Why don’t the networks take a page from the pr0n handbook: lots of free, older stuff to get you… um… interested while you have to pay for the good stuff? If you have to pay for it, perhaps then network TV could take a page from HBO, Showtime, etc and become more edgy, sexy, intelligent (ie, everything network TV rarely is). Imagine Dexter on ABC. Imagine Fox not canceling Firefly. Imagine no more erection and diarrhea commercials!!!
For more than 60 years, TV stations have broadcast news, sports and entertainment for free and made their money by showing commercials. That might not work much longer.
The business model is unraveling at ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox and the local stations that carry the networks’ programming. Cable TV and the Web have fractured the audience for free TV and siphoned its ad dollars. The recession has squeezed advertising further, forcing broadcasters to accelerate their push for new revenue to pay for programming.
That will play out in living rooms across the country. The changes could mean higher cable or satellite TV bills, as the networks and local stations squeeze more fees from pay-TV providers such as Comcast and DirecTV for the right to show broadcast TV channels in their lineups. The networks might even ditch free broadcast signals in the next few years. Instead, they could operate as cable channels — a move that could spell the end of free TV as Americans have known it since the 1940s.
#19 Actually, I think they named the series “hung” because that’s how they find most of their viewers after an episode.
#7. “There is always the UK model “, which was abandoned in NZ, and nobody noticed the difference.
I watch PBS and the weekly polictical round-up shows only.
The solution is the following;
1. Build free fiber broadband to every residence. Mobile access will always cost money because of the limited over-the-air bandwidth.
2. Stream TV over the internet with customer-specific commercials injected. All demographic information required to identify the customer (single man or woman, single mother or father with children of X ages, family with children of X ages, extended family) will be collected from census data updated every year. A 22 year old single male will never see ads for Depends and Viagra.
3. All shows will be a’la carte, as in iTunes. Most shows will cost a minimum amount $0.10 each.
4. Some shows may be free, and some shows may “pay” you to watch them (can we all say Shopping Channel).
Problem solved.
There are usually less than 5 shows, worldwide, being made each year that I would consider high quality. Maybe 5 more that are enjoyable but forgettable.
I buy the ones I like on DVD box set and watch the others if I can on TV. Otherwise the TV is there for sports and video games.
I will never pay for satellite TV or cable. Anytime I watch TV at a house that has satTV or cable more time is spent navigating the menus and discarding programming as unwatchable.
Anything “membership” usually sucks. It’s like a gym. A year’s worth of gym membership money will buy you enough exercise equipment to last forever.
I can watch the shows I like whenever I want(and thousands of hours of accumulated “re-runs”) with no monthly bill.
Now that is Comcastic!
i HOPE you know that with 2 fiber cable they COULD SUPPLY..
1. POWER to your home
2. INTERNET
3. PHONE service
4. LOCAL/REMOTE cell service from EVERY LOCATION including RURAL.
5. 1000′s OF CABLE channels from AROUND the world.
Think hard about that..
Can you see all the BITCHING and complaining from the services..CONDENSE ALL of it to 2 fiber lines to EVERY HOUSE in the USA. Then HOW MUCH TO CHARGE??
$100 per month and you get it ALLLLLL…
IF’ the GOV doesnt build it..
IF’ the gov builds it…ITS FREEEEEE!!!!
ECA, I’m with you. I refuse to pay for TV and what I get is over the air. Free.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the service the networks want to close down.
The thing is, the networks ARE making money. They’re just not making ENOUGH money to make it “worth their while”.
Remember when it was a great thing in business to make a little profit or break even? Not anymore. Shareholders keep demanding dividends and profits, so anything less than huge profits make business ventures “not worth it”. Greedy SOBs.
I have been cable free for 6 months. So far so good. All I need is a big ass Internet pipe.
ECA if you get 20 channels off of an antennae (not a dish) your not rural. Rural is when you get one station with a 33 foot tower, and the picture is still snowy. That’s where I grew up and my parents still live. Oh and on another note your use of capital letters is rather boorish and really does nothing to enhance your comments.
The deal on broadcast is that it is free to the audience or they get shut down. They don’t actually own the bandwidth free and clear.
On the other hand they can charge anything they want if they put it on a private system.
Since I wouldn’t pay three cents for 95% of what they are broadcasting I suspect they are going under or their production costs are going to get drastically cut.
They are testing what the market will pay on line through Hulu and other sites.
I just happened to think of something that perhaps the network geniuses have not.
If the networks move to cable, how will their audiences and revenues increase? Their reachable audience will actually drop from ±98% of the U.S. market (cable + off-the-air), to about 90% (cable only).
Also, how will they differentiate themselves from all the other 496 channels on cable? What will draw viewers away from Spike, or Discovery, or even the Game Show Network? People who have cable can already watch network programming, so they wouldn’t be getting anything new.
The only losers in this scenario will be 1. we freeloaders who refuse to pay to watch television, and 2. local affiliates who will end up filling their airtime with 24 hours of infotainment or TBN.
Broadcast has always aimed at the lowest common denominator. Since broadcast is getting worse in general, the audience must be getting worse – less demanding. The demanding component has DVD, premium cable, and internet leaving the dregs for broadcast. Drastically higher amounts of advertising including hours of commercials don’t increase the rate of return – gee who could have predicted that. The clutter overwhelms the content to the point where people will pay money, some us of lots of money, for devices that remove most of the clutter (DVR’s aka Tivo) to be able to tolerate the few gems left on broadcast – and you have to include PBS in that since they broadcast and they have commercials and corporate influence on their programming.
Watch for the handout expected by local stations that a dozen or so years ago were bought by brainless media conglomerates who looked at their cash cow history and expected to milk them forever. Stunning sums were spent for local TV and radio stations. Now milked dry and the bills for digital TV conversion arriving in the mail, watch for the handout to “compensate” those stations for their mandated expenses. Never mind, that industry blew itself up, and frankly I don’t give a damn.
hold it…
#30 HAS IT RIGHT…
If you know the LAW only bradcast really makes money…
they can only make mony AS COMMERCIALS are bought.
OTHERS buy TIME, to show the SHOWS>>>>> and make money on that TIME showing commercials…
Thats LAW..
GO ANALOG ANd guess what…they HAVE TO FOLLOW US,,,
What I hate most is the almost complete takeover by the Jerry Springer/Maury Povich types, on cable as well as network/broadcast, maybe more so. “Let’s give some skank ho’s their own show — all the skank ho’s at home and their baby daddies will watch and we can blast and saturate them with ambulance-chasing lawyer ads and cash for gold ads and cash for insurance settlement ads! We’ll rake in millions!” This has become one of the major religions of the era. For every Big Bang Theory there are three Real Housewives of fill-in-the-blank, plus one Chance of Love and two Big Brother / Real World ripoffs, plus one politician, one “political pundit” and one televangelist each saying “The lying liar Muslim Socialist Fascist Communist president lied again today! Pray to our just and merciful God for his quick death! Buy more guns (& gold)! Send me more money!”
What I hate second most is commercial creep. When I started watching TV, ads were maybe ten or twelve minutes per hour. Now they’re creeping up on seventeen to twenty, and it’s even worse on the cheap “independent” stations and cable stations! Then the cable company steps all over the station’s own ads with _their_ own ads! A local second- or third-tier station plays Family Feud (with John O’Hurley) reruns in the afternoon. We like him and have always enjoyed that game, so we watch sometimes. O’Hurley has only hosted the show since ’06, but already the time allotted for ads isn’t enough — they have actually interrupted the Fast Money round for ads more than once! The only way really old shows like Twilight Zone can be shown is at 4:00 in the morning, during federally subsidized “Cable in the Classroom” time. An 87-minute movie takes two and a half to three hours when played on TV.
And they wonder why viewership is dropping…
No, No, No….What’s going to happen is that the public free networks and private subscription networks will start to eat each other in buy outs. This will result in the consumer have fewer choices, and since it’s the choices that have drained the commercial money out of the markety this will have the benefit of: 1.) making us watch what the elite want’s us to watch, 2.) maximise the amount of money they can make in a given segment, 3.) well be paying to watch commercials; just like in movie theaters.
That’s the future, subsciption service with commericals and only two maybe three choices, probably all owned by Apple or Sony.
Whatever……………………….
Traaxx
When I was a kid in the 60′s (eons ago), TV shows had 33 episodes per season. Now the standard is 18 and in the case of a popular show it might be as few as 8. Shows disappear for a year between “seasons” and by that time you have forgotten what happened and/or completely lost interest.
Back then, hour-long dramas were 50 minutes long, now they are 38 minutes long, which means many more commercials. I’ve seen commercial breaks that are six minutes long, which is ridiculous!!!! I remember the hubub when Jerry Seinfeld was the first actor to be paid $1 million per episode…and that was when half-hour comedies contained 22 minutes of actual show That’s 4 minutes longer than the current half-hour comedy, which clocks in at 18 minutes in the case of Big Bang Theory, the most popular comedy on TV today.
Cable channels mostly consist of reruns of old network shows. That’s why they have to put the annoying ‘channel ID bugs” in the corners, otherwise you’d never know what channel you are watching since it’s just old reruns of Brady Bunch for the zillionth time.
Half your cable bill goes to pay for all the ESPN and Fox Sports regional channels. Fox wants to triple the fees for their cable channels. Scripps-Howard wants to quadruple the fees for HGTV and Food Network, which only consists of competition and reality shows any more; they are going to repurpose Fine Living into the Cooking Channel for all their actual cooking shows. It’s gonna get ugly soon as cable, satellite, and other provider fees skyrocket.
#29 And the sheeple will flock online and pay for the garbage they would otherwise get for free.
#33 said: “What I hate most is the almost complete takeover by the Jerry Springer/Maury Povich types, on cable as well as network/…”
Well, that’s what your fellow Americans like & demand. So guess who you have to blame for that.
#35 said: “Now the standard is 18…”
No, they’re 22, some even 24 (hint, there’s even a TV series called that way)
“now they are 38 minutes long”
No, they’re 43
We get your point, but get better informed.
So lets see we are currently in the process of destroying local newspapers and their news rooms, radio as an independent provider of news has already been destroyed, and in the near future if the OTA Networks go to cable only that will destroy local/independent affiliate TV stations and their newsrooms. So what does that leave us with? 4-5 Networks providing (and controlling) all the Local/National/International news/information we get (News = unbiased facts that have been actually verified as correct) with a bunch of unknown/unverified Internet bloggers as our only alternative?
Sounds like a good way to destroy a free society to me.
Media consolidation is bad for this country and bad for people who believe in a free society. We have allowed it to go to far already and if we continued down this path it will effectively shut down the free flow of verifiable accurate information. What will be left is “sanitized” or biased facts, opinions presented as facts, and out and out lies – actions based on this type of information will end our free society.
There was a PROMISE from the Startup of CABLE.
FEWER/NO commercials..
It never happened.
Out of the 15-20 channels that YOU WATCH out of the 200-300 idiot channels..
you PAY for all of them, when you pay your bill.
The FCC wanted and TRIED to push for INDIVIDUAL channel choice.
You could BUY the channels you wanted to watch..
delay
delay
delay
UNINFORCED..
The cable corps say they CANT DO IT, and it would cost you MORE..
Charge me $1 per channel, and I could get away with $20 per month, NOT $50, for CRAP and channels I DONT WATCH. they would be able to deliver to MORE people as they would have a CHEAPER rate..
Been Cable Free for four years now. Got an Gubberment box and a mast antenna. PBS is about the only thing worth watching, other than The Simpsons or Family Guy. The number of infomercials on the other channels are unbelievable, even during the day on weekends. If all of them except PBS go dark, the only thing I’ll truly miss is that one of the Big Three runs a local weather map on a side channel.
#38 Sounds to me you figured the plan out. Now let see the loonies calling you names for telling it like it is.