Viewers: The new program directors

For decades, the broadcast television business has operated under the assumption that the primary business of a television station is to deliver a continuous programming stream. The goal is to capture the interest of a viewer, and then to hold that interest across the discontinuities that are inevitable with both advertiser-supported and non-commercial television. With DVDs, NVOD, VOD and Personal Video Recorders (PVRs), the viewers are becoming the program directors, watching what they want, when they want, with no regard for continuity. With digital television, the equivalent of an analog vertical interval switch becomes a complex compression management task. Two operational philosophies now exist to manage digital operations and continuity. One approach is to handle master control operations using baseband (uncompressed) digital streams. The other approach is based on the splicing of MPEG streams to maintain continuity. Both of these approaches are patches that are unfortunately necessary because the most desirable solution was not economically practical with first-generation implementations of digital decoders and set-top boxes.