• by Mike Bloxham , Op-Ed Contributor, March 12, 2008

While at the 4 As conference in Orlando last week, I enjoyed a particularly fun conversation with a friend about one aspect of his TV viewing habits involving his favorite sports, his DVR, and breakfast.

My friend -- who shall remain anonymous unless he decides to identify himself in a posting linked to this piece, and whom we shall call "K" in the meantime -- records a daily sports program of an hour in length, which he watches the next day over breakfast.  He has configured his DVR to record over the previous day's program, so in addition to his own innate interest in the subject matter and its topical nature, he has an additional incentive to watch within a fairly short window of time.

"How long do you think it takes me to watch it?" was his question to me.  Well, since the program occupies an hour of total air time and he was watching on a DVR (and as the question itself implies that it wasn't an hour), I went for the obvious answer and assumed he went through the ads in fast-forward mode, so duly answered "Around 42 minutes or so."

As it turns out, I couldn't have been further from the truth: his actual time is typically more like 8-10 minutes, K said.

My estimate -- based on ad-shifting -- was probably OK as far as it went, but in this instance it failed to take into account the concept of content-shifting.  For K, the content he really wants is related only to the sports of interest and -- within those -- his teams of interest (and maybe on occasion other teams whose games impact on his favorite team's standing in tournaments, etc.).  As a result, while catching up on the latest sports news, he is fast-forwarding intermittently through the content and stopping when whatever is on screen looks relevant to his interests -- all while slurping down breakfast cereal or whatever other consumables prevail at the beginning of the day.

Aside from being an interesting example of how unpredictable viewing behavior has become and how many ways there are that people now shape their experience, all this seemed like an awful lot of hard work.  Now admittedly, I'm not a breakfast person -- it's as much as I can do to remain upright until I've imbibed enough caffeine and been on the go for a while -- but even for the most (irritatingly) alert of morning people, surely this sort of behavior represents something of a juggling act.

Continuing our conversation with that in mind, it wasn't long before we started to piece together a solution, all based on what could be done now if the stars aligned appropriately.  After all, rather than having to constantly use the remote to fast-forward and stop and start and rewind content, how much better would it be if we could record not whole programs, but the segments of interest based on meta-tagging within the programs.  Better still, if we could input relevant search / record terms with a voice-activated remote (they exist and function pretty well -- I played with one at CES around three years ago that handled different voices and accents in quick succession to search a program guide on the noisy show floor), the process of setting up my preferences would be simple.

I could say Football, Indianapolis Colts -- and lo and behold, my DVR could record the segments of relevance, with a 30-second buffer either side, and my life (or the breakfast of my friend) would be made so much easier.  Of course this requires that a degree of consistent meta-tagging be applied to TV content in much the same way as on the Web, but this is already done to an extent anyway, even though it varies by programming type.

Now naturally, not being a software type by any stretch of the imagination, I consigned this rather fanciful vision to the someday, sometime category.  Though in the course of the next 24 hours, I was intrigued to hear from one executive in the thick of the world of DVRs that everything described above is all pretty much possible now.

Of course, there are many players with a vested -- and arguably legitimate --interest in making sure this sort of thing doesn't become a reality.  It could play havoc with advertising exposure, carriage negotiations and who knows what else if anything vaguely like this ever took off.

Even though it would be interesting to contemplate how such capabilities could be utilized by marketers, and even though such a service could well be a differentiated proposition that subscribers would be willing to pay a premium for, this kind of scenario remains for now a distant possibility at best and a playful fantasy at worst.

On the other hand, if we believed that such "fantasies" never became realities, then we wouldn't have the remote control, the DVR, VOD, or many of the other innovations that have become disruptive to the long-standing mode of consumption that has underpinned the TV business historically.  There's a long history of consumers' latent or conscious desires being satisfied over time, even in ways that were once impossible or apparently unacceptable -- it's generally called progress.

This may not be one of those scenarios, but it would be foolish to rule out such a logical extension of a behavior that appeals to so many -- even if it is inconvenient and counter to current business practices.

CORRECTION: Tuesday's Online Video Insider at first had the wrong byline. The correct author (now credited online) is Paul Bowlin, a regional vice president for online video advertising marketplace SpotXchange, and a member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Digital Video Committee.