Where once we were at the mercy of schedulers, now we build our own schedules, streaming shows from Amazon and Netflix, DVRing programmes for later, taking risks on that quirky-looking series from France or this thriller from Turkey.
The schedulers told Nadal they had done so because Fognini's opponent, Lukas Rosol, was scheduled to play doubles later in the day as well, a rationale with which Nadal was deeply unsatisfied.
In my view there are too many schedulers," he says.
Some people suggested that their three 90-minute adaptations of Doyle's stories couldn't have been any good since schedulers put them on in August: ratings and reviews suggested otherwise.
The only other comparable experience to politics at the highest level might be being the boss of a major corporation, but that person has a flotilla of assistants, minders, spinners, planners, schedulers, minions and an eye-popping salary.
At least two recent American TV shows have played on the desperate attempts of baffled men to outfox their machines by recording lots of porn films or macho war movies because their TiVos think they are gay.At its launch in 1999, TiVo promised more: to be a revolutionary gadget that would upend the TV business, undermine the advertising industry and free viewers from the tyranny of TV schedulers.
Because their owners can select what they want from a whole week's TV viewing, they are no longer at the mercy of schedulers, so they might buy fewer DVDs.For now, few top media or advertising executives will admit publicly that there is a big problem coming.
The technology is causing something of a stir, because people in the industry expect that it will change viewing patterns far more dramatically than the VCR did, by allowing viewers more control over what they watch and when they watch it, and thus loosening the network schedulers' grip on the audience.
According to CBS's audience research, people are especially fed up with the glut of copycat programmes that schedulers have rushed on to the air following the genre's spectacular success over the past few years.
"To the extent that we can, we will put the marketing people together with the programme schedulers," says Gerry Murphy, chief executive of Carlton.
If HTML 5 can do that for web games, imagine what it can do for web-based business applications such as schedulers, databases, spreadsheets and even word-processors.
