One of the major points of contention came from the fact that the two major publicly available data sources had wildly different estimates of viewership. Nielsen had 9% and shrinking. GfK had 18% and growing. Back in April of 2013, we had a big debate with Felix Salmon over these numbers. I pointed to Fox's and NBC's then recent decisions to launch terrestrial superstations (the superb Movies! and the inept COZI respectively).
Let's assume Salmon's right and put ourselves in the position of a Fox or NBC executive who has to decide whether or not to create a new broadcast network. We can be reasonably confident that the executives have access to reliable data (particularly the Fox executive if the deal with Weigel included a look at some numbers from ThisTV and METV).What's happened since then?
You find, given our premise, that the total over-the-air audience is, say, forty million, the technology is obsolete and entire medium will probably be gone in a few years. At this point, it's hard to imagine you'd proceed with an expensive, time-consuming project that is likely to be an embarrassing failure but the situation actually gets worse.
You are looking at launching an advertiser-driven, English-language station but the OTA market is disproportionately poor and immigrant (I get programming in over a half dozen languages); the maxim relevant audience for your station now drops to maybe thirty million and there's more bad news. You're going to have to share that thirty million with a crowded field of competitors. A major market will have dozens of OTA channels including multiple PBS channels, This, ME, Antenna, Bounce, RTV, three ION channels and various independents.
Given Salmon's assumptions about the size and trajectory of this market, there is simply no way NBC or Fox would have gone ahead with these channels. They couldn't possibly recoup their start-up costs before OTA is phased out. Put bluntly, both NBC and Fox are betting against Salmon's position.
Obviously this is not conclusive, but it's a strong piece of evidence and it's consistent with what we've seen elsewhere. It's also consistent with GfK's numbers.
All of the terrestrial superstations mentioned above appear to be going strong.
Sony launched its own virtual clone of Movies!, GetTV.
And now
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