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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."
The problem with this, is the shows themselves are now shorter to accommodate all the ads that get put in. In the shows I watch, the watchable content for a 30min program is about 21-22 mins tops. This statistic by itself hasn't changed much in 20 years or so, but it is getting close to lower point of program running length for that kind of time slot. So when you watch a show on Netflix or Hulu, the content is only as long as it was made if it did have ads. Meaning, you are loosing the ads by watching on Netflix, but you're getting less and less content in each episode, meaning the episodes are shorter and shorter when you strip out the commercials.
Another big problem is now more shows (especially reality shows, but even news and infotainment type shows) seem to want to show you 15-30s of what is coming up after each commercial, and then when they return from commercial they want to repeat the last 30-60s of what you already saw as if you had no attention span. This becomes very apparent when you have a DVR and skip the commercials, you end up seeing the same segment around the commercial 2-3 times total. Not only is this annoying, but it drastically cuts into the actual running length of the show. So while technically, the show might be 22mins of content, if you removed the repeated content out of the show (that is due to the commercial breaks), then you really only end up with 15-18 mins of actual content for a 30min show/slot.
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."
Yes. They add a couple of hundred dollars to the price of the average car and they make the world a better place; unburned hydrocarbons are the most foul emission which automobiles make. You might also be interested in knowing that we averted the ozone depletion crisis by banning CFCs. Meanwhile, the O2 sensor that came along with those catalysts actually lets you make more power while burning less fuel.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"