly complex
How DVDs are changing the way we experience TV
By Steven Johnson | May 15, 2005
FIRST WE HAD ''appointment" television. You blocked out your Thursday
nights to watch ''Cosby" and ''Cheers," and stayed in reliably every
Wednesday for ''Melrose Place." And then, a few years ago, TiVo
helped usher in the age of ''time-shifting." Suddenly, you could
watch ''CSI: Miami" any night you wanted, as long as you'd trained
your digital video recorder to capture each episode. If you felt like
watching ''Saturday Night Live" at noon on Thursday, no problem TiVo
would dutifully serve it up on demand without any of the
tape-juggling and other hassles of VCRs.
Time-shifting was supposed to revolutionize the way we watch TV. But
while there's an undeniable shift towards more consumer control at
work here, time-shifting hasn't changed the overall pattern of
viewing TV shows: You still watch a standard rotation of programs you
just get to juggle the rotation to fit your schedule.
But I suspect (from purely anecdotal evidence) that a new pattern of
television watching is on the rise one that I call ''extreme
time-shifting"made possible now that the entertainment industry has
taken to releasing entire seasons of TV shows on DVD, or in some
cases via cable ''on demand," several months after they air. Instead
of watching an assortment of shows through the week, you watch one
show night after night until you've finished the season. So instead
of ''West Wing" on Wednesday and ''ER" on Thursday, it's ''Sopranos"
from April to mid-May, ''Arrested Development" from June to July, and
so on.
My wife and I have been devotees of extreme time-shifting for about
two years now, ever since we found ourselves on a continuous jag of
''Six Feet Under" viewing that took us through three whole seasons in
the space of about 90 days. When we emerged from that spell, we
realized that watching television dramas in this continuous,
committed way genuinely changes how you experience the content of the
shows. TiVo's time-shifting makes television more convenient, but
extreme time-shifting does something more profound: It makes
television more meaningful even more novelistic by revealing the scale
and intricacy of the stories it tells.
. . .
ttp://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/05/15/extremely_long_and_incredibly_complex/
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