Another Texas VC

I watch a few tv series pretty regularly, but to a show I have no idea what time they are scheduled to be on. With the exception of Longhorn Football, all of the stuff I watch is pre-recorded by my DVR. I am not alone, with a third of Americans now using DVRs. So when NBC decimated their primetime schedule to push Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno up an hour or two, my life was completely unaffected, except that NBC had one less show to offer me to pre-record.

The other day I accidentally deleted my DVR recording of Mad Men, and went to AMC on-Demand to pull the episode back down. Unfortunately AMC doesn’t post episodes until they are a week old, so I resorted to grabbing the torrent version off the web. The torrent version had higher resolution than the on demand version, downloaded faster than AMC on-Demand (15 minutes versus about 45), and already had the commercials stripped out.

The show that seems to understand our new pre-recorded world the best is The Colbert Report. Colbert smartly bakes sponsors into the meat of programming and offers episodes on colbertnation.com  within hours of broadcast where I get exposed to even more advertising opportunities. A TV show is worth as much as what you can do with your audience, and Colbert has proven that he can leverage his audience to do just about anything.

So NBC just bet their entire network on the faulty premise that viewers care what time shows are on. The battered network is in talks to be sold to Comcast, a programming speedbump that can easily be circumvented via the web. Billions of dollars are about to change hands, but should anyone really care? To me this is about as important as a printing press company getting bought by a newspaper.