• by Tom Hespos , March 1, 2005

It's a ritual I've been through many times over the years - disconnecting one's old cable boxes and bringing them to the local cable company's office for a trade-in and an upgrade in service. Since moving back to Long Island last fall, I've had to put up with the inferior cable TV service dictated by my old converters and coaxial wiring - inferior in the sense that the service is a far cry from what I was used to in Manhattan. So I spent a Saturday morning recently trading in my old boxes, signing up for a new service offering, and rewiring most of my house.

I decided on one DVR box for the basement and regular digital cable boxes for the rest of the house. I also signed up for a "Gold Package" that gave me most of the paid channels (all the better to watch The Sopranos when that gets started up again...)

My sister, who lives with me thought this was the bee's knees and happily recorded many of her favorite shows. This immediately ripped down the concept of "appointment TV" in my home, which was largely characterized by my sister's husband racing home from work on Thursday nights to watch The Apprentice with my sister. To be honest, it's taken every ounce of my willpower to avoid programming my cable box to record all things "Star Trek," as that would mean my killing several hours a week that I simply don't have.

Cablevision, which is the cable provider on Long Island, is quite aggressive with its digital and interactive TV offerings. There are more on-demand options than I can shake a stick at, and it's tempting to avoid schlepping to Blockbuster and ordering movies on demand.

Among the on-demand offerings is something called "MagRack", and I honestly wouldn't have given it a moment's consideration if I hadn't seen the ads they have been running on the Long Island Rail Road trains. Put simply, "MagRack" is an attempt to offer niche programming on an on-demand basis to subscribers.

Over the weekend, I explored it a bit and found a series of guitar lessons available on the service. I took a "course" in advanced soloing, which I happily participated in by plugging in my electric guitar and strumming along with the instructors. When I didn't understand a part of the lesson, I simply hit the rewind button on my remote and watched it again.

One afternoon, I went down to the basement TV and found my brother-in-law standing in front of the TV with a golf club, using "MagRack" to take a golf lesson in hopes of improving his approach shots. He's a golf nut, and when I saw him staring at the wide range of segments on improving his game, he commented "Yeah, all of these are getting watched..."

To me, "MagRack" flies in the face of what television has meant to me for many years. There's no longer a need for appointment TV - carving a specific time out of one's day to catch a broadcast. There's no need for broad-based content that will appeal to as many viewers as possible.

In fact, much of the content that's showcased in "MagRack" wouldn't have a prayer of making it in a network TV time slot. There's also the flexibility of the medium that allows for viewer participation. I was able to take my guitar lesson and skip through the things I already knew and review the things I didn't by rewinding and spending as much time as I needed to absorb them.

I know I'm late to the game and there are many of my readers who have been enjoying these features for quite some time now, but I wanted to make the point this week that today's cable TV offerings have appeared to learn a tremendous lesson from the Web and other media that we consider to be "interactive."

Time constraints are being lessened and the "lean-forwardness" of the medium is being improved such that viewers are able to interact with content more than ever. Keep this in mind before you make your next "TV is dead" pronouncement.