Thursday, November 08, 2007

TV Nation

Beyond the polemics, Fake Steve has some good points, per usual. Other than Barry Ritholtz, I don't know of anyone else who can discuss the fairly arcane, wonky subject of disintermediating content-revenue models in a genuinely entertaining style.

Up here in Silicon Valley we are busy building the next system and we are laughing our asses off at you guys. We all know you're going away. It's only a matter of time. You're latched on to a dying system like so many fat babies sucking on so many big fat Hollywood fake tits. Now the tits are drying up. That's what this strike is really all about. It's the beginning of the death throes of the network system. At some subconscious level you clueless fuckwits have begun to realize that the future has nothing to do with the system to which you're attached.

Obtain a clue, people. You're sitting there fighting over residuals and terms of this and that when what you should be doing is leaving the system altogether and helping to build the next one. But you can't do that because you can't get off the heroin of network money. You're hooked to a lifestyle. For all your groovy talk and hip little soul patch beards, you're the most risk-averse people in the world. You're lifers. I mean, you belong to a fucking union! How fucked up and 20th century is that?

Listen, Hollywood TV writers. For fifty years you've had a nice little gig going for yourselves. You've unionized and set up all these stupid rules and you've created a closed-off little club and you've done all you could to keep other people out of the club so you could make ridiculous amounts of money just for pumping out piles of shit content. Now guess what? The Internet blows that up. The Internet is anarchy. There's no writers guild. There's no limit on the number of channels. The writers and actors and directors who've been shut out of your club are creating their own alternate universe. They don't want to be in your club. Worse yet for you, they don't want you in their club, either. They don't need you. They don't give a shit about what you do. They view you as a bunch old, fat, stupid, overpaid hacks. Which you are.

Well, good luck with that strike, assholes. And seriously, thanks. I mean it.


He's right about the impending death throes, and the complete inability for either the networks or the writers to coherently navigate the shifts. That's part of the problem, they're just trying to figure out how best to ride the wave. The networks, just like the thrashing dinosaurs of the music industry or the old media, are frantically trying to cover their nut. And it's not working, and it reeks of desperation, increasingly so.

They're kept in place for now simply because of the scope of their operational oligarchy. It's not a carefully imploded Vegas casino, more of a sprawling, ancient edifice crumbling here and there, but faster and faster. Some of them have gotten better at diversifying and spreading to niches to make up the difference; Fox's FX Channel is a very good example of that, with smarter, racier, more HBO-style fare than they can run on the main network. But even they, like HBO, seem to be having more difficulty developing fresh material and making it stick; FX's flagship show, The Shield, will broadcast its final season next year, and like HBO with The Sopranos, there's no contender waiting in the wings to keep the pace. Rescue Me and The Wire, on those respective networks, are both superb shows, but each is also winding down, with the latter braodcasting its final season in January, and the former probably not having more than another season or two left in the tank.

So it's diminishing returns, and an attenuated content development setup, because it's so much easier and cheaper to just round up a dozen random candidates for forced sterilization and cobble an interminable piece of "reality" crap around them. And their first instinct when the ratings and revenues drop is more commercial time. As if paying $60+/month for fifty shopping channels and about five channels with watchable shows wasn't enough, now commercial breaks are even longer and more frequent. I've seen some shows with what appears to be roughly a "7-4" run -- four minutes of commercials after every seven minutes of content. (FX is even more insidious with its hour-long shows -- they'll suck you in with a 15-20 minute block, then 7-4-7-4 for the rest of the hour.)

So what it has devolved to, in the aggregate, is reeling in potatoes who don't mind watching other potatoes play guessing games with suitcases, or some D-list doorstop try to dance. That chases as many people away as it attracts, hence the dwindling shares. There's just too much else out there, and for me the kicker is the shorter DVD cycle time these days. I already rarely go to the movies as it is; it's expensive and noisy and there's a half-hour of promos before the fuckin' movie starts. I don't mind waiting three months to Netflix the DVD.

Lots of other people have gotten the same idea, and it was only a matter of time before they also realized that it's not a big deal to wait a few months for most series, especially with all the extras they throw in to please the die-hard fans. Seriously, other than The Daily Show and football, I don't really give much of a shit, and most of TDS is available on the website. Why do I want to spend $750 per year to watch the same mind-numbing commercials in Pavlovian repetition? Why would anyone?

I'm not quite as down on writers or unions as FSJ comes off as being; there are many good shows out there too, and it's hard work accomplished in an environment run on muscle and gall. They would get rolled without some protection, and they can't really make the jump as individuals just yet, though like lemmings, once one does, they all will. But FSJ is correct in spotting the institutional inertia at work here; the writers are too scared to make the intuitive leap to start getting their arms around this new media thing, and the networks will only do it in a manner that sustains the rest of their rotting carcass oligopoly.

And that's the thing that really oughta scare both sides in this, that they have so steadily eaten away the value of their product that a lot of people won't bother coming back. There's too many other distractions now; they don't have to settle for the umpteenth iteration of Survivor or whatever. The vegetable market will always be there, and always go back for more, like Bush's 25% core. You can always count on a moron to do what morons do.

But you can't always build and keep a solid revenue model around them. I couldn't care less about the teevee aspect of it; what intrigues me is the slow-motion crumble, and what could come out of it.

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