The Evolution of Television

It looks like analog TV broadcasts got a stay of execution, not that it matters to me. I am ready for the transition, but that's not why I don't care. Honestly, even if I hadn't gotten my coupons and digital converter boxes (I only have cable for internet access and my TV is old and has rabbit ears), I probably wouldn't notice. As far as I'm concerned, my television set is for games and (occasionally) movies (my son loves Cars).

I actually watch a handful of TV shows currently: Dexter, BattleStar Galactica, Heroes, Smallville, Tudors, House, Lost, Fringe, and various PBS programs. By the way, not to change the subject, but Dexter is an awesome show. If you have the means, I highly suggest picking it up. But back to my point: I follow a fair number of different TV shows (too many, really) and basically never watch any of them on my television. In fact, several of the series I've enjoyed the most (like Firefly and Babylon 5) were ones that I watched after they were already off the air. Then there's House and Smallville, which I started watching from the beginning after they had been on the air for several seasons already. Through a combination of Netflix, Hulu, and the sites of the various stations that carry these shows (some of which annoyingly use software that only works on Windows/Mac), I watch basically all of them on my computer.

Which incidentally is also why I still have an old CRT television set. Why would I want to spend money on a big, expensive TV when I have a beautiful high resolution screen that I can take into any room in the house? In fact, if I do the math based on viewing distances, I'd need something like a 100 inch screen to cover the same amount of my visual field as my laptop. I can pause, rewind, quit anytime and pick up where I left off later, too. Sure, I could do that with a PVR, but I don't have one. I skipped that stage of television evolution and waited for on demand access to arrive.

As far as I'm concerned, the FCC might just as well free up all of the spectrum used for broadcast television (analog and digital) and use it for something else. Yeah, yeah, I know -- not everybody has broadband, but with all the work that's gone into this switch, maybe we could have fixed that instead of limping the dinosaur that is television along for another generation. The mammals are here and the age of dinosaurs is over. Or maybe I should shut up and be thankful lots of people still use televisions; there's more bandwidth for me that way anyway.

Customer Experience is Key

As I was out driving to pick up some take out for dinner tonight, I happened to notice our local Blockbuster store. My wife and I used to be regulars at this location and it occurred to me that I haven't been in there in several years. So what happened? I had a bad experience.

Not long after Christopher Reeve died, I wanted to watch the original Superman movie. I stopped at Blockbuster a couple of times. It was checked out both times and the third time I asked about it. Turns out, Blockbuster had changed policies so that if you wanted a movie you just keep it at home long enough and eventually they charge you for it. It was on the shelf as though it were just checked out for a couple of days, but it might be like that for a month because Blockbuster doesn't have data on whether it was coming back or not. I told the clerk that was really frustrating.  I didn't like wasting my time guessing when (or if) a movie would be available. Being some teenage kid, he shrugged and basically blew it off. I've never been back.

My wife and I had used Netflix some time before this and had suspended our account because we ran out of movies we wanted to watch. Aside from some issues with scratched discs, we loved the service. It was convenient and we saw a lot of great movies at a fair price. We just needed to take a break for a bit.

After our Blockbuster experience, we resumed our subscription. That was almost 4 years ago. Right now I'm watching a BattleStar Galactica Season 4 disc I got from Netflix. The service has only gotten better:

• faster turnaround
• huge selection
• Watch Instantly^*
• fewer scratched discs

Blockbuster hadn't done anything innovative with their business in a long time and Netflix came along and took it away from them. Stagnation's not what clinched it for me, though. It was the rotten customer experience sealed their fate in my book. I saw ads that they had a movie delivery service, but I never even looked into it. They have a download service now, too. Guess what? I don't really care. I'm happy with Netflix for most things and Redbox covers the few cases when I want a new release that might stall my queue with a long wait.

Each experience can make or break a person's status as your customer, so don't blow it.

* Of course, I practically never used this until it got Mac support and would be happier yet if it also worked on Linux like Hulu and all the other Flash based video sites out there, but Watch Instantly is just gravy because I'm happy with the mail based DVD delivery.