Apparently, to no one’s surprise, old people still watch TV:

An annual study by ad buyer Magna Global USA shows the four major networks each had a median age of 40 or more for the first time, meaning half of viewers are older and half younger than that figure.

Fox has crept upward from a median age of 35 in the 2002-03 season to 39 in 2005-06 and increased sharply to age 42 for the season that ended in May.

CBS remains the oldest-skewing network, with a median age of 53, but it has remained the most stable in audience age. ABC’s grew from 46 to 48 in the past year.

And NBC, once a youth magnet with comedies such as Friends, now has a median age of 49, the top end of the 18-to-49 age range most networks target, thanks to the heavy loads of older-skewing Dateline, Deal or No Deal and Law & Order on its schedule.

Maybe if programming gets crappy enough they’ll even start to use P2P networks. Old people are funny.

People are so excited by the impending death of television because finally there will be something interesting to watch unlike the “vast wasteland” that is TV:

Honda will be the sole sponsor of what Sony Pictures Television is calling the Minisode Network, which is scheduled to begin next week. Visitors to the MySpace Web site (my space.com) will be able to watch episodes of 15 vintage Sony series like “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Facts of Life,” “Fantasy Island” and “Who’s the Boss,” edited from their original lengths of 30 or 60 minutes each to an Internet-friendly 4 to 6 minutes.

Why do people hate TV?

1. Boring Content
2. Advertising

We think someone’s missing the big idea here…

Recently at the All Things Digital conference, Steve Jobs described Apple as:

We’re in two busineses today, we’ll be very shortly in three business and a hobby. One is our Mac business, second is our music business, third business is the phone business, handsets. And the hobby is Apple TV. The reason I call it a hobby is a lot of people have tried and failed to make it a business.

It seems today that the new hobby is really a fourth business.

A film would cost $2.99 for a 30-day rental. Its digital rights-management software would allow films to be moved from a computer to at least one other device such as the video iPod or iPhone. The software would prevent movies being copied.

One studio executive said the service would “compete against cable companies and anyone else offering VOD into the home”.

It seems Apple is determined to do to movie downloads what it did to music downloads but this would mean that the AppleTV has to become as ubiquitous as the iPod. Perhaps it will be a hobby for a while.

In a move that has been repeatedly predicted here long ago, NBC is now inserting commercial content into the show to avoid people who skip commercial breaks with their DVR:

To fight the challenge posed by TiVo, NBC is borrowing a tactic from television’s early days—live commercials.

Tuesday’s broadcast of “The Tonight Show” will air a live skit promoting car satellite-navigation devices made by Garmin International. The skit will air immediately before the show goes to commercial break. There, the message will be reinforced with a taped spot for Garmin taking the first slot in the break.

However, this skit is really only the beginning of the long inevitable slide towards advertiser sponsored programming. The genius of the 30-second spot was that it created a firewall between content producers and advertisers. The content producers were free to create compelling programming and the advertisers were free to create whatever spots they wanted within their allotted time.

Now, the only way to ensure that viewers see the ad is to make the entire show the ad. Remember folks, you heard it here first. Now its time to go watch some Texaco Star Theater.

Entrepreneur magazine has a profile of the startup YuMe, which helps advertisers looking to target video ads online. Of course, the new company discovered that the massive patchwork of players/competitors in the online video space created some snags:

“We’re finding that people who have the content and want to distribute it want control over the ad sales, and people who are actually distributing the content, like YouTube and other distribution agents, also think they have control or a share of the pie,” says Kadambi. For now, though, everyone seems to be working together.

“Everyone seems to be working together” sounds a bit ominous to us. It is true that much good content isn’t licensed because current business models aren’t profitable enough but that’s because there are a whole host of other infrastructure issues no one has dealt with starting with the overwhelming lack of good broadband in this country. Generating more demand for video would be trivial if the infrastructure was in place…

The WSJ covers the recent announcement by lala.com that they will stream music for free via browswers and sell albums only if you want to load songs onto your iPod:

It’s like a subscription music service, but without the monthly subscription fee. Lala is betting that in return for getting all that free access to music at home, listeners will pay to buy the songs they want to take with them on iPods and other music players. The prices will range from $6.50 to $13.50 for an album. (For now, Lala plans to sell music only by the album rather than song by song.)

Entering the online digital music sales fray is not big news. What is big news however, is that unlike all other digital music shops, Lala has reverse engineered some of Apple’s iPod technology and found a way to load their music onto iPods without having to use iTunes!

The risks include enabling Lala customers to circumvent the proprietary iTunes software. That may be viewed by Apple as a provocation. Spokespeople for Apple didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The WSJ analysis is rather rosy but we feel that with Apple’s history of frequent updates to iPod and iTunes software that its only a couple of weeks before they release an ‘update’ that completely disables Lala’s technology. Let the rat race begin!

With the rise of YouTube came the implicit conclusion that the online video format wars were over and that Flash Video (.FLV) had rendered both Apple’s QuickTime (.MOV) and Microsoft’s Windows Media (.WMV) formats to the trash heap of history. But Steve Jobs may have found a way to secretly move YouTube away from the low-resolution and low-quality Flash Video format and strike a decisive blow against Adobe:

...Youtube will be encoding all of their videos into a “H.264 streaming-efficient compression format” specifically for the Apple TV. All of Youtube’s videos are currently encoded in Flash Video (FLV) format.

While no official reason is given for the mass transcoding of Youtube’s entire catalog, Macformat.co.uk believes it has to do with the iPhone.

“As far as I know even now, Flash content per se might not play on the iPhone from day one. But Apple clearly doesn’t – indeed, shouldn’t – care, as YouTube is for many people the most critical site that uses Flash.”

Indeed, both the iPod and iPhone can play H.264 encoded video, and so it seems the entire Youtube catalog may also become available to those devices later this year.

It’s almost as if Steve Jobs took a move from Bill Gates’ Microsoft monopoly playbook, by tying the video format to the hardware devices, content providers have no choice but to adopt Apple’s video software. Although it seems interesting that the Apple “tail” managed to wag the YouTube “dog.” Who needs whom more?