Why don’t the networks take a page from the pr0n handbook: lots of free, older stuff to get you… um… interested while you have to pay for the good stuff? If you have to pay for it, perhaps then network TV could take a page from HBO, Showtime, etc and become more edgy, sexy, intelligent (ie, everything network TV rarely is). Imagine Dexter on ABC. Imagine Fox not canceling Firefly. Imagine no more erection and diarrhea commercials!!!
For more than 60 years, TV stations have broadcast news, sports and entertainment for free and made their money by showing commercials. That might not work much longer.
The business model is unraveling at ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox and the local stations that carry the networks’ programming. Cable TV and the Web have fractured the audience for free TV and siphoned its ad dollars. The recession has squeezed advertising further, forcing broadcasters to accelerate their push for new revenue to pay for programming.
That will play out in living rooms across the country. The changes could mean higher cable or satellite TV bills, as the networks and local stations squeeze more fees from pay-TV providers such as Comcast and DirecTV for the right to show broadcast TV channels in their lineups. The networks might even ditch free broadcast signals in the next few years. Instead, they could operate as cable channels — a move that could spell the end of free TV as Americans have known it since the 1940s.
Man, that would make it an easy decision to ditch my basic cable service. It barely provides value at $5 per month. (they charge me $20 and give me $15 dollars off my internet bill.) I’ll cancel the whole business if it gets more expensive.
OMG, say it isn’t so. I grew up on free TV, it’s like part of the family. It was a major factor, all those series, soaps, sitcoms, sports, miniseries, B-movies, cartoons, it’s sort of like my culture is dying. Good thing I can still dl just about anything I want, I’ve been amassing everything from the 3 stooges to the twilight zone, Irwin Allen disaster films to all those great jap monster flicks or how ’bout Roots, or Rich Man, Poor Man. Hopefully interest in TV media will survive long enough for me to complete the collection.
I just ditched my Dish Network and signed up for Netflix. Now I watch streaming Netflix and put up a small antenna for Over the Air. Sorry Cable and Satellite. The programing is not good enough to pay for you to deliver it.
I predict all ‘FreeTV’ will go to the web. It’s already happening. It’s just a matter of time before free TV over the air is gone. For one, spectrum should be allocated exclusively for mobility services anyway.
Content for a fixed device like a TV should come in via a wire to the side of the premise and then wired of wifi path inside the house. It’s logical.
I guess the tv networks don’t get it
Then again they did not have to
Feeding cold Pablum to the masses who just took it in
Mindless relaxation or mind numbing stupidity
Well the games up
Not so much that people have smartened up
But rather alternatives have come to play
Boys you are going to watching your charts and graphs and ads – ought 1 percent off
and the bottom is going to fall off of the hot furnace
There is always the UK model (*shudder*). In the UK, you have to pay an annual tax (they call it a license) to own a TV.
Seeing as now us U.S. taxpayers have had to bail out auto industry, banking industry, stock brokers, mortgage companies, airlines, on and on, I’m sure the TV industry will demand a slice of that gravy.
Personally, good riddance. I ditched my last TV 2 years ago and haven’t missed it at all. Between broadband streaming, Netflix, and Redbox, and I get all the TV content I want. Most good TV series come out on DVD eventually. I can wait and watch it on my terms.
The few times I’ve been over at friends or family and they have TV on, I can’t stand it. 99 percent of the content isn’t worth watching, and there are way too many ads.
I work for a major television station in San Francisco. It is now well known that the station has lost money for the last five years. The owner, a huge company, will probably sell off all it’s owned and operated local stations any year now. It did exactly that to it’s AM radio stations a couple of years ago, and they are all now bankrupt.
Everything will go to an iTunes model…
I predict.
“Free TV” has never been free. Advertisers pay for ad time, then pass that expense on to the consuming public, even those who watch little or no TV.
It is, in effect, a form of taxation, one that we have been trained to ignore.
The main problem, both with television and Hollywood is way overpaid talent, executives and production workers. When the guy driving the outhouse truck gets $100 an hour and it scales up from there.
Oh, and there’s always the PBS model. They run commercials these days, though they don’t call them that, but they get a lot of their funding directly from viewers, on a voluntary basis. Come to think of it, I watch more PBS than “commercial” television anyway.
Five years ago I ditched cable t.v. All the brainless and patronizing ads brought to you by earsplitting audio increases were finally too much. The only time I watch cable t.v. is when I travel and the hotel/motel that advertises high speed net fails at actually having the service. I might watch a program till the adverts start, then its time to find a bookstore before I punch the idiot box.
In this early phase of the American Dark Ages, I no longer believe that “free” television is either desirable or economically possible. The television networks, in a country that contains millions self-professed religious believers(surpassed only by India), chose a strategy of targeting programming to please drug-addicted, bi-sexual, Bolsheviks, They murdered their industry for short-term profits. Prepare for Congress to use the Millennium Copyright Law to shut down the free public libraries (all our local governments are cutting their library funding) We need to look to alternative media (i.e.,the little that will be left on the censored Internet).
I think you folks are IDIOTS to PAY for TV channels, when (in my area, VERY RURAL) Im getting 20 free channels. DIGITAL and analog.
YOU are paying to watch COMMERCIALS..
Im NOT paying and I see them also..
I may not have the selection..
But if you ADD up all the channels you REALLY watch, out of those 200, its about 15-20 that YOU DO WATCH..
ANd mine dont repeat much either.
The stuff I REALLY watch is on the net. AT the TV corps site/Hulu/veoh and a few others..
Broadcast TV can go bankrupt for all I care, I haven’t watched it in years because it’s almost entirely crap. Unfortunately, media companies get so entirely wedded to outmoded business models and refuse to change when those models become obsolete, it’s no wonder that all media, from movies to music and now television, have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
#8 Pedro
Funny you should ask, I don’t pay more than ADSL and USENET costs. I don’t share, just leech.
I keep it for the same reason Noah built an ark. I’m one of those nutcases that have seen the end is near. One of the preparations is to collect all my favorite electronic entertainment, and store the hard drives (and other electronic ‘necessities’) in faraday cages. After the great solar storm of 2012, It’ll be a while before anybody get’s any transmitted or cable TV.
The Wasteland Speech was given by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Newton N. Minow on May 9, 1961:
“When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.
But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you’ll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.”[
#8 Pedro,
Yep, I thought HBO’s series “Hung” was supposed to be funny, but when I saw it and I realized it was a boring turd. And “Bored to death” definitively honored it’s title.
#7. “There is always the UK model “, which was abandoned in NZ, and nobody noticed the difference.
There are usually less than 5 shows, worldwide, being made each year that I would consider high quality. Maybe 5 more that are enjoyable but forgettable.
I buy the ones I like on DVD box set and watch the others if I can on TV. Otherwise the TV is there for sports and video games.
I will never pay for satellite TV or cable. Anytime I watch TV at a house that has satTV or cable more time is spent navigating the menus and discarding programming as unwatchable.
Anything “membership” usually sucks. It’s like a gym. A year’s worth of gym membership money will buy you enough exercise equipment to last forever.
I can watch the shows I like whenever I want(and thousands of hours of accumulated “re-runs”) with no monthly bill.
Now that is Comcastic!
i HOPE you know that with 2 fiber cable they COULD SUPPLY..
1. POWER to your home
2. INTERNET
3. PHONE service
4. LOCAL/REMOTE cell service from EVERY LOCATION including RURAL.
5. 1000’s OF CABLE channels from AROUND the world.
Think hard about that..
Can you see all the BITCHING and complaining from the services..CONDENSE ALL of it to 2 fiber lines to EVERY HOUSE in the USA. Then HOW MUCH TO CHARGE??
$100 per month and you get it ALLLLLL…
IF’ the GOV doesnt build it..
IF’ the gov builds it…ITS FREEEEEE!!!!
I have been cable free for 6 months. So far so good. All I need is a big ass Internet pipe.
ECA if you get 20 channels off of an antennae (not a dish) your not rural. Rural is when you get one station with a 33 foot tower, and the picture is still snowy. That’s where I grew up and my parents still live. Oh and on another note your use of capital letters is rather boorish and really does nothing to enhance your comments.
The deal on broadcast is that it is free to the audience or they get shut down. They don’t actually own the bandwidth free and clear.
On the other hand they can charge anything they want if they put it on a private system.
Since I wouldn’t pay three cents for 95% of what they are broadcasting I suspect they are going under or their production costs are going to get drastically cut.
They are testing what the market will pay on line through Hulu and other sites.
Broadcast has always aimed at the lowest common denominator. Since broadcast is getting worse in general, the audience must be getting worse – less demanding. The demanding component has DVD, premium cable, and internet leaving the dregs for broadcast. Drastically higher amounts of advertising including hours of commercials don’t increase the rate of return – gee who could have predicted that. The clutter overwhelms the content to the point where people will pay money, some us of lots of money, for devices that remove most of the clutter (DVR’s aka Tivo) to be able to tolerate the few gems left on broadcast – and you have to include PBS in that since they broadcast and they have commercials and corporate influence on their programming.
Watch for the handout expected by local stations that a dozen or so years ago were bought by brainless media conglomerates who looked at their cash cow history and expected to milk them forever. Stunning sums were spent for local TV and radio stations. Now milked dry and the bills for digital TV conversion arriving in the mail, watch for the handout to “compensate” those stations for their mandated expenses. Never mind, that industry blew itself up, and frankly I don’t give a damn.
hold it…
#30 HAS IT RIGHT…
If you know the LAW only bradcast really makes money…
they can only make mony AS COMMERCIALS are bought.
OTHERS buy TIME, to show the SHOWS>>>>> and make money on that TIME showing commercials…
Thats LAW..
GO ANALOG ANd guess what…they HAVE TO FOLLOW US,,,
No, No, No….What’s going to happen is that the public free networks and private subscription networks will start to eat each other in buy outs. This will result in the consumer have fewer choices, and since it’s the choices that have drained the commercial money out of the markety this will have the benefit of: 1.) making us watch what the elite want’s us to watch, 2.) maximise the amount of money they can make in a given segment, 3.) well be paying to watch commercials; just like in movie theaters.
That’s the future, subsciption service with commericals and only two maybe three choices, probably all owned by Apple or Sony.
Whatever……………………….
Traaxx
When I was a kid in the 60’s (eons ago), TV shows had 33 episodes per season. Now the standard is 18 and in the case of a popular show it might be as few as 8. Shows disappear for a year between “seasons” and by that time you have forgotten what happened and/or completely lost interest.
Back then, hour-long dramas were 50 minutes long, now they are 38 minutes long, which means many more commercials. I’ve seen commercial breaks that are six minutes long, which is ridiculous!!!! I remember the hubub when Jerry Seinfeld was the first actor to be paid $1 million per episode…and that was when half-hour comedies contained 22 minutes of actual show That’s 4 minutes longer than the current half-hour comedy, which clocks in at 18 minutes in the case of Big Bang Theory, the most popular comedy on TV today.
Cable channels mostly consist of reruns of old network shows. That’s why they have to put the annoying ‘channel ID bugs” in the corners, otherwise you’d never know what channel you are watching since it’s just old reruns of Brady Bunch for the zillionth time.
Half your cable bill goes to pay for all the ESPN and Fox Sports regional channels. Fox wants to triple the fees for their cable channels. Scripps-Howard wants to quadruple the fees for HGTV and Food Network, which only consists of competition and reality shows any more; they are going to repurpose Fine Living into the Cooking Channel for all their actual cooking shows. It’s gonna get ugly soon as cable, satellite, and other provider fees skyrocket.
So lets see we are currently in the process of destroying local newspapers and their news rooms, radio as an independent provider of news has already been destroyed, and in the near future if the OTA Networks go to cable only that will destroy local/independent affiliate TV stations and their newsrooms. So what does that leave us with? 4-5 Networks providing (and controlling) all the Local/National/International news/information we get (News = unbiased facts that have been actually verified as correct) with a bunch of unknown/unverified Internet bloggers as our only alternative?
Sounds like a good way to destroy a free society to me.
Media consolidation is bad for this country and bad for people who believe in a free society. We have allowed it to go to far already and if we continued down this path it will effectively shut down the free flow of verifiable accurate information. What will be left is “sanitized” or biased facts, opinions presented as facts, and out and out lies – actions based on this type of information will end our free society.
There was a PROMISE from the Startup of CABLE.
FEWER/NO commercials..
It never happened.
Out of the 15-20 channels that YOU WATCH out of the 200-300 idiot channels..
you PAY for all of them, when you pay your bill.
The FCC wanted and TRIED to push for INDIVIDUAL channel choice.
You could BUY the channels you wanted to watch..
delay
delay
delay
UNINFORCED..
The cable corps say they CANT DO IT, and it would cost you MORE..
Charge me $1 per channel, and I could get away with $20 per month, NOT $50, for CRAP and channels I DONT WATCH. they would be able to deliver to MORE people as they would have a CHEAPER rate..
Pedro #37:
The last two seasons of Lost were 14 and 16 episodes. Battlestar Galactica averaged 16 episodes per season. Two extremely popular and critically acclaimed shows.
Every episode of Big Bang Theory has been 18 minutes long this season due to packing Two and a Half Men with extra commercials into a 4 minute break mid-show, making it last until 8:31 PM, shortening BBT.
22 episodes is still a long way from the 33 episodes of The Lucy Show, My Three Sons, and other great shows from the “Golden Age of Television”; and they did not start the season in October, show 6 new episodes then take a two month break till the end of January to restart new episodes.