The Revolution Will Not be Televised

When satellite radio appeared, it was billed as one of those technologies destined to change the world.  If you didn’t have satellite radio, you just had “terrestrial” radio. Or maybe not.  Sirius and XM, the two major players in the field, are now merging.  Space wasn’t big enough for the two of ‘em, it seems.  Their stock values dropped 40 percent last year.  You can find their upbeat release HERE.  Likewise, when the Digital Video Recorder, or DVR, first appeared in 1999, everyone expected television to be altered forever.  People who had DVRs — TiVo is the leading brand — talked about how they could watch the shows they wanted to see whenever they wanted, and (most ominous to the media business) they could fast-forward through commercials.  Traditional TV advertising, it appeared, was doomed.  That apparently hasn’t happened yet either, at least not according to a report from the Nielsen Company, which does television ratings.  Nielsen, out with a report last week, found that about half the time, DVR owners are still watching TV the old-fashioned way — they’re plunking themselves down on the couch, turning on the set, and watching shows as they’re broadcast.  Even if they wanted to zap the commercials, they couldn’t. What’s more, when they do record a show to play later, they still watch 40 percent of the commercials.  Nielsen has more HERE.  Stop me if I’m taking this too far, but perhaps these two widely-separated items are more evidence that technological revolutions take a little longer than we expect.  They do happen–you’re using a new medium right now, after all–but old way of doing things are not necessarily blown away by what comes next.  Mark Ramsey, president of hear2.0, a radio consulting firm, takes this farther.  He graphs the declining traffic to the Sirius and XM websites over the last year, and writes, "to the degree that web traffic is a proxy for consumer interest, it looks like a long and slow race to the bottom."  I’m not so sure.  I think it’s just a slow climb to the top. (Image courtesy Sirius Satellite Radio.)