TV- a new model

[Hermiod]

The audience is watching in ways that can't be tracked and thus don't make money for the networks. This might be good for the producers of the content but not good for the networks.

The network usually doesn't get a huge chunk of the money a show brings in beyond advertising. They don't care if a show does well on DVD.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Yes, but I see this being on a per show basis rather than subscribing to a whole channel or group of channels, and once you've paid for it, it's yours to watch as often as you like on your TV, on your computer, on your phone, on your iPod or whatever.

We've already got the per-show model - Netflix, which was always intended by the company founders to migrate to all-download someday. DVDs by mail is just a temporary strategy that they are using to build up their customer base. They've already started instant-viewing for some titles and eventually when DVDs go the way of cassette tapes, that will be all they offer.

But to "pay" for the cheaper/more flexible per-show model, your cost is lag time. You won't get Dexter at the same time the subscribers get Dexter. The six month DVD lag time will most likely continue when downloads fully take over from DVD. Otherwise, HBO and Showtime will lose all their subscribers and why would they do that? They would rather have two largely non-overlapping revenue streams (one via Netflix or via their own lag-time version of Netflix) than one, and the less profitable one to boot.

Target the luddites - Focus on the still reasonably large population of people who don't know how to skip ads or simply don't care, and make content to appeal specifically to them. Police procedurals and reality TV fit into this category. Avoid sci fi at all costs.

The cost of police shows is such that it'll be too expensive soon.

The audience is slowly dying off and (probably) not being replaced to the same degree as younger viewers have different tastes. But I think the attrition will be slow. CBS, which is the most fully target-the-luddites network, is also the most successful one. I don't think this will change "soon" (within the next ten years) but it will eventually.

Premium and some of the basic cable networks are doing great creating quality television, so I don't see the need for HBO and Showtime to add an iTunes variation of their perfectly profitable model.

That won't last, and doesn't give me the show to keep. It's still hit and miss. I'd be paying for shows I don't watch.

I see no indication that are any serious threats on the horizon to the premium cable model. They can keep their core subscriber audience and expand out to the per-show rental market by using the approach that Netflix has trailblazed for them.

(But I have to rescind that comment that I didn't think they should "add" an iTunes approach - of course they should, it's a new revenue stream and why let Netflix profit from their shows alone? They just shouldn't add a revenue stream that will siphon off their existing revenue stream, there's no advantage to doing that.)

I think the biggest challenge facing the TV industry today is revolutionizing how it gathers and measures "ratings". As you said, viewership is down. But if one were to factor in DVR, iTunes, online streaming (via Hulu, ABC.com, or wherever the content is made available) and any other medium for watching content, I think the ratings for a lot of shows would jump considerably.

The DVR ratings are already being captured but advertisers are leery about paying for it because they know ads are being skipped. Online formats are still too small in number to have much impact and are not designed to carry the volume of advertising that network shows are. Online viewing would have to be much larger than network viewing to compensate but right now, it's something like 1% of network viewing - very tiny.

It just goes back to what I said: TV content in the future will be designed to appeal to people who either don't skip ads or who will pay for the content in lieu of ads - cable subscription, Neflix, iTunes download, etc. There's no free lunch. Formats like TV or DVD might be superceded entirely by new ways of delivering content, but the imperative will continue - create only content that you have a reasonable expectation of profiting from, because it appeals to an audience that will fork over the money.

Audiences who do not want to pay for content will soon find that there is no content for them at all. Why should this be surprising?

 

[Marten]

Doesn't all shows suffer roughly the same amount by DVR-rating?

PS I have actually no idea what DVR is, so I'm just guessing.

Digital Video Recorder? Seriously?

I'm not a native speaker, and we seldom record TV-shows here, for some reason.

I could of course googled it, though. Sorry about that,

 

[Hitman]

Simple model, one episode, one dollar, and make the content available on the entire planet. 50 million downloads means 50 million dollars; take half for production and running costs, other half, profit. Viewers get what they want, when they want, and for a low price. Content providers get what they want, money. It's a win-win situation.

 

[23skidoo]

For all scripted drama, make everything pay for what you watch. First three episodes are free, then you pay up for a full season. You download it, it's yours to keep forever to redownload or stream whenever you want in the latest and greatest format.

Oh, and cut seasons down to 12 or 13 episodes to reduce padding.

I don't agree with the first (for one thing, in electronic/digital media the "keep forever" idea is a fallacy; anything that's not physical media is, at best, temporary).

However, I do agree with the second. I know fans love the idea of seeing their favorite actors and characters for 22-24 episodes. But the fact is no series, I don't care how acclaimed it is, or how popular, can produce 22-24 episodes in a season filmed over 10 months and keep the quality consistent. Can't be done, at least not when we're talking about shows that are created with the anticipation or hope of running for multiple years.

In the UK and elsewhere, series are devised to run 6 episode, 13 episodes, occasionally longer. But they are not created with the idea of going for 10 years at 22 episodes a pop. Torchwood made 2 seasons of 13 episodes, and a 3rd of 5 episodes. And that 5-parter was one of the most popular shows of the year last year over there.

I think TV producers need to stop creating shows on the basis of 22 episodes and 5-10 years, or whenever they get their magic 100 for syndication. For one thing, syndication is dead. If a show runs 6 episodes it stands just as much chance of selling on DVD than a show that runs 22 or 75 or 100 episodes. And that's where the money is now, not reruns.

They need to adopt the UK model. I think shows like CSI, Fringe, the Star Treks -- they'd be so much stronger, storywise, with 13 episode seasons. Plus, it reduces franchise fatigue. It eliminates the need for flashback and bottle episodes (or at least reduces the need for the latter). And I think the physical quality of the shows would increase; in the UK they spend as much time filming a 13-episode season of Doctor Who as a US show spends making 22 episodes. Do the math. (If you don't like Doctor Who as an example, feel free to substitute Hustle, The Office, Queer as Folk, Fawlty Towers, the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes, Red Dwarf, House of Elliott, Merlin, Primeval. I could keep listing them.)

And with shorter lengths, networks can guarantee a show will run for a complete season. One reason why network TV is collapsing is because people don't want to get involved in shows anymore that get cancelled after the first 6 episodes.

There are always exceptions. "24" would not work as "6" (though that said they are looking at doing a movie, which I assume isn't going to be 24 hours long). There are also shows in which the ongoing arc demands many episodes. But for many shows they could do quite well with 13 episodes or 6. And a lot of shows wouldn't overstay their welcome so quickly if they had fewer episodes. Exhibit A is Heroes.

Alex

 

[Mistral]

Doesn't all shows suffer roughly the same amount by DVR-rating?

PS I have actually no idea what DVR is, so I'm just guessing.

Digital Video Recorder? Seriously?

I'm not a native speaker, and we seldom record TV-shows here, for some reason.

I could of course googled it, though. Sorry about that,

My apologies-I didn't look at the geographic location. DVRs are all the rage over here...

 

[Kelthaz]

Well, I still say a Hulu type system available through the Television would be the best idea. Allow someone to use Hulu from their TV using their TV remote. They can watch whatever shows they want and due to the fact that their demographic information is known (account info), advertising can be specifically targetted towards them resulting in fewer commercials generating the same amount of advertising money.

 

[RoJoHen]

Re-work the way commercials air. Rather than having 6-7 commercial breaks in an hour-long show, have two longer breaks: one before the episode starts, and one at the halfway point. Then make it so that DVR users can't fast-forward through the first 5 minutes of any program, to ensure the commercials get played. It would be an inconvenience, but at least it would prevent you from having to watch multiple breaks throughout the course of a show.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

But the fact is no series, I don't care how acclaimed it is, or how popular, can produce 22-24 episodes in a season filmed over 10 months and keep the quality consistent.

Plenty of shows do just that, with a consistent enough quality to generate consistently strong ratings. Therefore, there's no motive for anyone to change; why make less money with fewer episodes? What you keep proposing will never happen for the mainstream CSI type shows, which is where networks are increasingly heading, and cable already does shorter seasons in many cases, for whatever reasons.

And quality of shows really isn't the topic of this thread - it's how to make money off shows when network TV is telescoping into all police procedurals, sitcoms and reality TV because the other genres are becoming increasingly unprofitable. The shows that are winning are certainly not better than the shows that are losing. CBS is the most successful network, yet I can't find a single show worth watching.

One reason why network TV is collapsing is because people don't want to get involved in shows anymore that get cancelled after the first 6 episodes.

That would only impact serialized shows. So the network solution would be: forget about serialized shows. Do more CSI. And given the 2010-11 pilot lineup, that is just what they are doing.

in the UK they spend as much time filming a 13-episode season of Doctor Who as a US show spends making 22 episodes.

Yikes! You are asking businesses to spend the resources they now use to yield X number of ad slots and spend the same resources to get 40% fewer ad slots, and therefore 40% less revenue. With the TV biz hurting, that is not the way to salvage the situation. You need to advise them how to get more bang for their buck, not less.

And a lot of shows wouldn't overstay their welcome so quickly if they had fewer episodes. Exhibit A is Heroes.

Heroes' problem is that the writers are catastrophically bad. Handled properly, there's no reason that premise couldn't have gotten 5 or so seasons worth of 22 episode seasons. It had a wonderfully open-ended premise that you could do anything with.

Rather than having 6-7 commercial breaks in an hour-long show, have two longer breaks: one before the episode starts, and one at the halfway point.

You're risking a huge bail-out during that long ad break. Competing networks will realize Network A is doing that, and will program to draw away the frustrated people clicking around the channel at just that time.

Then make it so that DVR users can't fast-forward through the first 5 minutes of any program,

How are you going to get TiVO to cooperate?

 

[Hermiod]

Audiences who do not want to pay for content will soon find that there is no content for them at all. Why should this be surprising?

It's not surprising at all. I already pay for my TV.

I pay a licence fee for the BBC's extremely limited male-interest output (which consists largely of Top Gear, Match of the Day and Mock the Week) and I pay for my Sky subscription to watch football, movies, Dave, the Discovery Channel etc.

I don't pay anything except inflated prices at the supermarket for ITV, Channel 4 and Five. There's nothing on those channels for men to watch, except the occasional Champions League game on ITV.

So yeah, I'm used to paying.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

The government forces you to pay that fee in order to have a TV at all, right? That's not at all the same as people who opt to subscribe to HBO or basic cable packages because they like the content, or people "paying" for network shows by watching ads. What I'm talking about is the natural operation of the free market.

 

[Hermiod]

The government forces you to pay that fee in order to have a TV at all, right? That's not at all the same as people who opt to subscribe to HBO or basic cable packages because they like the content, or people "paying" for network shows by watching ads. What I'm talking about is the natural operation of the free market.

I have to pay the licence fee in order to legally own a television set with a tuner. This extends to BBC iPlayer as well. In theory, I could just buy a PC monitor and hook my PS3 up to it. As long as I don't use any BBC services I'm fine.

On the other hand, I choose to pay for my Sky (satellite television) subscription in the same way you choose to pay for cable. I choose to pay for my premium Sky Movies and Sky Sports subscriptions in the same way you choose to pay for HBO.

The problem is that the choice is an illusion. In order to watch anything that I really want to watch at all I have to have at least the Sky and Sky Sports subscriptions. When I finally upgrade to a HDTV in the living room that'll be another £10 a month on top of the £40+ I pay.

If I wasn't a football or a WWE fan, I could lose the Sky Sports subscription but I'd still have to pay out to watch Lost, Dollhouse, Stargate, 24, House, V etc.

And that's all because the BBC I have to pay for and the purely advertising supported Freeview channels do not cater for male viewers in terms of scripted drama.

The controller of drama for the BBC - who by his own admission is the most important man in British drama since, thanks to the advertising slump, nobody else has the kind of budget for drama production that the BBC has - was asked on Points of View (an occasional programme where BBC viewers can ask questions relating to BBC programming) last year if he felt the BBC's drama department was serving adult male viewers adequately.

His answer to the question was to cite Torchwood, Spooks and Hustle. That's less than 24 hours of programming per year. Not even a day's entertainment.

The lion's share of the BBC's drama budget is spent on period dramas and soaps like Eastenders, Casualty and Holby City.

Now, I'm sure some people reading this will be thinking "Doctor Who ? Hello ?" but there's a reason why they spend so much time wandering around in Cardiff on that show. A bit of cheap CG and some make up doesn't make a show big budget and the BBC consider it "family" entertainment anyway.

The BBC spent a considerable amount of money securing the long term rights to show Heroes, Mad Men and The Wire - all shows with a good male following. A leaked report today suggests that the budget for importing US shows will be the first thing to be savagely cut in order to reduce the BBC's costs as it is believed that a Conservative government would be much more ruthless should they come to power.

To summarise, people suggest that nobody will pay for television they can get for free, but it is my view that people already are paying without necessarily realising it.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

People will pay for TV if they're getting exactly what they want. Otherwise, they might watch if it's easy and free. Everybody pays through the stuff they buy (ad costs built in) but that would be true if you never watched one second of TV. The solution there is to stop buying anything that's ever advertised on TV, or at least scale way back to whatever degree possible. Think about food for instance. Nobody needs to buy any brand names of food in order to survive.

 

[Othello]

They do need a new model and as long as I get access to quality TV shows I'll be happy.

 

[Hermiod]

People will pay for TV if they're getting exactly what they want. Otherwise, they might watch if it's easy and free. Everybody pays through the stuff they buy (ad costs built in) but that would be true if you never watched one second of TV. The solution there is to stop buying anything that's ever advertised on TV, or at least scale way back to whatever degree possible. Think about food for instance. Nobody needs to buy any brand names of food in order to survive.

Advertising is not going to go away. Companies need to get their message out.

My point was that different audiences have to pay differently whether they want to or not.

If I want to watch anything worth watching, that's £45 a month right there.

 

[PlainSimpleJoel]

I refuse to pay $75 per month for pay TV (for Basic Package, Sports and Drama). So that is out. Here is in Australia I get most my shows on free to air TV (via 15 freeview channels). I have no problem waiting a week or a few months for my overseas shows (with one exception). Plus many shows now I rather watch DVD.

Plus downloading (and paying for it as suggested) is out due to my slow internet and monthly broadband limit. Maybe when I move I get a better internet than this wireless broadband that I currently have.

 

[FordSVT]

Audiences who do not want to pay for content will soon find that there is no content for them at all. Why should this be surprising?

It's not surprising, and it's an argument that falls on deaf ears when it comes to people who regularly download music and movies and TV illegally. If everything was free, there would be no profit incentive to produce anything. No offense to anyone, but 95% of the independent and free music and entertainment offerings on the Internet are not up to the standards of the commercially viable products. Everyone goes on about how P2P is really about protecting up-and-comers from the EVIL CONTENT DISTRIBUTION GODS and taking control away from groups like TimeWarner, but when they dropped all illegal content from Mininova (a torrent site) and left only the legitimate stuff put on there by independents, their site visits dropped by 98.3% within a matter of days. And the vast majority of people making their art available for free are, in fact, looking to turn a buck on it some day. People gotta eat!

So there is an acknowledgement at some basic level by the public that this stuff IS worth paying for, they just don't WANT to. It's really short-sighted, and quite frankly it's pre-school mentality.

 

[Hermiod]

^Yeah, the whole communist "everything should be free, maaaan" thing is garbage. People deserve to be paid for their work.

Yes, there are issues with DRM that cause me as an advanced consumer of their content problems - specifically moving content around between devices - but I understand why they have to protect their content otherwise nobody would pay for it and the content wouldn't exist to copy.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Advertising is not going to go away. Companies need to get their message out.

Companies can get their message out without recourse to TV at all. TV is just one advertising medium among many venues, ranging from banner ads on websites to bus stops and benches to event sponsorship to those funny billboards you see pulled behind trucks on the freeway.

TV advertising is just one part of the mix, and not an essential part for all campaigns. Ad agencies might look at the cost and results, and recommend that their clients scale back on TV ads vs rolling billboards or sponsoring NASCAR teams or whatever. TV has a lot of competition out there for ad dollars, and the trend is in favor of the competition (events and viral marketing seem to be the hot new trends lately).

 

[lawman]

Hermiod, why do you keep emphasizing shows for "males"?

I happen to be a guy, but I've never noticed any gender distinction in terms of who enjoys quality, scripted TV... or, for that matter, who spends their time watching disposable crap. (There are other distinctions -- "intelligence" springs to mind -- but not gender.)

---
Anyhow, I don't think there's any clear future path right now, at least not one we can generalize about... since the technological options and business models are really significantly different in the US compared to the UK compared to Europe compared to Australia, etc.

Here in Chicago, Illinois, USA, I do not pay a cable or satellite bill, and never have. (Which puts me among about a 15% minority of the population, so I'm not claiming to be typical.) I might reconsider if cable providers offered a la carte subscriptions, but of course they have no interest in doing that... and the stuff in their "bundles" of channels is 98% worthless. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay a big monthly bill for stuff I have no interest in. In particular, I know that some of the highest costs in cable pricing are passed along from the sports channels, and I don't care about sports any more than I do about reality shows or forensics procedurals.

Instead, my girlfriend and I get free digital HD broadcast signals off the air with an antenna, which is connected to a DVR, which is connected to an AV receiver and home theater system, which is connected to an HDTV. We pick up about 30 channels that way. Most of that is crap too, but that's no problem if I'm not paying extra for it. We've watched exactly eight shows on a regular basis this past season (not all of which have overlapped): Big Bang Theory, Dollhouse, FlashForward, Glee, Heroes, Lost, The Good Wife, and V. So that's all scripted shows, only one sitcom, five of them long-form serials, and seven of the eight SFnal and/or "geek" themed in some way. And yes, we generally DVR them and speed through the commercials.

Far more of our viewing time is spent on DVDs, for which we have a NetFlix subscription (the cost of which is much more reasonable than cable), which in addition to movies allows us to catch up on cable-produced series that aren't broadcast over the airwaves, like BSG, Rome, The Wire, In Treatment, and so forth... as well as interesting foreign shows from Canada, the BBC, etc. (Why American commercial networks don't just license and broadcast more of these has always puzzled me. Has to be cheaper than producing brand-new content... seems like a win-win for both sides. So why on earth has Doctor Who always wound up on PBS? But I digress...)

Downloadable content may eventually be a viable alternative to this, but right now it's simply not there yet. Hulu is handy for catching an occasional episode of something we missed recording, but it's a pain to watch a show on your computer screen rather than the actual TV. Most of what Netflix offers isn't actually even available for streaming. And yes, I know it's theoretically possible to set both of these and more up to play on your TV, but it'd be a royal pain. It'd require a number of new components added to the system (which is only four years old, not exactly on its last legs), and damn near a master's degree in networking. It would also require a lot more bandwidth than is conveniently available -- here in Chicago, the best we can get at a reasonable price (i.e., under $50/month) is about 6Mbps downstream via DSL, which -- although it's blazingly fast compared to a few years ago -- isn't really up to the task of matching broadcast HD resolution and surround sound.

I pay for the cost of commercials (and all the other ubiquitous advertising in which I'm immersed every day) whether I watch the damn things or not, every time I go shopping. So for now, nobody better try to take away my free TV. Maybe somewhere down the line an alternative will present itself that's equally convenient, economical, and high-quality, but it's sure not available yet. (And I say that as more of an AV and computer technophile than 90% of the people I know.)

BTW, it may be different where you are, but here in the U.S. the networks tend to have an ownership stake in most of the studios that produce content for them (much more so than even 15 years ago), so it's not true that their only revenue stream is from the ads. That ownership itself is not necessarily the greatest thing for creative experimentation, but that's a different discussion... and at any rate it does tend to undercut arguments that shifting business models will make it impossible for them to make money.