07.07.07
Is Television Doomed?
We all know that television as a medium for entertainment and advertising has some specific advantages and disadvantages.
- Major networks still tend to attract mass audiences that reach across demographic profiles. This generates incredibly large audiences for hit shows and makes television advertising more expensive than most competitors.
- Smaller networks and channels often specialize, carrying a particular type of programming. Sports, for example, or food and cooking. Within that type, there may be even more specialization, such as a channel focusing on one particular sport.
- Special events may generate even higher audiences, which in turn makes them more attractive to advertisers and more expensive for advertisers.
The interesting thing is that it seems to me that some people are starting to abandon television the same way that people have been abandoning their landline telephones in favor of mobile telephones.
- CBS Evening News is reporting lower numbers of viewers.
- Some viewers prefer to receive similar content via a different medium, but networks and their suppliers are having a hard time understanding this. In this case, it was a sporting event ejecting a newspaper reporter because he was supplying updates via the Web.
I originally found that there were very few programs I actually liked–the television might be on, but I was not interested in what was playing. When I found a few programs that I liked, the networks would preempt the shows I wanted to watch for awards shows, political debates, and sporting events.
I currently have three programs that I enjoy, Numb3rs being far and away the most enjoyable, although it is distinctly less enjoyable now than it was when it started. Because of the volume games that broadcasters play (commercials loud, program quiet), it becomes too irritating to sit through very often. It reminds me of the dancing cowboys (and now dancing green aliens) in the banner ads for a certain mortgage lending company that are frequently found on Yahoo! and MSN sites. I’m sure you’ve seen them–they are so animated that they distract from the actual content that was the reason you visited the site.
There are some shows that are being carried on the Web, Numb3rs being one of them, but the Web presents other challenges for television programming. Like the rest of the Internet, the Web is designed for interaction and two-way communication. Although much of the dynamic content that characterizes modern Web applications is something that was added on after-the-fact, the fact remains that from the beginning the Internet and the Web were seen as a two-way medium. Television, on the other hand, by its very nature, is one-way. Several programs have utilized out-of-band communications to add some two-way interaction–talk forum telephone call-in programs are one example, and the reality shows where users call a number to vote for retaining or ejecting a specific cast member are another. The thing is, it feels fake, like a politician’s smile and greeting.
On the Web, there are various social networking sites, blogs, and other ways to actually conduct conversations with other people. I would include the network-enabled games in this category as well. It seems to me that people are rediscovering the ability to communicate with other people rather than passively taking in whatever comes from a chosen media outlet. Those of us that are watching this are quietly humming the song “Convoy”, the 1970s song that helped launch the CB radio craze. As with CBs, the Internet is a tool that is helping people connect in ways that were previously unknown.
Since the whole business model of the television broadcasters is based on getting relatively large numbers of people to passively watch their programming (and to convince advertisers to pay to promote their products & services to those large numbers of people), it seems to me that they are about to follow the newspaper and music industries circling the drain.
Let me clarify this: I don’t expect TV to go away. I do expect it to be more and more marginalized, the way that radio was for so many years.
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Tags: media
