• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, November 1, 2007

Typically, we discuss the future of television on these pages. Today, I'd like to recognize an important part of its past. Or, I should say, a part of its passing. The death notice came quietly the other day, and it took the form of a Nielsen communiqué that nonchalantly informed clients it would cease collecting and reporting data on television remote controls at the end of this year.

The news elicited no banner headlines in the industry trade press, or front page stories in The New York Times. It logged nary a blog. For all intent and purposes it was a non-story, and no big event. In fact, Nielsen said it was discontinuing its tracking of remote controls because they had approached ubiquity and the data has essentially become irrelevant.

"Reporting this household characteristic in our reports and systems is not as relevant as when this technology was first introduced," the TV ratings giant stated. "Not reporting on remote control will enable us to report on another, more relevant technology in the future."

One can only imagine what that other, more relevant future television technology might be, but it had better be pretty significant if Nielsen is bumping remotes to make room for it.

I don't know about your households, but remotes are still a pretty big deal around the Mandese homestead. They are still the chief source of intra-family power grabs, and their grasp defines much of our domicile's pecking order. And on the not-so-rare occasions that a remote disappears into the Twilight Zone of couch cushion oblivion or wherever they actually end up, our family dwells in near-catatonic state staring melancholically at the seemingly immovable channel tuner as it goes through the stages of loss of remote control - denial, anger, acceptance - until Dad arrives with yet another replacement from Radio Shack. Mind you, the replacements are not nearly as satisfying as the original, branded versions - never mind that the all-in-one gizmos can now control everything from the DVR to your microwave oven. And it's not just the ergonometrics, or the fact that you have to constantly relearn which button controls what. (Why is it that universal remotes have no universal design?).

Aside from being a boon to the ratings of the public TV station our set was tuned to last, the periodic displacement or loss of TV remote controls has taught me how truly dependent we are on the devices, and how, when they disappear, we experience a profound loss of control. And it's not just the need to get up and manually click through a channel tuner (a fairly formidable task on a DirecTV satellite receiver). It's the fact that some modern-day television hardware - incredibly - is not designed to function without a remote. And I'm not just talking about some of the more advanced features, but some basic functions. For example, when our Go Video dual deck DVD/VCR remote broke, it became impossible to select the "play movie" feature on the DVD player from the hardware's control panel.

I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point. It is that I don't think that we've really begun to scratch the surface of how something as seemingly ubiquitous as a remote control actually influences TV viewing behavior. With the exception of, "Remotely Interested," a truly insightful report authored last year by fellow TV Board contributor Mike Bloxham and his Ball State University colleague Michael Holmes, I haven't run across much, if any, literature on the subject. But anecdotally I understand that the influence - like that of any consumer media interface - is profound.

The other day during Media magazine's Forecast '08 conference in New York, an audience member asked a panel of consumer research experts when they thought the "remote control, the computer mouse and the Lay-z-Boy" would eventually converge. This, of course, is an oxymoron, because the remote control, like the Lay-z-Boy, is the ultimate metaphor for a "lean back" user experience, whereas the computer mouse is a "lean forward" mode. But the reality is we are increasingly toggling back and forward when we consume media - across any platform, and especially across cross-platforms.

The TV remote control may have grown irrelevant for Nielsen, but its functionality has become embedded in the way we think and behave as media consumers. Thank you for allowing me to pause on this thought.