There are bets then there are bets -- developments in the rabbit ears war

Fox launched its terrestrial superstation, Movies!, on Memorial Day with the following line-up.

8:00AM / Take a Hard Ride

10:10AM / House of Bamboo

12:20PM / Backlash

2:25PM / Michael Shayne: Private Detective

4:10PM / The Man Who Wouldn't Die

5:45PM / Jumpin' Jack Flash

8:00PM / High Anxiety

10:05PM / Silent Movie

The channel is a collaboration with Weigel Broadcasting and there's definitely a Neal Sabin touch with lots of dog whistles for movie lovers (Goldsmith, Fuller, Sturges, Brooks), widescreen format and an emphasis on the pretty-good but hard-to-catch (Emperor of the North is playing muted as I write this). The channel also introduces the welcome practice of not editing for length.

Looking through the schedule for the next few days, I see a number of interesting titles, more than I'll have time to watch. I also see indications that a great deal thought went into scheduling, making NBC's COZI secure in its position as worst run terrestrial superstation.

When I rescanned my channels to pick up Movies!, four other new channels also showed up, including what appears to be a new subchannel from the CBS affiliate. At present, it simply rebroadcasts the same programming as the main channel, but if they really have gone from broadcasting one channel to broadcasting  two, it would seem to indicate that CBS is at least considering jumping into the terrestrial market (which would mean that all four of the big four networks would have terrestrial-only channels).

In the past week I also noticed an LA company that sells and installs outdoor antennas has launched a fairly sizable ad campaign. Along similar lines, I recently started seeing store windows in East and Central LA carrying a wide selection of motorized and/or amplified indoor antennas.

As we've mentioned before, there are two wildly divergent pictures of the state of over-the-air television: healthy and growing according to the 2012 Ownership Survey and Trend Report; or small and shrinking according to Nielsen. It appears that pretty much everybody with first hand knowledge and skin in the game (networks, broadcasters, regional media players, retailers, manufacturers) are putting their money on the first scenario, while the only prominent backers of Nielsen appear to be reporters for the New York Times and Reuters.

Noah Smith recently observed that trivial bets do not necessarily reveal beliefs. That's true, however the multimillion dollar ones do indicate a certain level of sincerity.

What the Zuck is wrong NBC?

Despite the title, this isn't a joke. NBC raises all sorts of interesting questions about why some massive companies have long periods of excellence and others have runs of incompetence, or more specifically a period of excellence followed immediately by a period of gross incompetence (one that shows no sign of abating).

Here's Ken Levine (who knows what he's talking about on the subject) assessing the current state of the network:

But the message is clear. NBC was a disaster last year. It’s hard to build an audience with so many new shows but what choice did they have? Last year they had star vehicles (like Matthew Perry in GO ON), the Olympics to promote their schedule, THE VOICE, and SUNDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL. And still they finished the year in shambles.  

This is what might be called the third period of NBC television (when we go back to the radio era, things get complicated, with what was NBC being split into NBC and ABC, but that's a story for another time). For about the first thirty years, CBS was on top, NBC was in the middle and ABC was at the bottom. In the late Seventies, though, everything went topsy turvy. ABC hit number one and actually started poaching stations from NBC.

The second period starts in the early Eighties and is usually associated with Grant Tinker and Brandon Tartikoff. This was the era of Must-see TV. NBC went from last to first and remained arguably the dominant network for almost twenty years.

Sometime around 2000, we hit the third period. The network went into sharp decline and has mostly stayed at the bottom ever since.

The standard explanation for this is good management/bad management (I've used it myself), but I'm starting to have my doubts. For starters, that relies on both great-man and idiot-in-charge theories and though I find the second somewhat more believable than the first (it is almost always easier to screw up something good than it is to fix something bad), both tend to have their impact exaggerated.

Worse yet, if we extend the data in either direction -- pre-Tinker (i.e. Silverman, who had a long string of successes stretching over two networks before he got to NBC) and post-Zucker -- the theory ceases to hold. We can possibly explain away the Silverman era based on timing, short tenure and expectations (Silverman's run was less of a disaster than most people realize and on some ways even laid the groundwork for Tinker's success*).

The post-Zucker era, however, is not easily explained away. Zucker was an embarrassingly underqualified executive who oversaw what was probably the worst decline in more than six decades of network television,  but he has been gone for almost three years and there does not seem to have been a noticeable improvement or even a significant change in direction.

NBC remains an organization that has no clue about how to do its job: it doesn't know how to develop or cultivate shows; it decided to waste a large chunk of its valuable Olympics real estate promoting arguably the least promising new show it had at the time; developing a new channel for the terrestrial market, it launches one of the most badly thought out ad campaigns you'll ever see and makes programming decisions like pairing Munster, Go Home with a drama about a raped nun killing her newborn baby.

I don't have an explanation for what happened with NBC. I don't even have a good theory. I do however have a different way of framing the question. Instead of focusing on the styles and decisions of different executives, perhaps we should be asking how a company goes from hiring executives like Tinker and Tartikoff to hiring executives like Zucker and apparently many more like him.


* From Wikipedia:

Despite these failures, there were high points in Silverman's tenure at NBC, including the launch of the critically lauded Hill Street Blues (1981), the epic mini-series "Shogun" and The David Letterman Show (daytime, 1980), which would lead to Letterman's successful late night program in 1982. Silverman had Letterman in a holding deal after the morning show which kept the unemployed Letterman from going to another network. ...

Silverman also developed successful comedies such as Diff'rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, and Gimme a Break!, and made the series commitments that led to Cheers and St. Elsewhere. Silverman also pioneered entertainment reality programming with the 1979 launch of Real People. ... On Saturday mornings, in a time when most of the cartoon output of the three networks were similar, Silverman oversaw the development of an animated series based on The Smurfs; the animated series The Smurfs ran from 1981 to 1989, well after Silverman's departure, making it one of his longest-lasting contributions to the network. He also oversaw a revival of The Flintstones.

In other areas of NBC, Silverman revitalized the news division, which resulted in Today and NBC Nightly News achieving parity with their competition for the first time in years. He created a new FM Radio Division, with competitive full-service stations in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington. During his NBC tenure, Silverman also brought in an entirely new divisional and corporate management, a team that stayed in place long after Silverman's departure. (Among this group was a new Entertainment President, Brandon Tartikoff, who would help get NBC back on top by 1985.)  

Shamisen heroes and free TV

I had been working on another piece about over the air television when I happened to surf across this video on one of the many Asian-themed channels you can get with an antenna in LA and it struck me as an appropriate accompaniment for a quick note about over the air TV.

With a pair of rabbit ears I pick up programming in at least a half dozen languages. That's an indication of the diversity of the medium and its importance to some underserved segments of the population, but it also represents a real competitive weakness. Terrestrial television suffers from a crippling lack of attention. Both Journalists who cover both media and personal finance are almost completely oblivious to this innovative, totally free source of programming.

If you're a medium trying to get the attention of the mainstream media, having a large part of your viewership consist of recent immigrants is not going  to help.

I'll leave you with something a bit more traditional from the Yoshida brothers, though still, well... Hell, just watch it.

An actual quick one on broadcast TV

My last post on the topic went a bit longer than I had planned so I'll keep this one brief.

From the New York Times:

The Nielsen Company, which takes TV set ownership into account when it produces ratings, will tell television networks and advertisers on Tuesday that 96.7 percent of American households now own sets, down from 98.9 percent previously.

There are two reasons for the decline, according to Nielsen. One is poverty: some low-income households no longer own TV sets, most likely because they cannot afford new digital sets and antennas.

Of course, you don't need 'new digital sets and antennas.' You need a forty dollar converter box (thirty if you shop around. Closer to twenty used). Any antenna that's UHF compatible will work (in other words, any antenna). I've used one from the 99 cents store -- worked fine.

Here are some more details:

Nielsen’s research into these newly TV-less households indicates that they generally have incomes under $20,000. “They are people at the bottom of the economic spectrum for whom, if the TV breaks, if the antenna blows off the roof, they have to think long and hard about what to do,” Ms. McDonough said. Most of these households do not have Internet access either. Many live in rural areas.*

I'm sure that some of these people can't afford a thirty dollar converter or a thrift-store TV, but there are certainly others who went without because they were misinformed about the costs. misinformed in part because reporters increasingly feel like it's their job to protect consumption rather than consumers.

* Having grown up in the Ozarks and taught in the Mississippi Delta, I can tell you from experience that rural areas face extraordinary challenges that are generally ignored if not openly mocked. For some of these people, the switch to digital really did end their access to free TV, greatly compounding problems with isolation. I'd like to respond to this with a major push to get high speed internet access to rural areas but that's a topic for another column.

Correction

I was wrong when I said industry watchers had been incorrectly announcing the death of network television for over thirty years.

I should have said over forty years:

An awestruck audience at the 1970 CES loved the VCR's convenience -- but Hollywood battled back, warning that piracy would run rampant and kill network television.

Nobody loves an orphan technology

And the loneliest orphan of them all is over-the-air television. It's the kind of story you would expect to find in a Lemony Snicket novel, complete with evil guardian trying to kill it off to get to the family estate (bandwidth).

OTA television has few friends. Cable and broadband get all the attention while the media has been committed to the death of broadcasting/networks for more than three decades now.

Of course, one of the problems with being committed to a narrative is that it forces you to ignore the details that don't support the narrative and these have an unfortunate way of being the interesting ones.

Case in point: this story on the growth of Univision, though a bit credulous ("Univision set to become top U.S. broadcast network"), contains some impressive statistics about the growth of the network. It does not, however, contain any mention of this:

Univision is concerned because nearly 28% of Hispanic households — and 43% of homes where Spanish is the primary language — watch TV only via over-the-air transmissions, according to a 2005 National Association of Broadcasters report to the FCC.

Given that Univision skews toward the Spanish-language only households, that means a big chunk of its audience is coming in over the air. That means that selling off that part of the spectrum would have big consequences for the fast growing area of Spanish language media. That's an awfully important detail to leave out.

The Long Goodbye -- the networks are taking a long damned time to die

Yesterday I posted a link to Clay Shirky's essay comparing the big media empires to societies like the Roman Empire that collapsed under the weight of their own complexity. I commented that I doubted his conclusions. Here's one of the reasons why.

Back in the early Nineties, when I was still picking up some extra money as a freelance writer, I did a long feature on the surprising vitality of broadcast television in Northwest Arkansas. The vitality was surprising because broadcast television had been under a death watch for more than a decade.

These ominous prognoses had started started sometime in the mid to late Seventies, prompted by the arrival of home video and the rise of cable and satellite-based cable stations. By the beginning of the Eighties, most observers agreed that the outlook was dire. At least one columnist predicted that one of the networks (his guess was NBC) would be gone by the end of the decade. (The columnist obviously didn't have a lot of faith in that Tartikoff kid the network had just hired.)

By 1990 there were exactly twice as many networks as the columnist had predicted and one more than anyone had expected. What happened? Entertainment executives had been trying to launch a fourth network since DuMont went dark in 1956. Why was an industry facing an explosion of new competition suddenly able to support a major new player?

What industry watchers were overlooking was that broadcast stations fell into two distinct groups: VHF and UHF. For the VHF stations, cable really was a threat to a virtual monopoly. it marginally improved their picture quality but it brought in numerous new channels. UHF stations, however, had poor picture quality and low range. As businesses, they were only viable in large, heavily populated areas (and then only marginally). With cable, though, a channel 39 could compete on an equal footing with a channel 2.

This was what made Fox and later the CW viable businesses.

But to me the most remarkable thing about this story is the way the standard narrative has changed so little over the decades. For more than thirty years, there has been a steady stream of stories about reduced schedules, mergers, and deaths of networks and with the exception of the creation of the CW, every single one of them has been incorrect. Over three decades of wrong.

Just to put this in perspective, ABC, the last of the big three, started broadcasting in 1948. That was also about that the other networks started moving past the experimental stage. If we pick that as our starting point, network television has spent more than half of its life under a prognosis of imminent death. During that time the number of networks has gone from three to four to five (and might have been six if not not for some disastrous strategic errors by the heads of WB and UPN) and CBS, the network that reacted the least to the changes in the market (sticking mainly with sitcoms and hour dramas and keeping a very small web presence) is arguably the healthiest of the bunch.

Of course, this could all change in the next year or so. There is no reason to assume the current networks are any more immortal than DuMont was. All the same, we've been told since the late Seventies that this section of the sky is just about to fall. Perhaps it's time to question Mr. Little's credibility.