Is the television, our beloved friend who brings us hours and hours of entertaining programming, about to face an untimely demise? Many technology and television executives think the answer to this question is “yes” and have weighed in with their opinions on this subject over the past few years:

“Let’s just declare TV dead and move on.” – Headline from Michael Arrington, TechCrunch editor

“TV is over. If people are interested, they’ll watch. On their time (or their boss’s time). They’ll watch online, and spread the idea. You can’t email a TV commercial to a friend, but you can definitely spread a YouTube video.” – Seth Godin, bestselling author, entrepreneur and marketing expert.

“85% of all video we watch is pre-recorded, so you can set your system to download it all the time,” he said. “You’re still going to need live television for certain things - like news, sporting events and emergencies - but increasingly it is going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later.” – Vint Cerf, Vice President, Google, (aka “Father of the Internet”)

However, contrary to what many have predicted, traditional television viewing is not suffering from this growth in online viewership.  The Nielsen Company reported that American television viewers watched approximately five more hours of television in 2008 than in 2007, or 142 hours a month on average.

Why did this increase happen? Surprisingly, the answer cannot be found by examining the television medium itself, but rather through the analysis of television’s new best friend: the mobile phone.

The mobile phone’s data communication capabilities, including text messaging, mobile instant messaging, and mobile social networking, offer viewers new ways to interact with their programming when used alongside traditional television.

Already we have begun to see both major networks and cable channels explore the potential of the mobile phone as a key partner in bringing about the future success of television. From text voting on American Idol to Twittering on CNN, the growing symbiotic relationship between mobile phones and televisions seems increasingly evident. The work we are doing with VH1, Nickelodeon, and TiVo are clearly pointing to this emerging trend and we thought we would explore it in more detail.

Read more in our new Mobui whitepaper: Television’s New Best Friend: The Mobile Phone - Analyzing the Mobile Phone’s Influence on the Emerging Trend of Interactive Television

- John Burry

Last year I was away from home for a few days and I didn’t have my notebook with me, but I did have my iPhone and access to a WiFi hotspot. When I saw a show that I wanted to watch advertised on TV, I really didn’t think much about grabbing my iPhone, heading off to the TiVo site and setting up the show to record on one of the two TiVos at my house. When I got home, I watched the show. More and more of us take this sort of technology for granted. It’s there, it’s functional and we use it daily. But consider going back just a few years ago and the thought of being able to (with nothing more than a phone) schedule your home DVR to record a show that was airing later that night seemed like the sort of thing that we’d only be able to do in the distant future, well the future is now.

I have an iPhone with me nearly everywhere I go, I sync my calendars and address book to it, I check my email on it, I take and send pictures from it and surf the web. On occasion I even make phone calls from it. I genuinely think of it less as a phone than a portable computing device that can also make calls.

Very soon the TiVo Mobile (http://m.tivo.com) web site will be coming out of beta, the team and I spent a lot of time working on this site and it really makes scheduling shows on your TiVo from your cell phone much easier than the full TiVo site. Sure it offers a limited set of functionality compared to the full site, but that’s basically the point. It’s not meant to replace the full site, but rather to augment it for easier scheduling and nothing more. Some folks might be wondering why TiVo opted to go with a mobile web site rather than a full on iPhone application. Well, the answer to that is fairly straightforward, they wanted to make their service accessible to the broadest audience.

In the future there will probably be a genuine iPhone application, but for the time being give the mobile site a try, I’d love to hear your comments on it.

- Snake