On-demand doesn't take away from linear viewing
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David Brennan, research and strategy director, Thinkbox
There’s no “race to replace traditional TV” by TV-on-demand services like SeeSaw, despite what Blinkx’s Suranga Chandratillake claims (Letters, nma 18 March 2010). Viewers are certainly not in a race, as record broadcast viewing shows. On-demand TV is an extra, not a replacement. It serves totally different needs from the linear schedules, the main one being to catch up with missed broadcasts.
It’s possible on-demand viewing will substitute for some broadcast viewing (fully web-enabled TVs will oil these wheels), but we’ll be watching more TV as a whole.
If you want to paint on-demand services in a competitive light, then SeeSaw should be seen more as a competitor to Blinkx than linear TV. But in truth, the expanding TV landscape is displacing time spent with other media rather than reducing people’s time with TV.
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