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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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".
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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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).
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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?