“You may need heard “don’t trust data that you just haven’t individually faked”. Well, this certainly also applies to RIAA “loss” information, as a result of in accordance with Soundscan, the agency with the main influence on US billboard top 200 charts, CD sales have truly gone up in the first quarter of 2004 as in comparison to the same quarter in 2003, whereas the RIAA has mentioned a reduce in sales for an identical period. The article goes on explaining why there’s such a discrepancy, but it turns into obvious that the RIAA is combining the numbers in the correct trend to display a loss for them even though stores sell more CDs. So much for the “losses” then. “There is little question that the PVR is having a serious effect on the viewing habits of the 100,000 or so owners of TiVo and Replay PVRs in the United States.
It is reported that TiVo equipped households watch 3 hours more TV a week than other families but they do not watch scheduled TV anymore. According to Josh Bemoff, a tv industry analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. , who intently follows the fortunes of TiVo and Replay, viewers “get into the habit of not paying attention to when the courses are on andjust watch what they have got recorded. ” This means that the idea of “prime time” and the advertisements revenues that go with it could become something of the past. Likewise, the viewer has become the schedule controller and clever packaging by the broadcasters will be less beneficial in maintaining the viewers.
Increasingly, viewers’ loyalty will be to programme brands in preference to channel brands. It shall be more difficult for networks to allure audiences to new programmes by launching them in prime time when all and sundry is looking: instead, each programme is competing for the viewers towards all others whenever transmitted.