The Persistence of Scheduling

I was hanging out with a good friend the other day, and we got to talking about his two girls. He related an exchange between his oldest (whom I’m pretty sure is six — I’m really bad at remembering that stuff, but for the purpose of the story she’s six. Okay? Cool.) and his mother-in-law on a recent visit to the girls’ grandparents’ house. This is third-hand, but the dialogue went something like this:

Grandma: Honey, do you want to watch TV?
Six-year old: Okay! I want to watch Hanna Montana!
Grandma: Uh, Hanna Montana isn’t on right now honey.
Six-year old: (PUZZLED LOOK.) Oh, I want to watch Dora!
Grandma: Dora isn’t on either, hon.
Six-year old: (ANOTHER PUZZLED LOOK.) But grandma, your TV is right there!

The confusion, of course, is that my friend has had a PVR, on-demand digital TV and a massive collection of DVDs for the entire living memory of his children. They don’t understand that their favourite shows come on a certain time of day because they can watch them any time they want.

Recently here in Canada, the major television networks have been pushing to have cable companies (and by extension cable consumers) pay “carriage fees” to them for the privilege of carrying their programming, the same way the cable-only channels do. I don’t want to get into the whole convoluted and political debate around this but here’s the very short version as I understand it: networks traditionally provide their signal for free to everyone in exchange for using the broadcast airwaves (the ones you pick up with your old rabbit ears) which are public property. Now the networks are arguing that this traditional competitive advantage is not good enough.

Implicit in their argument, I think, is that the broadcast television model is ultimately on its way out. And of course, the broadcast television model is highly reliant on certain things being on the air at certain times. Coincidence? I think not.

I can’t help but wonder — how long will it be before the old concept of a television schedule becomes a complete relic of the past

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