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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.
in old times, local tvs were limited by the power of their antennas, their syndication deals, and government licenses.
now internet gives them the possibility to broadcast to ENTIRE world. no limitations.
unless telcos kill network neutrality, and bring an environment in which local broadcasters would be forced to make syndication deals with isps, this will be the big break of local televisions.
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.
Read radical news here
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.
er... hasn't WGN been a cable network for the last 15-20 years? I don't even live in the same state (or even time zone) as Chicago, but all the local cable operators carry WGN, and have carried it even back when it was "Chicago's Very Own Channel 9."
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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/
While I certainly watch sports on local TV I don't really watch any kind of sports reporting or weather reporting or traffic reporting on TV. The internet provides all off that in a much more efficient package. I can go check the local weather right now without having to wait for the news to come on and get around to the weather report.
Right now I am more likely to get news, weather and traffic information from AM radio than I am from local TV stations.
Still, there will have to be some kind of local reporting somewhere, even if its not in the form we have been used to.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
As satisfying as watching Two and a Half Men? Well, that wouldn't take much. An out of focus, artifact ridden, 6 fps, 320 x 240 puppet show would be as satisfying.
I've been thinking about this for some time, since I am about to drop cable and Tivo and go to strictly an internet connection.
It especially came to light this last week when a number of severe storms went through the area. At present the local TV stations offer fantastic coverage of severe weather events, giving the viewer pin-point information on where tornadoes are and where they are headed. People can get prepared more quickly and only need to head for shelter when a storm is imminent. However, if local TV loses its revenue source, how can it financially support such excellent coverage?
Of course the National Weather Service and the county government have a warning system, but the NWS issues a tornado warning for an entire county. This means that the neighborhood sirens go off even though a storm might be 30 miles away -- an unnecessary inconvenience.
I'm also wondering how cable TV will fare. I don't really have a need for it anymore, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. After local TV disappears, cable is next.
Proverbs 21:19
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.
The local stations here do, and not just celebrities (except impeached governor Blago) and murders, either. There's politics, road closings, city council meetings, etc. Your local stations may not be like that, but the local (Springfield, Decatur, and Champaign) stations are. All three stations cover stuff from the whole central Illinois area, and are worthwile.
Since you live in LA, I can see why they're so celebrity-obscessed, but LA isn't anything at all like anywhere else in the country. Your visiting here would be only slightly less alien than visiting Peru.
Personally, I think the article is full of it. Most folks (not we nerds, but normal people) don't bother with anything more than plopping down on the couch, turning on the TV, and channel surfing. The internet isn't going to change that.
Free Martian Whores!
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
Local TV may be free over the Air, but it really works best in cities and suburbs. Regardless, many people get the local channels through cable anyway.
What I see happening generally with TV, is a move towards everything streaming over the internet.
The idea beingyou pay for a service, and it gives you access to on-demand streaming of the entire back-catalog of most prime time TV shows, and other programs that largely follow the same format. Most regular TV shows would be watched in this fashion. On the air date they just appear in the list of streamable programming.
Other programs would support live streams. For example most news programs would have live streams, as would the Weather Channel, sporting events, etc. Those that make sense to also have available on-demand, would be available that way after the live stream is concluded.
Under such a system there would be no such thing as local programming. All sporting events would be national, (although pro sports may insist on black-out regions), and even local news programs would be available nationally, since it would actually be simpler to allow that, and really not add any cost.
Now I recognize that this if it ever happens will take a while. It requires substantial Internet infrastructure upgrades, requires near universal broadband, and it would be opposed by local stations (who would do little besides create the local news broadcasts), the networks (the service would largely replace the networks), producers (thing will change the way funding works, and would definitely really hurt the sales of box sets).
Never the less, we are already gradually heading in this direction, so it is still possible, especially if the networks chose to co-operate, perhaps creating this service as a joint venture among the Big Three and the Little One.
Besides it is really the only chance the Television industry has, since there are already numerous unauthorized TV show streaming sites popping up, and they are far more convenient than tuning in at broadcast time, or even setting up a DVR to tape the shows. All those sites are missing is set-top box support.
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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.
And transportation technologies that preceded the car are not supported or relevent anymore?
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?
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?