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How Television Is Fighting Off the Internet
HughPickens.com writes: Michael Wolff writes in the NY Times that online-media revolutionaries once figured they could eat TV's lunch by stealing TV's business model with free content supported by advertising. But online media is now drowning in free, and internet traffic has glutted the ad market, forcing down rates. Digital publishers, from The Guardian to BuzzFeed, can stay ahead only by chasing more traffic — not loyal readers, but millions of passing eyeballs, so fleeting that advertisers naturally pay less and less for them. Meanwhile, the television industry has been steadily weaning itself off advertising — like an addict in recovery, starting a new life built on fees from cable providers and all those monthly credit-card debits from consumers. Today, half of broadcast and cable's income is non-advertising based. And since adult household members pay the cable bills, TV content has to be grown-up content: "The Sopranos," "Mad Men," "Breaking Bad," "The Wire," "The Good Wife."
So how did this tired, postwar technology seize back the crown? Television, not digital media, is mastering the model of the future: Make 'em pay. And the corollary: Make a product that they'll pay for. BuzzFeed has only its traffic to sell — and can only sell it once. Television shows can be sold again and again, with streaming now a third leg to broadcast and cable, offering a vast new market for licensing and syndication. Television is colonizing the Internet and people still spend more time watching television than they do on the Internet and more time on the Internet watching television. "The fundamental recipe for media success, in other words, is the same as it used to be," concludes Wolff, "a premium product that people pay attention to and pay money for. Credit cards, not eyeballs."
So how did this tired, postwar technology seize back the crown? Television, not digital media, is mastering the model of the future: Make 'em pay. And the corollary: Make a product that they'll pay for. BuzzFeed has only its traffic to sell — and can only sell it once. Television shows can be sold again and again, with streaming now a third leg to broadcast and cable, offering a vast new market for licensing and syndication. Television is colonizing the Internet and people still spend more time watching television than they do on the Internet and more time on the Internet watching television. "The fundamental recipe for media success, in other words, is the same as it used to be," concludes Wolff, "a premium product that people pay attention to and pay money for. Credit cards, not eyeballs."
Like you were supposed to when you started charging for cable. Who knows, you could make more money by offering a better product.
if I search for any movie I will see 20 links to what are supposedly pirate websites, although I suspect half of them are set up by the media companies as honeypots to identify people who want to pirate stuff.
if I search for a review of any product, from computer to a car, probably 10 video show up that are not reviews at all but are instead a few words of product information in slideshow format with really annoying music.
what is annoying is that the geniuses at Google could easily get rid of that spam but they do not. maybe they are not geniuses after all, but merely have huge egos.
into television. I cut the cord years ago because I couldn't stand all the commercials. Now my hulu+ is getting loaded with commercials- it's almost as bad as watching broadcast TV.
I think I'll go back to getting discs from Netflix..
Uhh... of course I am not going to read the original artice, this is Slashdot after all. But the summary mentions 5 shows, 3 of which are on channels with commercials. How does this support the original tenet? I would think you are far better naming only commercial free quality shows. I agree on the point about streaming later becoming a money maker though and that driving a way of thinking in the age of new media.
I'm not paying. No cable TV for me. You turn the volume up on commercials and make them 5 minutes long for every 5/10 minutes of TV. My new TV has automatic volume control which kicks ass! I'll switch to HD antennae if I have to.
No thanks I'll wait for the seasons to come out on Netflix just like I do now. If that changes I'll just quit watching altogether. You lose. Ha ha..
Funnily enough, I probably spend 20% of my TV watching on actual broadcast TV. The rest is watching torrented stuff, usually shows I missed when they were on at the time, sort of timeshift++. As such, I'd say this view of TV winning is about as realistic as the music industry saying they have one over on MP3s.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
...reading your op-ed (as opposed to, oh, I don't know, an actual report containing actual facts).
One of the unique characteristics of the Internet is that it provides a way to monetize tiny minority tastes. That way, bozos can produce books or videos on "Down is Up", "Beanie Babies: The New Future-Proof Investment", or "The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age", and find enough paying customers to make it worth their while.
In what world is TV fighting back successfully? Cable subscriptions are dropping rapidly, Netflix is equal any of the major studios, and nobody is tuning into TV any more.
If you mean studios like HBO and sites like Hulu are are allowing more content to be presented on the internet then yes they are having success, but becoming a internet content provider is not TV succeeding over the internet, it's the death knell of TV. It's abandoning TV to become a Netflix clone. Within 20 years the only people not getting their entertainment over the internet will be grandmas.
Some of which are only available on premium high cost additions to your package.
The reality is old coffin dodgers like to sit in front of the googlebox all day. As they die off, the next gen will be doing the same with streaming services. The next lot, who knows, but OTA TV will probably be gone, everything will be digital, and we'll be billed for subs and pay-per-play.
Yesterday, I found myself saying, "if you know someone who still has cable..."
Online media has, like a meth junkie at a desert party, overdosed itself. The average slate or buzzfeed is a rats nest of unrelated yet increasingly predatory advertising that saps bandwidth and kills the user experience waiting for everyhting from monolithic flash ads to autoplay html5 elements to load. even your local newspaper is taking advantage of this to hose you for cash payments you wont make to read their clickbait articles that are written at the 4th grade level.
And what is this television thats slowly weaning itself off advertising? Watching Van Helsing in my hotel room I was treated to a 3 hour movie padded with advertising for everything from pain pills to fried chicken and cars. some ads even came back-to-back for the same damn product. television is rehabing from ads like a crack addict rehabs at the family reunion with a rail of white lightning in the bathroom. And dont think this excuses you, blu-ray and DVD titles are just as much television as the average CW network after school highly sensored puritanical life lesson sitcom. I have 12 to 20 minutes of un-skippable content in each of these disks where 10 years ago i was promised this wasnt ever going to happen. Im forced to watch advertisements and previews for products i dont give a shit about, just so i can get to the movie that includes (surprise) more product placement. Does anyone remember Oreo-bot from the transformers?
The only change in televisions model has been taking credit cards for things other than the ronco electric food dehydrator or the jack lalane power juicer. the guide feature in most provider services at the 1080p level still includes a myriad of floating chyron ads for weight loss and dick pills. buying anything pay-per-view will immediately forward your personal information to nearly two dozen affiliate advertisers and merchants. its a horrendous pain in the ass. And if you dont like it? two words: Its Comcastic.
cable and television service providers not only insult your intelligence and dignity but take it as a personal act of blasphemy if you try to cancel. simply calling up, youll be asked a phonebook of personal and insulting questions about your service and your personal likes and dislikes. its not the callcenters fault, some seersucker clad golfbag toting used car salesman marketing drone decided it was going to be a great idea to force the callcenter to carpet bomb customers in whats known as 'customer retention.' tactics.
the only thing this article isnt mentioning is that adblock is still a very real and useful thing, and that everything on television inevitably shows up on torrent.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Ever since cutting the cord two years ago its amazing how much extra time I have per day and now more alive you feel not watching tv. Now I haven't gotten rid of it all yet, still have Netflix and we watch a few Star Trek episodes at night but the medium no longer controls out lives. Now internet had eaten up quite a bit of my life but that is one more thing I'm slowly removing also.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
This reads more like a comparison between Buzzfeed (or blogs & news agregators in general) and Television than Television & Internet Streaming. Not really a meaningful comparison. Blogs and News sites compete against traditional print-media more than Television, and they are most certainly winning that war.
TVs aren't going to disappear anytime soon. Cable networks however....
You just need a large array of hard drives to store it all.
It's always comes down to the same thing. If you want people to get your product, make a damn good product. Some things will naturally be a fad, but will fade away. Lasting revenue is based on making something people actually want/need. For so long, many networks have been shoveling our crap content - now that there are ways to view exactly what you want, they have the incentive to make something you really want.
Scientists discover this one weird trick that will make any internet streaming service want to switch over to TV broadcasting!
Lawyers. Lots and lots of lawyers.
...many years ago, we were told, "in the future, you will pay for TV". And we said "WHAT!? We get it for free, off our antenna now!" And they said, "but since you will pay for TV, there won't be any need for advertising." Many years later, I am paying for TV, PLUS, getting ads that run across the screen all the time. It it any wonder I am feeling ripped off? Oh yes... I think these were the same people who said, "we will put catalytic converters on cars. it will cost more, but they will convert the noxious fumes into harmless water and carbon dioxide." So years later, we are, indeed paying more, PLUS being clobbered by the "carbon crisis"
... but the number of TV subscribers keeps going down. If they're claiming victory, I'd say it's a Phyrric one - but really, I'm not seeing it.
#DeleteChrome
The quality of programs is steadily declining with ever more emphasis on reality programs. They do this simply because it is cheap to produce, and there is a long line of people who are happy to get their face on TV without getting paid, so there are no actors to be paid.
And in between this dreck, more and louder commercials. There are some channels that I simply won't watch - if you start to watch a movie, they back-load the commercials towards the end in the hopes that you get hooked on the thing and keep watching all of the crap.
If anything I've noticed the minutes of advertising per hour has gone up. A lot of newer TV shows are only 20 minutes run-time...giving 10 minutes of commercials vs 8. Older shows are getting edited and time compressed to squeeze in another ad or two. No...sorry..if "half" of their revenue isn't ad-based; then they must not be making squat off advertisements and are just reducing the amount of programming because they want to.
Something doesn't seem right about this; it seems to be completly counter to what I've noticed. Ads are increasing on TV, not decreasing. The reality is the industry is as greedy. Local broadcasters double-dip in profits by selling advertising space *and* making you pay for the channel if you have a TV provider. TV providers are sticking it to cord cutters by requiring verification of a TV subscription to get programming. Last time I tried Hulu I was locked out of content if I didn't verify I had a TV subscription...plus I got to pay $10/month to watch advertisements.
I thought it was obvious even more so than throttling Netflix and other services. My 100 Mbps connection can download one gigabyte of data in under ninety seconds. A cap of 250 GB by Comcast could be used up in about six hours. For one person, that might work okay. But what about family of four or more people?
At least we get turned back to being the customer after having been the product far too long.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The subscriber base is ratcheting down.
The only thing keeping the cable model going at this point is sports.
That's it. And the instant the sports leagues think they can make as much money on line... cable is done.
Would you pay a 100 dollars a year for access to every NFL game streamed to your machine of choice? A lot of people would.
Total up the sports leagues people care about... football, basketball, soccer if you swing that way... Its a finite number of leagues that people care about and you could charge 10 bucks a month for access, discounting for a yearly subscription, and maybe throw in minor leagues of the same sport. So the NFL package gets you all the college games etc.
Its entirely viable. And if that means no blackouts and the ability to watch the games on your smartphone or tablet... Sure, there is sling boxes and some cable services let you stream anything to your devices. But the underlying problem with cable is that it isn't fully a la carte. And until it is... there's going to be a problem.
The vast majority of what people pay for with their cable package is something they have zero interest in watching. None.
We're spending a lot of money on other things besides our cable now as well. We've got all these new streaming services. And on top of that the cable bills have gone up.
Something has to give there. The reality is that people tend to prefer netflix for general entertainment programming... the only edge cable has is the dubious value of cable news stations and sports.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I think corporately owned sites like this are basically paid shills. Old media is failing like a drunk with liver disease. I think part of the problem is they aren't understanding the tidal wave about to roll over.
Only old people have cable anymore, they will die, nobody new is (or wants to) buying cable.
Cable was their friend growing up, nurturing and informing them in it's warm glow, I do not begrudge their love of such a thing. Nor do I begrudge the businesses their love of such a cash cow.
Its death is inevitable though. Nostalgia cannot withstand superior competition over a long enough time line. Watching hilarious commentaries about its resurgence is baffling, perhaps pushing your head deeper into sand and yelling publicly alters reality? I think not.
[haven't had television in 15 years, obviously haven't missed it, or a single show]
Go figure. Make meaningful content that people want to watch and they'll be willing to pay a few bucks for it. Netflix might be beating them to the punch with it's array of coming materials. The things Netflix has produced that I've seen have all be thoughtful and - maybe too strong of a word - innovative.
Hire me...
I guess I should check the wikipedia article ...
the folks in the middle show absolute contempt for the folks that produce and the folks that consume the art.
they sow. they reap.
The thing people are avoiding isn't "television" (video dramas, comedies, etc). The thing people are starting to avoid is "television" (getting those shows via cable companies). I don't think any predicted the death of video as a form of entertainment.
The ideal situation is for all the content creators, to still make their content, but sell it to the public over the internet, bypassing the cable companies. It is the cable companies that need to die (or just be relegated to being ISPs). They just aren't up to the task of delivering media in the 21st century. They have stopped being a distribution channel and more of a gatekeeper for old people who can't use the internet.
Amazon has the HBO back catalog HBO Now is on Apple TV and will soon go to all devices I think Showtime is on Slingshot then there is a mix of netflix, itunes or vudu for other shows At this point cable TV is for sports, which you can only stream through some pirate sites. commercial breaks are for bathroom, drinks and food.
Fwiw, Netflix pays big money to try and make sure it does interest you.
But I agree, for a service that knows we binge watch, it is really negative to the user experiance to see the same stuff over and over.
When watching hulu +, I find the ads worse than the ads on regular television. The same ones over and over, half for hulu plus, which I already have!
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
HBO is the best value on my cable bill, right after the 100mbit internet.
Really!? you might ask. $15/month for that? Well, yes. I like the programming (this is the network that brought us "The Sopranos", "The Wire", "Game of Thrones", "True Detective", and I could go on and on ("Last Week Tonight", anyone?). All this with no commercials, because I paid for superior programming without commercials.
I get the HBO GO service for that same money, and I can time shift what I want to watch with a ChromeCast, and I can watch just about all of HBO's original programming with the HBO GO service -- not just the current stuff. Sure, I'd like it better if it was $10/month.
With HBO NOW, HBO has figured out how to cut the need to actually buy cable TV out of the picture. You can just subscribe and buy their content over the internet directly.
What I'm waiting for is true a-la-carte television, with real options. Pay $15 a month for HBO, or $3/episode for "Game of Thrones", or don't pay, but answer surveys or watch advertising to watch for free. People who don't want ads could pay, people who have the time but not the money could fill out survey or watch ads to watch for free.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
How Television Is Fighting Off the Internet
You keep saying "fighting off", but this...
Television shows can be sold again and again, with streaming now a third leg to broadcast and cable, offering a vast new market for licensing and syndication. Television is colonizing the Internet [...]
...this sounds more like "embracing" to me. Maybe we should clear up what we're talking about here.
TV, the medium, is dying a slow death. It has been slow to adapt to the changing reality and hasn't reacted at all to changes in the market. But the content distributed on the TV medium? The shows themselves? They have a bright future. That said, it's just a matter of time before we stop referring to them as "TV shows" and start referring to them by some other name such as "serials" or simply "shows". My guess is that within 20 years the kids will look at us funny if we say "TV show", yet that content will still exist in some other form online. And already, we're seeing some changes in the format, such as with Netflix's shows, which can vary considerably in length from one episode to the next.
For an analogue, think about the news industry. The news isn't going away anytime soon. We have an insatiable appetite for it. But newspapers? They've already lost the fight against the Internet, in much the same way that TV is losing it now. We'd scoff at anyone suggesting that newspapers are fighting off the Internet by posting their news content online. The same is true here.
We'd do well to not conflate content with the medium on which it is distributed. Old media is dying, but its content remains relevant in our society.
Even a service, program or product I'm interesting in becomes quickly boring and soon after annoying when I get to see the same ad or trailer over and over and over and over.
Take your favorite show. Pick the 30 most interesting seconds of it. Now try to imagine another show you like being interrupted again and again to show you those same 30 seconds.
And then tell me that this isn't going to be annoying after no later than the fifth time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This article just recounts the collective fantasy of some tv executives.
The Old always beats the new in the end, and simply absorbs it and turns it into a copy of itself. The Old has more experience and lots of inertia and established presence. The New may have some strong momentum but sooner or later, it gets tired and slows down, mired in the ways of the real world. The TV paradigm is decades old. The Web had merely 20 years to try and establish its own reality and failed because as soon as the wide public jumped on board, they carried the old paradigm with them. The TV model is simply too rooted in. The Web is vanquished. It will become TV 2.0. Get over it.
On what planet is Buzzfeed comparable to something like a television series?
This is like putting a farm chicken in a UFC tournament and then acting surprised that the prize fighter won.
Maybe compare television viewership, subscriptions, and ad sales broadcast via traditional means (i.e. cable) to television shows that are exclusively streamed via the internet (ala House of Cards, Community).
This is a non-story designed to make chump television advertisers feel like they aren't being conned.
Thinking back to the late 1980s through late 1990s, I spent a lot of time in a movie theater with my friends. There was always something getting released that we really wanted to see.
In the last decade, not so much.... Hollywood spends way too much time doing remakes of movies done before, and IMO, the entire comedy genre has been pretty much decimated. Everything's reduced to fart/poop humor or trying to squeeze more laughs out of awkward sexual situations. Occasionally they manage to pull off something a lot of people will go see, but it seems like even then, they ruin it with a needless sequel (a la "The Hangover" or "Hot Tub Time Machine").
In recent years, the only movies we could justify forking over the money to watch in a theater were the kids' movies (PIXAR animations, etc.) and superhero movies (which are kind of hard to ruin, as long as they keep relatively close to the original story-lines).
Meanwhile, I think television has bridged the gap in a lot of ways, coming out with really well done series' that outdo Hollywood's story telling abilities. This is one reason why people will pay for HBO or Showtime subscriptions.... They're no longer just showing "already run" movies. They're creating new content, and people feel it's content worth paying something for.
That's because of business model.
Netflix gathers a TON of statistics about who their subscribers are. Right now, they're mostly upper middle to middle class people who generally have professional style jobs and university degrees and all that.
Why is that important? Because Netflix's revenue source is subscribers. So they have to produce and obtain content that appeal to their subscribers. You're not going to see the latest exploitive TV show on Netflix if it's not appealing.
The goal if Netflix is to weigh the balance - who are the people likely to subscribe? Who are their current subscribers? If they produce content, are their current subscribers likely to leave?
Appealing to the lowest common denominator works for network TV, because those people are eyeballs and network TV is all about eyeballs. (If you want free TV, stick an antenna on the roof. Network TV still produces TV for free).
But those eyeballs even if you put the content on Netflix are unlikely to become subscribers. So it's pointless for Netflix to produce those shows because it'll attract few subscribers.
And yes, it's all about balance - is the Netflix subscriber base ready for a show about homosexual people? Maybe, if their subscriber base is more liberal, and they know that liberal minded people are more likely to pay for subscriptions.
That's the sort of decisions that go into Netflix programming. Netflix is not about eyeballs, it's about subscribers, and knowing their preferences. It's also about knowing their demographic - the people who would subscribe but currently don't, so knowing more about them to produce programming they like to encourage them to subscribe.
But that's not the same decision making that goes into CBS, NBC, FOX, ABC, and others, because they don't have subscriber counts, they have raw eyeballs.
Remember WIRED Magazine? They used to run a sidebar that I loved to hate, which was the Tired/Wired list. And; as I predicted long ago, everything that *was* in their "Wired" column has ended up as "Tired" and Vice-Versa.
The re-emergence of TV versus online media, the re-emergence of New York City versus Prague, the re-emergence of going to work versus tele-commuting.
Wired magazine has been wrong about nearly everything, and this article merely cements the fact that the writers and editors never knew what the hell they were talking about. The fact that for over a decade they printed onto paper speaks volumes. (pun intended).
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I think the "make 'em pay" model, has a lot to do with why so many people are cord cutting. So this strategy by the TV companies, isn't really a long term solution but more like a placeholder to buy them time to find a new way to fund their companies.
I used to read and post a lot on Usenet back in the 80s and 90s when it was the biggest game in town. (To the point where I felt guilty about it, and needed my usenet 'fix' every day.) When Usenet degraded I felt an acute sense of loss. I got on slashdot, which is slightly reminiscent of old usenet, and I also was on IMDB for awhile, slightly reminiscent of another part of usenet. (That , the IMDB, is where I got tired of all the BS from fatuous, self-important posters). Nothing quite replaces Usenet back in the glory days though. (Or maybe it just seems that way because I was relatively young then.)
Slashdot's moderation system helps filter out a lot of noise, though I'll admit that here too, it seems harder to pan for those golden nuggets of insightful comments than it used to. Mainly, in my opinion, too much snarky schoolboy humor gets modded 'up' nowadays.
Anyway, getting back to the original topic, I keep hearing how 'nobody' watches broadcast TV anymore. I guess that makes me nobody. Digital TV has excellent video quality, and you see those programs on PBS like Nature and Nova in glorious detail. Even the quality of the commercial shows is , for the most part, better than it was 'in the old days', and for me the old days goes back to the 50s.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Pretty much the only thing i watch these days is animated shows, and having grown tired of waiting for Cartoon Network to offer itself ala-carte, and not digging CrunchRoll's curated pile of claptrap, I often find myself buying an entire season of a particular show on Amazon - often 12-18 shows for $15-$24. Even with the 4-5 series I buy every year (Steven Universe, AdventureTime, an anime or two like 'Kino's Journey') plus Netflix (for the family) I'm still WAY under what I used to pay in annual fees to DirecTV (in fact, I now use that money to run a local monthly popup makerspace for kids and their parent(s)). I'm still hoping that in the very near future there will be indie producers that offer up a pilot and 2-3 episodes via Kickstarter that, if I like it, me and 50k-100K fans can pay $18/yr to have a show we'd really like to watch be produced - stuff like 'Trek Continues', 'Out With Dad' and 'Bee and Puppycat' come to mind.
I haven't had cable/sat(television) for six years. I've gone strictly NF since and I love it. I get to choose what/when/where I watch.
And... wait for it...
There are no ads.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
This all sounds good, but, if it's true, WHERE IS MY FREAKING FIREFLY!!!
That one show, resurrected on Netflix, would buy them more long-term lasting subscribers than any of the garbage they put out now.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Especially when the homescreen has a slider of content I'm likely to not know about (new for example) on a slider.
The video ads I think are a terrible idea, they annoy me on HBO when bingeing, they'll annoy me on Netflix too.
But the interest criticism I don't think is fair.
The know every word part, ugh.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
*POTY*
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
From the summary: "And since adult household members pay the cable bills, TV content has to be grown-up content: "The Sopranos," "Mad Men," "Breaking Bad," "The Wire," "The Good Wife."
Never in my life have I read such nonsense.
For one thing, of the shows cited, not a single one is from the last five years. (Yes, some ended within the last five years, but the most recent of the bunch in terms of start date is already six years old. Two (The Sopranos and The Wire) are more than a decade old, and predate the existence of YouTube. Only two of the shows listed are more recent than Netflix's unlimited streaming service. These shows are hardly indicative of a reaction to the internet.
Secondly, a ten-second glance at your TV is enough to confirm that these shows are a tiny, tiny minority. The overwhelming majority of shows -- while extremely adult in nature -- are plotless, crass and utterly childish drivel that is the furthest thing possible from grown-up content. Think, for example, of the entire catalog aired by Bravo, a channel once devoted to "fine arts and film", but now almost entirely populated by "reality" TV drivel. If anything, this would prove the opposite of the assertion: That TV's response to the internet has been a dumbing-down to provide a constant stream of lowest common denominator trash.
However, I wouldn't make that assertion because unlike the submitter of this article, I understand that correlation doesn't equal causation. It's just as possible we'd have gotten the same drek on our TVs even without the existence of the Internet.
"Online-media revolutionaries once figured they could eat TV’s lunch by stealing TV’s business model" ref
I disagree, some people in television thought they could recreate the television broadcast modem online - as in videos interrupted by adverts. They were wrong on two counts, people didn't like their videos being interrupted and the Internet couldn't scale to the numbers that a conventional broadcast could. If you take a look at the television demography - the audience is growing older. If online-media wasn't such a threat then why did the Murdochs expend much energy in shuting it down. ref ref
They listened to the bean counters. They put more and more junk advertising per hour on TV. Then they got the notion that having less episodes of a series would save a buck. Viewers fled over the air TV in droves. Ads should be restricted to 1 one minute ad per hour. Series should be designed to run 52 weeks a year with a new episode every week. That holds viewers. You could chart the encroachment of advertising and the shrinkage of new episodes of series and offer a strong proof of why business types simply can not run successful TV networks. Right now i would give up all over the air channels for Net Flicks.
> "The fundamental recipe for media success, in other words, is the same as it used to be," concludes Wolff, "a premium product that people pay attention to and pay money for."
True as far as it goes, but not long ago when television was the only game in town, "premium" only referred to cost, not content. I think what we're seeing is the television industry re-discovering something they had forgotten since the early days when TV first had to fight for new eyeballs. That you can't just put any stupid formula thing out there, you had to provide content that people actually wanted to watch.
But I think the article (or at least, the summary) got one thing incorrect -- TV's true competition isn't ad-driven "free" content on the internet, it's paid content on the internet that's superior in both price and quality.
I think the TV business model -- that we're going to show you what we want you to watch when we want you to watch it (and sandwich some stinkers in between to get eyes on them) -- is still dead. But it's good to see that they're trying something besides litigation.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Strange. I bought a $30 digital antenna from Walmart that's about 10 inches square, and I get around 30 channels. And I live in kansas. Not a whole lot of population here. Granted, about 5 of those channels are in spanish, 3 or 4 are 24 hr weather, and a few are duplicates but still. I would imagine larger cities would have even more channels.
Netflix users with DVD service have several years of experience learning to wait a year for the current season of shows. It works the same with streaming.
Except that people who wait a year have to make an effort to avoid spoilers and have no chance to discuss plot developments with their respective social groups.
The reason TV adverting was expensive was that slots were rare and there was far more demand for the good slots than there were slots. The ad guys did a great job showing the world they were good honest people who were helping their clients sell stuff. This is why the honest guy who would never do any wrong in Bewitched in the 60s was an ad man. The show was there to sell more advertising. The clean ad man image has changed in recent times to a image of a person who can manipulate anyone into buying a worthless product but that too helps sell more TV advertising.
The rarity of slots did matter in the early days of TV and as a result, several industries were changed. In the early days of live broadcast, only car dealers near the TV stations could go live but people were so impressed in the first months of those ads that they did work and and other dealers would buy larger lots near the stations and created a new type of car dealership. Those dealers grew rapidly, not so much because of the ads but because of the influx of new buyers as the two car family became the norm. The TV ads didn't tip the buyers, it tipped the dealers into buying more ads. Even today car advertising is a significant part of tv station income.
Remember that the customer of the advertising is not the final consumer who buys the product, it is the marketing department of a large corporation who pays for commercial tv and the advertising business has many ways to prove their ads work even when the sales figures show they might be running off customers.
Now the internet ads are over saturated, they aren't worth anything yet idiots keep paying lots of money for useless ads because they think they work. Even google is playing the old tv ad game with their analytics package which helps show businesses how well the ads are working. Too bad that details slip through like you pay for a specific key word and you find out that most people are trying to avoid results with that word but using google improperly so you pay $5 per click for people who will never buy your product.
If the advertisements really are worth as much as they think, then they should be paying me to watch them.
They tried that back in the AllAdvantage.com days. It turned out to be unsustainable as CPM rates plummeted.
I should not post this but, well, I must. I can take the karma hit.
I love you. No, I really do. Not in a drunk and sloppy way either - I do not drink. The other day I saw someone else got the first post and the said mean things about King Frosty. All I could picture was two angry nerds, at that point, who had vowed to rule the /. (perhaps from a moderately well appointed basement lair). I do not know how much time and effort you put into your posts but I do appreciate it. It can't realistically be scripted so that is even more amusing.
Then we have the apps guy who happily tries to make some sort of post about apps and Luddites in each thread. Then we sometimes get a variety of others - including a link to goatse but I think that one is scripted. All I can picture is a bunch of people who are like the Head Crushing Guy in Kids in the Hall. It will be ruin if ever you all should meet.
So, it takes all of you to make /. the place that it is. I, for one, am thinking it is better with the oddities and persistence. I'd buy you a beer in the real world. I would not drink it with you - even if I was drinking. But, I would buy you one. Shine on you crazy diamond, shine on.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
That is an odd assumption to make. I suspect that most have pirated it by now. The folks who would have subscribed, and it does have a lot of fans, would have done so if they had included it a long time ago. Now? Not so much, I suspect - a claim as valid as your own. Those folks have moved on, grown up, and discovered new things. They also have an external drive with that content saved, in its entirety, on it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
One of the most healthful and happiest decisions in my life. This is not elitist bragging. One day you realize the purpose of commercial TV (the hint is in the name) is to shove as many ads down your throat as you will tolerate. Any ideals of using the medium for communication or enlightenment get drowned by ad profiteering.
F that noise. Every precious second of my life belongs to me, and any salesman trying to steal even one second can F off and die. I still view the essential stuff through various ad free means. But now I find myself allergic to ads, and break out in anxious fits when stuck in a bar or airport terminal with ads blaring in your ears.
Kill Your Television
Thank you for being a friend Traveled down the road and back again Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
And if you threw a party Invited everyone you knew You would see the biggest gift would be from me And the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.
This troll is finally not totally off-topic :-)
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I don't know. I don't even have cable. Just a strong internet connection. leave the 80's TV junkies too it. They'll die suction cupped to a TV screen. It keeps them out of our hair.
I'm not talking about the old episodes. I'm talking about resurrecting the show as a made for Netflix series.
At $2M/episode * 20 episodes/year = $40M / year. For $20/month that would take less than 170,000 fans to keep the show running, not counting any income from DVD sales, merchandising, licensing, etc. I bet there are that many fans who would do that without a problem.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
In 1995, an online colleague (a leader at Lexis-Nexis) told me that content owners were king. He's still right.
No clue if you read this, but been watching Mash on Netflix. One thing that hits me is how much longer a half hour show was. Mash is consistently 25 minutes give or take 30 seconds, from 1972 to 1981.
Big Bang Theory otoh seems to be barely 20.5 minutes in Netflix (european netflix, not in US). Mind you, on TBS it's closer to 18.5-19 minutes because I have noticed in the meantime they cut subplots out and probably use software to drop repetitive frames, as well as slightly speeding up the whole thing.
These massive amount of commercials are what I think driving the younger generation off. And rightly so.