Technology Review: "You Don't Understand Our Audience"

Technology Review: "You Don't Understand Our Audience"

Former NBC Dateline reporter John Hockenberry, now with the MIT Media Lab, has a lengthy story about the shortsightedness of his former employer: "I knew it was pretty much over for television news when I discovered in 2003 that the heads of NBC's news division and entertainment division, the president of the network, and the chairman all owned TiVos, which enabled them to zap past the commercials that paid their salaries. 'It's such a great gadget. It changed my life,' one of them said at a corporate affair in the Saturday Night Live studio. It was neither the first nor the last time that a television executive mistook a fundamental technological change for a new gadget."