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Local TV Could Go the Way of Newspapers
Hugh Pickens writes "Alan D. Mutter writes on his 'Reflections of a Newsosaur' blog that the economics of local broadcasting may begin to unravel as dramatically in the next five years as they did for newspapers in the last five years, due to the unparalleled consumer choice made possible by a growing mass of (mostly free) content on the Internet. 'Once it becomes as easy and satisfying to view a YouTube video on your 50-inch television as it is to watch "Two and a Half Men," audiences will fragment to the point that local broadcasters will not be able to attract large quantities of viewers for a particular program,' writes Mutter. The economics of cable TV programming already are geared to serving small but targeted niches, but as audiences shatter, those options won't be available to local broadcasters, who will be deprived of the vast reach that enabled the high ad rates and enviable profits long associated with their businesses. Although barely 8% of US households had access to IPTV in 2009, this technology is likely to be available to some 20% of the more than 100 million homes subscribing to pay-television services in 2014, according to senior analyst Lee Ratliff of iSuppli, a private market research company. 'We already have gotten a hint of what the future could hold. Acting to trim spending during the recession, many local stations cut back their news staffs, resulting in a decline in the caliber and depth of their coverage,' writes Mutter."
Local sports on TV will not die and WGN is good with there local news and they have the best meteorologist.
Also CSN CHI / CSN + is one of best sports channels.
Whether or not a two hour "Who's the Boss" block in the evenings is worth anything is fully up for debate, but local news channels fulfill a niche that the crush of 24/7 news channels doesn't touch. I want local weather, local street closings, local politics, local crime, local sports. In the hours right about dinner I'd guess that the ratings of local channels rate higher than cable news. How they fill the rest of their schedule, I have no idea.
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.
Most everything I watch is on Discovery, History or one of the other cable networks. For the most part ABC, CBS, NBC, etc all run low budget and out of date programs & 100's of interchangeable sitcoms.
Back in the day local news used to actually do local and fairly decent investigative reporting. These days all they do is read propaganda badly disguised as press releases from city, state, federal and corporate officials. I'm going to miss the hottie weather trollops though.
News used to come from reporters.. and some of it still does, full time professional ethically balanced reporters. These are different from news readers and talking heads who have a bias and and a point of view.
However more and more of what seems to be news is actually generated through the PR business; PR companies pitch stories to reporters looking for "news." Some time they provide footage and certainly make people available for interview including primary sources but also third parties who may seem neutral, etc.
As more and more news comes from the PR process, there is less and less need for the local news since they are not really reporting anything that could not be directly posted on YouTube. In the end we will have "news" channels' like http://gothamist.com/ which collects and presents, curates, and presents stories that other people have reported.
In the future we will have a few real reporters and the rest will be a collection of people who report ABOUT the news pushed by the PR folks. Collaborative filtering and other social filtering methods will help us find the news we need.
http://www.hawknest.com/
Your mother is no longer part of mainstream society.
Sooner or later, there won't be enough people like her to support the industries that she relies on for her news, communication, and entertainment. Adapt or learn to live without those things, it's going to happen eventually and if she's under 60 it will probably happen in her lifetime.
Until the Weather Network can give as good a forecast as our local meteorologist, the local TV will still flourish.
Calgary is a very quirky city. Its weather is the strangest thing ever. We have had snow in July, then +30 the next day, we've had sunny skies to rain to hail to sun again in less than 30 minutes. We have had the temperature expected high/low span of more than 35 degrees celcius, for a single day.
There are a few sayings that roll around Calgary:
"If you don't like the weather, wait a bit"
and
"If you plan on going camping, bring your swim suit and your parka."
Get an Aspire Revo for your TV instead - it's only $200-$300. I already had a stand alone Blu-ray, so it's perfect for my needs. Search for Revo htpc, there are tons of cool things you can do once you add a usb tuner & a remote.
imagine. one video goes viral and you are on top of the world in just a few hours. keep quality content up, and youll get subscribers in no time.
Yeah - because "viral" videos are "quality content". Whatever.
All that would do is encourage local news outlets to air the stupid or sensational kind of content that exemplifies "viral", something they already do and tell viewers "you can see this again on our website".
If it's a bridge collapse, I suppose that's one thing. If it's a dog that scares itself with its own farts, I'd say this decreases quality. The way to keep consistent viewers at the local level -- something local advertisers with real, local money desperately want and are willing to pay for, in general -- is to have pertinent, quality content given by professional broadcasters with as little bias as possible. Online "news" outlets (mini agenda mills), the alphabet affiliates (5 minutes of actual news per 30 minute broadcast) and the cable outlets (even bigger agenda mills) provide the exact opposite of these things.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
My mother is not 60 years old yet and will NOT touch a computer. She is not alone.
This is about as relevant as saying in the 1920s: "My mother is not 60 years old yet and she will NOT drive a car. She is not alone." Or in the
I only get OTA televison. 2 of the local affiliates continuously run weather radar and scrolling news on their 480p subchannel. During storms, the coverage there is better than anything I can get on the internet.
The best local news coverage on the internet are just web versions of the local newspaper and tv/radio news stations, so I don't think the internet will replace them, but rather just supplement them.
Parent may be FB, but he's right. TV can do tons of stuff locally that newspaper can't, if only because the lag time between an event and the coverage is so much shorter.
Additionally, with tech advances like some of the ones mentioned in TFA, it only becomes easier to do, as well as cheaper and more profitable with targeted advertising.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Local TV news is easily replaced by the internet. Hell, even Google News has a local section customized to your area.
But the internet provides something that TV simply can't -- hyperlocal news. There's two or three blogs that cover my own neighborhood. You can read up on events in the area, park closures, or see photos of interesting stuff (great for when you're too lazy to venture outdoors.)
It simply wouldn't be economical for TV stations to provide this level of granularity.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
You're forgetting that local TV is paid for by local businesses trying to get local people to buy from them. It wouldn't make sense for a local restaraunt or auto dealer to pay to advertise to people 500 miles away, let alone on the other side of the world.
And nobody came for the music business, they're killing themselves from their own greed and evilness, and the newspapers are doing pretty much the same thing (only at a less evil level).
Free Martian Whores!
Acting to trim spending during the recession, many local stations cut back their news staffs, resulting in a decline in the caliber and depth of their coverage
That's odd, the caliber and depth of news coverage seem exactly the same as before.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
How many folks in the US *really* get the kinds of speeds needed, plus real unlimited capacity, to make this fly? Where's this ultimate connection outside of a few lucrative fiber roll out areas? Sure, *some* do today, but there are vast areas with millions and millions of people where OTA TV signals will still rule.
The reason why I say this is because I have read every single broadband article here for the last long time, and not one article contained information like " and today, the major telcos and big ISPs announced a trillion dollar plan to roll out fiber optic high speed connection to 98% of the population within x-small number of years".
They aren't spending any profits, not that much, on upgrading physical delivery infrastructure, they are bidding against each other and dropping all the serious coin in buying up media/content producers and each other, bigger fish gobbling the little fish. That leaves like some small percentage for infrastructure upgrade.
In other words, ain't happening without them being forcefully mandated to provide credible high speed connections, not this joke stuff they claim is high speed, like way back when telephone and centralized grid power were first started and they got *ordered* to do it by the government, to not just pluck the low hanging fruit, but to provide it everywhere where they rolled it out.
Paper newspapers are different, they cost a lot, and today, the news is stale by the time you get it. Unless you got a flock of kids in school locally, where you want to read about the little soccer games and so on, local papers got not much anymore, and the larger metro papers, again, stale news. That's why they are folding. But good def TV, being replaced by zillion megahertz-to-think-about-it connections? OK, everyone pack up and move into a few apartments in Korea or something. I mean we *just got* good OTA digital TV all over recently, and it works really well if your antenna-fu is strong, so how is any net TV going to really compete with that when only a small percentage of the population will have that sort of compatible connection?
Once it becomes as easy and satisfying to view a YouTube video on your 50-inch television as it is to watch "Two and a Half Men,"
Is it ever easy or satisfying to watch "Two and a Half Men"?
It's transmitting 20 Mbit/s * ~10 stations == 200 Mbit/s of data to each and every home. That's certainly more efficient than running 1/2 million cables.
Yes. But the question is, how long can you get enough people to watch the same 10 stations?
The elephant in the room is "balkanization," and everyone is struggling to figure out how hard it will hit.
Personally I think it's possible to be "not much," but only if broadcasters make a concerted effort to appeal to an audience.
If broadcasters take the route of cutting costs and services, then it will be "severe."
What is the old adage? That you have to spend in a recession? How does cancelling Leno and Conan figure into that equation?