Future of Cable TV

Quote: Fleastiff

Sure a quality show will help but where is there any quality out there?

But why bother?
CBS just cancelled their sitcom, "The Millers", because it was averaging 7.28 million viewers. FOX is keeping their sitcom, "The Mindy Project" despite averaging only 2.4 million viewers a week.

Someone can film a funny dog failing a training test and get 9-10 million viewers. Now you only have one commercial, and all youtube videos won't attract that many views, but you can assemble enough of them to equal 16 thirty second commercials on a sitcom.

So youtube has higher revenue than ABC television network (remember ABC has only minimal sports since Disney also owns ESPN).

That was funny, he thought it was a buffet
just for him.

Quote: Pacomartin

Someone can film a funny dog failing a training test and get 9-10 million viewers.

Well the dog and the owner still love one another and that usually doesn't happen at the end of "cheaters".

That forty-three second video of seven pound cat versus sixty-five pound dog did well enough to get the owners on the Today Show, but I don't know what revenue was generated or if the cat gets residuals or not.

I might be able to rehab a boat and create a series of videos about sailing it around the world but somehow I think that young girl who looks great in a bikini is going to do much better getting people to watch it.

Youtube advertising revenues was reported at $5.6 billion in 2013 which equaled that of ABC. Of the major broadcast networks, ABC has almost no sports since Disney finds it much more profitable to shift all sports to ESPN which justifies the astronomical fees paid by cable networks. So ABC has the lowest revenue.

But given the growth rate of youtube, it may surpass CBS.

Quote: Pacomartin

But given the growth rate of youtube, it may surpass CBS.

YouTube promises targeted ads. I mean if they live stream a two day rock music festival from the dessert.... that is a heck of a narrow audience to get exposed to ads. Also if the quality of the ads improves, they can charge more.

Look at that First Kiss video I posted about long ago. The video was so good it went viral but its actually a clothing advertisement for a Los Angeles based upscale fashion merchant. All the men and women in the first kiss video were wearing the black and white fashions featured in WREN's collection that year. When is the last time that network television aired a commercial that the public chose to watch intently for 87 million times? Even those who chose to pan the kissing styles or lighting watched a commercial voluntarily.

Or that NYC Coffee Shop commercial for a re-issued movie Carrie. That New Jersey actress got flown to California simply on the strength of a two minute video in a Greenwich Village coffee shop and several people copied the idea in other videos. These are ads remember, not shows.

Deliver viewers like that on a regular basis and its then Easy Street.

Quote: Fleastiff

YouTube promises targeted ads. I mean if they live stream a two day rock music festival from the dessert.... that is a heck of a narrow audience to get exposed to ads. Also if the quality of the ads improves, they can charge more..

But the advertiser will not be purchasing ads on a two day rock music festival. He will be buying 4 million teenager male "views" in a month. Youtube will have to assemble the hundreds of shows or video clips that can indicate in a verifiable manner that the ad was seen that many times.

Quote: Pacomartin

But the advertiser will not be purchasing ads on a two day rock music festival. He will be buying 4 million teenager male "views" in a month. Youtube will have to assemble the hundreds of shows or video clips that can indicate in a verifiable manner that the ad was seen that many times.

Different ads for different needs. The Super Bowl sells out because everyone will watch. But how many remember? IMHO the YT targeted is the better way for most businesses but the P&Gs of the world still need the one-time exposure.

Dish Network has been threatening to remove CBS-TV and Comcast SportsNet from their roster of channels. This would affect Dish subscribers in L.A., NYC, Chicago, WashingtonDC, and San Francisco. Another terrible P.R. move for both the telecoms & the broadcasters. These guys are blissfully tone-deaf to the massive competition they're up against from Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, and video games. The telecoms need to be 100% focused on stopping the cord-cutter phenomenon, but instead they're distracted by a game of chicken with CBS. If the goal is to piss off their own subscribers, they're doing a great job.

Here's my question: it seems as though these re-transmission fee battles between the cable companies and the broadcasters are a common occurrence these days. But in the 1980s and 1990s, this behavior was unheard of. In the 1980s, your cable company didn't black out CBS because of a money dispute. Is my memory mistaken? Or are these guys getting greedier?

Quote: reno

Here's my question: it seems as though these re-transmission fee battles between the cable companies and the broadcasters are a common occurrence these days. But in the 1980s and 1990s, this behavior was unheard of. In the 1980s, your cable company didn't black out CBS because of a money dispute. Is my memory mistaken? Or are these guys getting greedier?

SHORT ANSWER: The fee negotiations were not even legal until Sept 1993, and the networks only recently decided that the possibility of losing some advertising revenue was relatively insignificant compared to the possible revenue of retransmission fees.

LONG ANSWER:
Cable TV (or Community Access TV CaTV) started in 1948 by a shopkeeper in Pennsylvania. He reasoned that he couldn't sell TV's to people who couldn't get reception. As a matter of fact he couldn't even demonstrate a TV in his shop so he would drive his customers to the top of a nearby hill where he could pick up Philadelphia TV stations. He basically relied on some training he had in WWII to build an antenna on the hill, run a cable to his shop, and sold his signal to twenty or thirty homes he passed for $2 a month. It took him about four years until he closed the shop and just sold cable service.

At that time, the price of a TV meant it was the second biggest purchase by most households, second only to the family car.

By the 1970's cable was developing and Superstations were appearing. It was clear that the biggest cable company (TCI which is an ancestor of COMCAST) could make money by distributing only cable networks. To protect the broadcast networks from losing their share of viewers "must carry" laws were developed that said that cable companies must carry local broadcast stations. That situation last a little over a decade, when broadcast stations began to grow jealous of the double dip that cable networks had (advertising revenue + affiliate fees).

The FCC was pressured into changing the law so that the broadcast stations could elect "must carry" or "negotiated permission" status. That way the local independent stations could elect "must carry" for no fee, but the major networks could elect to negotiate. The new rules began in September 1993. The cable companies loudly declared that they were not going to pay hard cash for signals that were free to antennas. ABC settled for smaller victories, like no cable company could broadcast ABC unless they carried ESPN2 (Launched October 1, 1993). In those days any new network was a marketing plus for cable companies and the affiliate fees were not a big deal. So most cable companies would have probably paid for ESPN2 anyway.

The first film to be released on DVD was Twister (1996) and Netflix was incorporated in 1997. TiVo introduced their DVR in 1999. Cable networks realized that they might not survive without high quality original series and that cable networks that simply showed reruns and low quality series would become passe. So by 2002, the cable series Monk began to get ratings similar to a mildly popular network show. Monday Night football went to ESPN in fall of 2006.

The broadcast networks decided that aggressively pursuing considerably larger retransmission fees was their only way to profitability. As advertising revenue was deemed insufficient to support prime time programming, the fear that the cable company would simply drop the station was no longer as frightening.

But NBC, ABC, and FOX are owned by large media conglomerates. NBC can't be thrown off COMCAST because they are the same company. ABC is part of Disney and they are making a huge percentage of their revenue from EPSN and DISNEY CHANNEL affiliate fees. FOX is heavily invested in FX, FXX and other cable channels.

CBS is the one network which is not heavily invested in cable channels. They own Showtime and Smithsonian channel. So they make the largest fee demands for retransmission of CBS broadcast signal. So for the forseeable future they will be the only channel you will see in down to the wire negotiations with cable companies.

I would absolutely love it if all TV were on demand, whether via internet or cable. I'd support a monthly fee model, provided it carried an "all you can watch" option. like Netflix, but with literally every TV show and movie ever made. Of course that won't ever happen.

And yet things like sporting events, news, breaking news, award shows, some important political events, and other things should be broadcast live, too. Imagine something like 9/11 happens and few people find out because they're all watching something else.

Ray Bradbury was right. Predictions are risky, especially about the future.

A couple of years ago I was listening to a radio show while in a traffic jam. The hostess was explaining Twitter to her audience with the help of guests. They launched a topic (I think. I don't do Twitter), and tried to measure it. The topic took off quickly, because a lot of people listening on the radio went to their phones, tablets and PCs and retweeted it. This tells you how powerful "old media" still is.

And I also want to keep owning some of the media I watch and listen to. For TV and movies, that means DVDs or Blue ray. I'm comfortable with virtual, cloud-based software you don't physically own, because most software needs to be changed after a few years anyway. But a treasured movie like Tron or TV series like B5 holds its value forever.