Personalisation in television can be seen through the PVR system. Sky+ in the UK and TiVO in the US are the two leading brands that offer the PVR system. PVRs use computer technology to record television programmes onto an internal hard-disk. Functions such as basic recording, recording of series, pausing and rewinding live television, recording one thing whilst watching another are all available on a PVR system. Your digtial box is then able to build up a basic idea of what kind of programmes you have watched and recorded then compares your data on a database and compare it to people with similar viewing tastes.
The role of the PVR in shaping a personalised media experience is potentially revolutionary as the traditional schedules are being seriously challenged by NMTs. However PVRs are not selling well in 2004 sky only had 150,000 users of the Sky+ service. One of the major criticisms is that PVRs aren't that new in function, as a VHS could do exactly what a PVR does however instead of saving a programme to a tape it saves it to a hard-disk. However Sky's emphasis on personalising your own television channel is a clear step towards correcting this misconception.
PVRs are a clear view of how things are heading for the future in terms of of major industry developments. Microsoft is working hard trying to encourage sales of Media Centre PC's that have similar functions to that of PVRs. Sony have introduced the PlayStation 3 that has its own media centre, as well as being a games console, Sony are also putting a PlayTV DVB-T tuner/digital video recorder accessory for the console. These are both examples of convergence.
‘Variety show’ scheduling
'Variety show' scheduling attracted large audiences to television due to the fact that there would be a mixture of different genre's of programming on one channel or another. Due to PVRs variety show scheduling may become a thing of the past, even without PVRs, the fact that digital television is not also set up into categories for different viewers shows that this approach is soon becoming a thing of the past.
The audiences for the 'old' analogue channels may be smaller however their viewing is more committed due to the fact that no other channels have this variety anymore. However due to this personalisation of channels audiences don't have to watch anything they don't want to watch anymore so everything they watch can be suited to their own personal tastes. It is a so called 'pick-and-mix' approach that you can watch one programme of a certain genre then watch one of a totally different genre also gives us this personalised experience.
"Giving audiences exactly what they want, even if they don’t know what it is yet, seems to be the latest marketing drive for many technology products" - Gavin Luhrs
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