CNN.com – Researchers: Homes have more TVs than people – Sep 22, 2006
Listen up, kids. I remember. I was there the day it happened. I know, you’ll say there’s no way I could have been alive back then, but it’s true — the pace of change is faster than you young whippersnappers think, and advances in long-life studies have kept me going far longer than I ever expected.
So yeah, I was around back on the day when it all changed — the day when we learned that TVs outnumbered people in most houses.
It’s hard to believe these days that there ever was such a situation. Back then, a lot of households still didn’t get more than a few hundred channels, and most got a lot less. You couldn’t watch an old show anytime you wanted — they actually sold plastic discs with old show data on them, can you believe it? Never mind today’s remix scene; just not there. All you kids hooked on Buffy the M*A*S*H Dragnet, outta luck, heh heh (*cough cough*).
I think the real tipping point was when TV stopped being purely passive. When it started reaching out. At first, broadcasters thought they were reaching through TV in order to sell stuff. They were wrong, though. The stuff they thought they were selling was just a way to sell smarter TVs, in the end. As the TVs gained more brains with ever-fancier set-top boxes, the passive screen swallowed up computers, game consoles, DVRs, and all the rest. And stopped being so passive.
And now here we are. TVs outnumber people by a lot. They have to sell things to us instead, driven by our endless need to channelsurf, stream data, store and chop and remix it. It’s what we were born to do: slice and dice the broadcasts, be the broadcasts.
Speaking of which, my damn clicker’s broken. Can someone change my channel?
6 Responses to “CNN.com – Researchers: Homes have more TVs than people – Sep 22, 2006”
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Somebody must have a hell of a lot of TVs, because I don’t have any.
tess wrote:
I have 2; I watch one for the news (BBC obviously as I have the benefit of a fairly impartial broadcaster in the UK) or The Simpsons. The other sits in the spare room gathering dust. Sure, I might watch a lot of films on the PS2, but I never count watching a movie as TV. I’d watch it them on the PC if Starforce hadn’t mucked about with the DVD drive….
I do find it hilarious that TV companies are getting in a huge fuss about the interactive content of digital TV; it’s about 1% of the level of interactivity that the web has had for about 15 years.
I do hope that TV in terms of a purely passive experience will die off. News, a thought provoking movie or Discovery documentary are about all that deserve to be shown IMHO….apart from The Simpsons of course 🙂
I certainly fit into that demo, the one with more TVs than people. The worst part is though, two of them are busted!
I assume they only counted standalone Television units and not those that can play TV on their computer too. That’s even worse 🙂
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I almost think this story is misleading. I don’t know about anyone else, but I know, in my household, there is a TV in every room. However, my wife and i hardly watch it. Sure the TV is on and we watch it sparingly, but we are usually doing something else. One of us would be at the computer playing an MMO while the other one is on the couch playing a handheld game or doing some puzzle. It used to be that the TV and or Radio was the primary form of entertainment in the home, that is no longer the truth, between Ipods, Gameboys, PCs, Sodoku books (SP), and all the other portible entertainment available to us, we get a lot less exposure to Advertising by our own choice. I have seen the future, it comes in the form of the Billboard advertising in Anarchy Online, while this seems reprehensible to some, it actually impressed me that they had a full motion video in the square by my apartment reminicent of Blade Runner.
Which reminds me, how far off is the future of Blade Runner? FLying cars aside, New York times square has the moving billboards and whatnot that were seen in Blade Runner. I live in Vegas, driving down the road, I had seen LCD screens in the place of billboards on the side of the road, this isn’t just the typical Vegas sign featuring showgirls of some 19.99 dinner show, but a picture on a traditional billboard that was a giant LCD screen.
The point is there maybe more TVs then there are People in most households, but advertising folks are finding it harder to grab our attention with their ads. This probably means that they are going to reach out to us through other means, ie. pop-up ads, Ads in Video games, Sponsored events, etc. etc.
I apologize for the tangent, I just get off on these random thoughts where I think the whole entertainment pie is connected, probably because I do 2 to 3 things at the same time to keep me occupied at home. Anyone else like that?
We have 2 people and 1 TV. Soon we’ll have a 3:1 ratio. I feel very strongly about “no TV in the bedroom.” B feels very strongly about not paying the cable companies any more money than we have to. I like say, “we don’t have cable,” but it’s not really true — we have what’s called Limited Cable that with our multi-item Comcast discount costs us $2.50/month. We get about 6 channels I watch, and about 20 others that I have no interest in whatsoever. That’s as far as he’s willing to go.
I did, however, talk him into getting us a Tivo. We bought one yesterday. I’m soooo excited about it. 🙂