Chew on this for a moment: if you’re watching network television, you are probably a geezer…sorry, Baby Boomer! Variety reports that the median age of viewers of all the broadcast networks has gotten older than the traditional 18-49 target demographic for the first time ever. The average American TV viewer is now 50 years old. And that number is skewed lower only because CW and Spanish-language network Univision score in the mid-30s. The average CBS viewer is 54 years old (CBS has always had the oldest audience anyway), but even ABC, which programs to families and kids, has a median age of 50.

But that’s not to say that geezers…er, boomers are resistant to the lures of New Media. Around 20-25% of homes in the U.S. now have DVRs, and that number is expected to rise to about 50% by 2011 as cable companies push the technology onto their customers. The DVR paradigm is familiar enough to long-time television watchers, who long ago got used to using VCRs and remote controls, that technophobic middle-agers and seniors readily accept and embrace the functionality. But the DVR has been a double-edged sword for television content providers from the word “GO”; they’ve had a very hard time coming up with a way to prevent people from fast-forwarding through the commercials on recorded programs. In the beginning, when DVR users were in the minority, the networks were somewhat resigned to this, but with half the homes in America using DVRs, it’s now front-and-center. Posting at Zatz Not Funny, Mari Silbey takes a realistic look at what is about to happen to DVRs and how we use (and won’t be allowed to use) them.

Almost in the same breath, though, Dave Zatz posts about one of the newest features included in the recent TiVo software upgrade: shopping on Amazon.com through your TiVo. From almost the earliest days of the web, prognosticators have told us that the day would come where something like this would happen, and it has finally come to pass. This may, in time, develop into an economic model that would reduce the reliance on advertising as the only tradable resource for television content providers and television service providers, but might have to go through a few iterations until it turns into something that will attract people to try it. If TiVo does well enough with it now, I would expect the cable companies to drum up something similar for their own offerings within a year or two, but then I think it would take a while to be anything beyond a novelty to most people. Eventually, someone will figure out the way to tie programming directly to online shopping, and it will catch on with the more digitally-literate younger demos.

Let’s twist that idea around for a second. Let’s say you’re watching television and you’re NOT a geezer. You’re a hip 20-something who only watches TV ironically, quipping snarky comebacks to the pictures on your set, while you quaff energy drinks with your equally hip, snarky buddies (and your grandma, who owns the TV). You see some commercial for a product you would never buy in a million years, like life insurance or gutter covers, but it has the COOLEST music you have ever heard and you want to add that track to your iPod so you can sample it for your DJ mix for the rave you’re going to next week. Well, this site identifies all the cool music being used in the latest batch of commercials on TV and gives you download links where you can purchase the tracks. You, of course, will simply bookmark the page and then go download pirated copies of all those tunes from your favorite BitTorrent site, but geezers like me might actually pay the 99 cents or whatever to download them.

Moving on to other media-related links…NBC announced yesterday that Jay Leno’s last night as host of the Tonight Show will be May 29, 2009 to make way for Conan O’Brien. Conan’s replacement, Jimmy Fallon, will start hosting “Late Night” segments on the Internet beginning in the fall. If you are 50 or over, you will probably neither know who Jimmy Fallon is, nor how or why you would watch him on the Internet. In fact, you might not even know that Jay Leno has been hosting the Tonight Show for 16 years, because you’re usually in bed well before 11:30. Oh, and Johnny Carson is dead.

NBC also announced their programming schedule for Super Bowl Sunday for 2009. Their Super Bowl programming will begin at 8:00 a.m. with a special edition of the Today Show, even though the game does not kick off until 8:00 p.m. O.M.F.G.

Relatedly, yesterday the Third Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the FCC’s decision to fine CBS for the infamous Janet Jackson “wardrobe failure” during the halftime show at the 2004 Super Bowl. The court called the exposure “fleeting” (which it was to anybody without a DVR or the Internet) and said that it was an unwilling act on the part of CBS, which had no idea about Jackson’s plans. NBC immediately announced plans to expose its own boob during the halftime show, but Tim Russert is already dead, so they’ll have to find a replacement.

Long-time readers know that I have followed developments in the realm of what is called “HD Radio” in the U.S. and “DAB” (Digital Audio Broadcasting” in the U.K. since way back when. DAB has had far greater success in Europe, though it has done reasonably well in large American media markets (Boston, for example, has quite a few stations that broadcast in HD Radio now), In fact, last month, a task force set up by the BBC and other interested parties in the U.K. recommended that all traditional radio services be decommissioned in favor of all-DAB as soon as 2012, but no later than 2020. It’s unclear to me whether or not this might have some impact in the U.S. market; after all, it took nearly 30 years to implement HDTV, and broadcasters are still dragging their feet on that, but the radio business is in a bit more of a state of desperation than the television business.

Meanwhile, British radio maker Roberts has introduced the first solar-powered portable DAB radios in the U.K. (that’s them up there in the picture). (via) Engadget calls them ugly, but I kind of like the neo-retro style. In this country, even though you can find plenty of home HD radio receivers, the thrust of the hardware market has primarily been in the automotive space. Radio listening has been automobile-centric in the U.S. for decades, and is the place where any successor to traditional radio, be it HD or satellite, needs to make its stand. The satellite radio business is still in limbo now that the XM-Sirius merger has been put on hold yet again, so it’s a good time for HD Radio proponents to push for something similar to the U.K. task force recommendations.

I’ve been following the developments in the labor negotiations between the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) and the two main actors’ unions (SAG and AFTRA) for a couple of months now, and what began as quiet negotiation has turned into a very public squabble. Not between AMPTP and the unions, but between SAG and AFTRA and the various factions within. You have probably read or heard mainstream media stories now that big name actors are publicly involved. The media are playing up the George Clooney vs. Tom Hanks confrontation big time.

If you’ve been reading my posts, you know that AFTRA accepted what is generally considered to be a weak offering from AMPTP. The battle in these negotiations is over payments for re-use of material in digital deliverables, the same issue that the Writers’ Guild went to strike over during the winter. It’s felt that the deal AFTRA accepted is not as good as the deal the WGA got, but because AFTRA is a smaller subset of performers they just didn’t have the clout to push for a similar deal. AFTRA’s acceptance gave AMPTP a lot more leverage in negotiating with SAG, which actually walked away from negotiations a couple of months ago. So now the fight is whether or not to take the same deal as AFTRA or hold out for more and make the threat of an actor’s strike even more likely. Hollywood veteran Mark Evanier offers his assessment on the recent developments.

Meanwhile, having won their battle, the Writers’ Guild has moved on to new battles. Last week, Advertising Age reported that the WGA had petitioned the FCC to begin formal inquiries into the practice of in-show product placements on television. (It happens in film, too, but the FCC doesn’t have regulatory oversight there) Now the FCC officially announces that it will do just that, launching a formal Notice of Inquiry and Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOTE: link goes to a PDF). A similar effort was made last year, but the FCC abruptly dropped the proceedings.

The complaints come in two forms: first, media reform watchdog groups are opposed to the practice in its entirety. It’s one thing when brand-name products are used as props or background items on a set in the name of verisimilitude, and another when the action of a scene or even the entire production features specific products as part of the dramatic continuity. Some groups want the practice abolished, and others would settle for some sort of “sponsored by” notification in the credits of the show to acknowledge the presence of the advertisement. Second, the WGA and other industry groups aren’t bothered by product placements at all, they just want their cut of the action. Because product placements aren’t formally part of the production deal between a television network and a producer, writers and actors and so on don’t see any of the money the producer gets. Forcing the producers and networks to fess up to product placement would give the WGA et. al. something esle to bargain for with AMPTP down the road.

The music industry (which, let’s face it, is really the same thing as the movie industry and the television industry, since all media in the U.S. is controlled by five corporations) continues to die its slow, painful, desperate death. Last week the RIAA lost an argument they made in one of their ongoing cases against file sharing; they claimed that merely having files on your computer that were visible to other people constituted the same thing as actively uploading files for sharing. It puts them at a distinct disadvantage at prosecuting any more cases. Meanwhile, it looks like sme musical artists are beginning to see that there is life without the traditional record companies. According to this Ars Technica story from a couple of weeks ago, a clearinghouse label called “Merlin” that was formed by a handful of independent artists now licenses music for 12,000 artists, making it the fifth largest record label. Major artists as well as up-and-coming acts are offered, and Merlin may go after the thousands of artists who promote their own music on MySpace, giving them a chance at much wider promotions and sales.

The Associated Press has decided that they’re going to charge bloggers who quote more than five words in a row from an AP story, with a minimum charge of $12.50 for a 5-to-12-word quote. Be sure to read Cory Doctorow’s little screed in that BoingBoing link, because he nails it cold.

Meanwhile, in it’s announcement, the AP said it was meeting with some group called the “Media Bloggers Association”, but, as Teresa Nielsen-Hayden discovered, there is no such organization. There’s just some pathetic right-wing blogturd named Robert Cox who passes himself off as a “representative” of bloggers and has put up a site called “Media Bloggers Association” to justify his lame hornblowing. She dissects his shtick pretty thoroughly, so I hope the brain surgeons at the AP have a chance to read about who they’re dealing with before they think they’re going to start collecting any money from anyone.

Why is it that “old media” people have been so utterly unable to understand the mechanics of the “new media”? Thing like this, or the New York Times’ ill-advised “Times Select” paywall, do nothing but shriek out loud the complete cluelessness of the people who run these businesses. Even the television people are finally beginning to not fuck up every single thing they try, but the “dead tree” folks seem to think its still 1919 and William Randolph Hearst runs the world.