Till TV do us part

by Yeoh Siew Hoon

A couple of articles got my interest this week.

The first one said that even as we were trying desperately hard to fight climate change, all the little gadgets we now have are gobbling up more electricity than ever before.

Americans now have about 25 consumer electronic products in every household, compared with just three in 1980.

If I were just to use my household of three, I think we have easily about 20 gadgets between us – that’s not counting the GPS collar I’d like to get for my cat that’s always off wandering in the night.

Consumer electronics now represent 5% of household power demand, and that is expected to triple over the next two decades, according to the International Energy Agency.

Then there’s the new fancy flat-panel television sets that now adorn almost every living room and hotel room which they say consume even more power than refrigerators.

The fact that they are now so cheap means their footprint can only spread – I got my Samsung flat panel one night on impulse while I was out shopping for frozen chicken. There was a sale and I got mine, including delivery, for under S$600.

One small step for me, one giant leap in electricity consumption.

Then, just as I thought that maybe the day would be saved because television is so Dark Ages compared to the Internet which has become THE place to watch television if you are cool and hip, I read that with Internet television becoming so popular, broadcasters now want to put it on television.

The article said, “Within several months, viewers in Europe with specially equipped televisions may be able to watch public broadcasters’ Internet TV services, which let users catch up on the television shows of the previous week, whenever they choose, via their computers.”

Using hybrid technology, services such as the BBC’s iPlayer in Britain and Hulu in the US, which have attracted millions of users on the Internet, would become available on television and that remote control we now wield so easily would become a powerful tool of digital convergence.

What that means is that as we are watching a cooking show, we would access page links to similar, archived programmes or to retailer websites selling the ingredients.

Imagine what this could do for travel programmes – you could be watching Rough Guide, for example, and inspired from seeing some mad man clamber up a rock or something, book a flight and a hotel for that holiday of a lifetime.

Yes, the gap between inspiration and transaction gets ever narrower, which is precisely what marketers want, of course. They want that all roads lead to instant transaction.

Experts call it “crossing the Rubicon” – “the moment when the Internet and television come together”.

This worries me somewhat because I remember reading an article in 2007 that quoted AC Neilsen statistics as saying the average American watches more than four hours of TV each day (or 28 hours/week, or two months of nonstop TV-watching per year).

In a 65-year life, it means that person would have spent nine years glued to the tube.

With the convergence of television and Internet, well, that figure is bound to rise which means we could end up spending up to a quarter of our life watching the screen in one form or another.

This also means we will be spending more time watching programmes about how climate change is going to kill our Earth while in actual fact, it is us aiding and abetting that crime.

Yeoh Siew Hoon is producer of WIT-Web in Travel – being held at Suntec in Singapore, October 20-23, alongside ITB Asia