Hum186 wk3
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8 Television, Cable, and Mobile Video
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Learning Objectives No one is neutral about television. We either love it or hate it. Many of us do both. The reason is that it is our most ubiquitous and socially and culturally powerful mass medium. Recent and on-the-horizon technological advances promise to make it even more so. After studying this chapter you should be able to
̖ HBO’s Game of Thrones. Innovative, challenging streamed and cable programming helps improve the quality of all television. © HBO/Courtesy Everett Collection
Outline the history and development of the television and cable tel evision industries and television itself as a medium. Describe how the organizational and economic nature of the conte mporary television and cable industries shapes the content of telev ision. Explain the relationship between television in all its forms and its viewers. Identify new and converging video technologies and their potential impact on the television industry and its audience. Describe the digital and mobile television revolution. Apply key television-viewing media literacy skills.
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̖ Netflix’s House of Cards. Free from network television’s commercial restrictions, producers of streamed content can take creative chances. © Photos 12/Alamy
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“WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING? “College hoops.” “But you don’t get cable. You said you were a cord-never, never had cable so there’s no cord
to cut.” “That’s right. Never needed it.” “But that game’s on ESPN, a cable channel.” “Yes and no. Yes, ESPN is a cable channel, but it’s now streaming directly to fans, no cable
subscription necessary. Unlike with Fox, TNT, and TBS streaming. You’ve gotta pay for cable before those channels will let you stream their stuff.”
“You still have to pay for ESPN, right?” “Sure, but not as much as for cable. Sony has a streaming service, too, with channels like
Comedy Central, MTV, and Spike. Even HBO launched a no-cable-subscription-necessary streaming service. You don’t need cable for their shows like Game of Thrones or Championship Boxing.”
“Or Girls?” “Yup.” “No way.” “Way. Television is changing, my friend, more than you realize.” Indeed it is. Netflix outbid established video giants HBO and AMC for House of Cards,
originally ordering two seasons, 26 episodes, for over $100 million. YouTube has committed $100 million to commission original programming designed exclusively for its two dozen new channels. Search engine and Web portal Yahoo produces original programming for its Yahoo Screen, notably Community, late of NBC. Online retailer Amazon commissions program pilots, offers them free to viewers who vote on which should be turned into full series, and then produces the winners for its Amazon Prime subscribers. Among its shows are Alpha House, Betas, Mozart in the Jungle, and Bosch. Its Transparent won a Golden Globe for Best TV series in 2015 and its star, Jeffrey Tambor, won Best Actor, both firsts for streaming television. Hulu Plus streams original shows like Deadbeat and Moone Boy. Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Prime alone invest $6.8 billion a year in original video programming (Wallenstein, 2014). Viewers have enthusiastically taken to this new form of television—half of all U.S. households now subscribe to at least one of these services (“Is It OK,” 2015)—but the new television also offers a great deal of creative freedom to those who produce its content. “It’s much harder to bring innovation to network television because network television works as a strong corporate entity where change is maybe not as easily applied,” explains House of Cards cinematographer Igor Martinovic. Streaming companies are “willing to experiment, they’re willing to take chances” (in Khatchatourian, 2014, p. 79). “Fifty years ago,” writes media critic Bob Verini, “TV drama was Bonanza and Gunsmoke, genre stuff grownups sat in front of when there were not hot, intelligent movies around. But the wheel has finally turned. Now the big screen caters to kids and action junkies, while drama series offer adults a damn good justification for never leaving the house” (2013, p. 48). Yes, television is changing, and this chapter details that change, from early experiments with mechanical scanning to the electronic marvel that sits in our homes to the mobile video screens we carry in our pockets. We trace the rapid
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transformation of television into a mature medium after World War II and examine how the medium, the entire television industry, in fact, was altered by the emergence and success of cable and satellite television. But significant change is once again remaking what we currently know as television. The changes just mentioned reflect only a small part of the coming transformation. Nonlinear TV—watching television on our own schedules, not on some cable or broadcast programmer’s— is here right now. Even more dramatic evolution is on the horizon. All of us are now TV executives, choosing our programs and our schedules, no longer limited by what Netflix executive Neil Hunt calls the “tyranny of the grid.”
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That means, according to Mr. Hunt, that “linear TV is ripe for replacement.” What will result is the ultimate in the fragmented television audience, an individual channel for every individual . . . and no commercials (in Poggi, 2014).
The remarkable reach of television—in all its forms—accounts for its attractiveness as an advertising medium. We discuss this reach, and we explore the structure, programming, and economics of the television and cable industries. We consider new technologies and their convergence with television and how they promise to change the interaction between the medium and its audiences. Finally, we discuss media literacy in terms of what we expect from our news anchors.
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A Short History of Television Television has changed the way teachers teach, governments govern, religious leaders preach, and the way we organize the furniture in our homes. Television has changed the nature, operation, and relationship to their audiences of books, magazines, movies, and radio. The Internet, with its networking abilities, will eventually overtake television as a medium of mass communication, but television defines even its future. Will the promise of the Web be drowned in a sea of commercials? Can online information services deliver faster and better information than television? Even the computer screens we use look like television screens, and we sign up for Internet video, online video conferencing, and the new and improved online video game. Before we delve deeper into the nature of this powerful medium and its relationship with its audience, let’s examine how television developed as it did.
Mechanical and Electronic Scanning In 1884 Paul Nipkow, a Russian scientist living in Berlin, developed the first workable device for generating electrical signals suitable for the transmission of a scene that people could see. His Nipkow disc consisted of a rotating scanning disc spinning in front of a photoelectric cell. It produced 4,000 pixels (picture dots) per second, producing a picture composed of 18 parallel lines. Although his mechanical system
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proved too limiting, Nipkow demonstrated the possibility of using a scanning system to divide a scene into an orderly pattern of transmit-table picture elements that could be recomposed as a visual image. British inventor John Logie Baird was able to transmit moving images using a mechanical disc as early as 1925, and in 1928 he successfully sent a television picture from London to Hartsdale, New York.
Electronic scanning came either from another Russian or from a U.S. farm boy; historians disagree. Vladimir Zworykin, an immigrant living near Pittsburgh and working for Westinghouse, demonstrated his iconoscope tube, the first practical television camera tube, in 1923. In 1929 David Sarnoff lured him to RCA to head its electronics research lab, and it was
̖ A Nipkow disc. © Bettmann/Corbis
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there that Zworykin developed the kinescope, an improved picture tube. At the same time, young Philo Farnsworth had moved from Idaho to San Francisco to perfect an electronic television system, the design for which he had shown his high school science teacher when he was 15 years old. In 1927, at the age of 20, he made his first public demonstration—film clips of a prize fight, scenes from a Mary Pickford movie, and other graphic images. The “Boy Wonder” and Zworykin’s RCA spent the next decade fighting fierce patent battles in court. In 1939 RCA capitulated, agreeing to pay Farnsworth royalties for the use of his patents.
In April of that year, at the World’s Fair in New York, RCA made the first true public demonstration of television in the form of regularly scheduled two-hour NBC broadcasts. These black-and-white telecasts consisted of cooking demonstrations, singers, jugglers, comedians, puppets—just about anything that could fit in a hot, brightly lit studio and demonstrate motion. People could buy television sets at the RCA Pavilion at prices ranging from $200 for the 5-inch screen to $600 for the deluxe 12-inch-screen model. The FCC granted construction permits to the first two commercial stations in 1941, but World War II intervened. But as was the case with radio during World War I, technical development and improvement of the new medium continued.
The 1950s In 1952, 108 stations were broadcasting to 17 million television homes. By the end of the decade, there were 559 stations, and nearly 90% of U.S. households had televisions. In the 1950s more television sets were sold in the United States (70 million) than there were children born (40.5 million) (Kuralt, 1977). The technical standards were fixed, stations proliferated and flourished, the public tuned in, and advertisers were enthusiastic. The content and character of the medium were set in this decade as well:
Carried over from the radio networks, television genres included variety shows, situation comedies, dramas (including Westerns and cop shows), soap operas, and quiz shows. Two new formats appeared: feature films and talk shows. Talk shows were instrumental in introducing radio personalities to the television audience, which could see its favorites for the first time.
Television news and documentary remade
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Four other events from the 1950s would permanently shape how television operated: the quiz show scandal, the appearance of I Love Lucy, McCarthyism, and the establishment of the ratings system. Another, in 1948, would permanently reshape the television industry. That development, as you’ll soon see, was cable television.
THE QUIZ SHOW SCANDAL AND CHANGES IN SPONSORSHIP Throughout the 1950s the networks served primarily as time brokers, offering airtime and distribution (their
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broadcast journalism as a powerful force in its own right, led by CBS’s Edward R. Murrow (See It Now, 1951) and NBC’s David Brinkley and Chet Huntley. Huntley and Brinkley’s 1956 coverage of the major political conventions gave audiences an early glimpse of the power of television to cover news and history in the making.
AT&T completed its national coaxial cable and microwave relay network for the distribution of television programming in the summer of 1951. The entire United States was now within the reach of the major television networks, and they came to dominate the medium.
̖ Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin, pioneers in the development of television. (left, right): © Bettmann/Corbis
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affiliates) and accepting payment for access to both. Except for their own news and sports coverage, the networks relied on outside agencies to provide programs. An advertising agency, for example, would hire a production company to produce a program for its client. That client would then be the show’s sponsor—The Kraft Television Theatre and Westinghouse Studio One are two examples. The agency would then pay a network to air the program over its national collection of stations. This system had enriched the networks during the heyday of radio, and they saw no reason to change.
But in 1959 the quiz show scandal, enveloping independently produced, single-advertiser- sponsored programs, changed the way the networks did business. When it was discovered that popular shows like The $64,000 Question had been fixed by advertisers and producers to ensure desired outcomes, the networks, mindful of their reputations, were determined to take control of their schedules. They, themselves, began commissioning or buying the entertainment fare that filled their broadcast days and nights. Now, rather than selling blocks of time to ad agencies and sponsors, the networks paid for the content they aired through spot commercia l sales (selling individual 60-second spots on a given program to a wide variety of advertisers).
As a result, the content of television was altered. Some critics argue that this change to spot sales put an end to the golden age of television. When sponsors agreed to attach their names to programs, Alcoa Presents or the Texaco Star Theater, for example, they had an incentive to demand high-quality programming. Spot sales, with network salespeople offering small bits of time to a number of different sponsors, reduced the demand for quality. Because individual sponsors were not identified with a given show, they had no stake in how well it was made— only in how many viewers it attracted. Spot sales also reduced the willingness of the networks to try innovative or different types of content. Familiarity and predictability attracted more viewers and, therefore, more advertisers.
There is a counterargument, however. Once the financial well-being of the networks became dependent on the programming they aired, the networks themselves became more concerned with program quality, lifting television from its dull infancy (remembered now as the golden age only by those small, early audiences committed to serious character-driven televised drama). Different historians and critics offer arguments for both views.
I LOVE LUCY AND MORE CHANGES In 1951 CBS asked Lucille Ball to move her hit radio program, My Favorite Husband, to television. Lucy was willing but wanted her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, to play the part of her video spouse. The network refused (some historians say the network objected to the prime-time presentation of an interracial marriage— Desi Arnaz was Cuban—but CBS denies this). But Lucy made additional demands. Television at the time was live: Images were typically captured by three large television cameras, with a director in a booth choosing among the three available images. Lucy wanted her program produced in the same manner—in front of a live audience with three simultaneously running cameras—but these cameras would be film cameras. Editors could then review the three sets of film and edit them
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together to give the best combination of action and reaction shots. Lucy also wanted the production to take place in Hollywood, the nation’s film capital, instead of New York, the television center at the time. CBS was uncertain about this departure from how television was typically produced and refused these requests as well.
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Lucy and Desi borrowed the necessary money and produced I Love Lucy on their own, selling the broadcast rights to CBS. In doing so, the woman now best remembered as “that zany redhead” transformed the business and look of television:
̖ Running from 1947 until 1958, NBC’s Kraft Television Theatre aired some of the golden age’s most respected live anthology dramas. Top left, Richard Kiley and Everett Sloane; lower left, Ossie Davis; lower right, Walter Matthau and Nancy Walker. (top, bottom left and right): Courtesy Everett Collection
Filmed reruns were now possible, something that had been impossible with live television, and this, in turn, created the off-network syndication industry. The television industry moved from New York, with its stage drama orientation, to Hollywood, with its entertainment film mind-set. More action, more flash came to the screen.
Weekly series could now be produced relatively
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quickly and inexpensively. A 39-week series could be completed in 20 or 24 weeks, saving money on actors, crew, equipment, and facilities. In addition the same stock shots—for example, certain exterior views — could be used in different episodes.
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̖ I Love Lucy was significant for far more than its comedy. Thanks to Lucille Ball’s shrewd business sense, it became the foundation for the huge off-network syndicated television industry.
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MCCARTHYISM: THE GROWING POWER OF TELEVISION The Red Scare that cowed the movie business also touched television, aided by the publication in 1950 of Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, the work of three former FBI agents operating a company called American Business Consultants. Its 200 pages detailed the alleged pro-Communist sympathies of 151 broadcast personalities, including Orson Welles and journalist Howard K. Smith. Advertisers were encouraged to avoid buying time from broadcasters who employed these “Red sympathizers.” Like the movie studios, the television industry caved in. The networks employed security checkers to look into people’s backgrounds, refused to hire suspect talent, and demanded loyalty oaths from performers. In its infancy television had taken the safe path. Many gifted artists were denied not only a paycheck but also the opportunity to shape the medium’s content.
Ironically, it was this same Red Scare that allowed television to demonstrate its enormous power as a vehicle of democracy and freedom. Joseph McCarthy, the Republican junior senator from Wisconsin whose tactics gave this era its name, was seen by millions of viewers as his investigation of Reds in the U.S. Army
© CBS/Photofest
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was broadcast by all the networks for 36 days in 1954. Daytime ratings increased 50% (Sterling & Kittross, 1990). At the same time, Edward R. Murrow used his See It Now to expose the senator’s lies and hypocrisy. As a consequence of the two broadcasts, McCarthy was ruined; he was censured by his Senate colleagues and later died a lonely alcoholic’s death. Television had given the people eyes and ears—and power—where before they had had little. The Army–McCarthy Hearings and Murrow’s challenge to McCarthyism are still regarded as two of television’s finest moments.
THE NIELSEN RATINGS The concept of measuring audience was carried over from radio to television, but the ratings as we know them today are far more sophisticated (see the chapter on
̖ The Army–McCarthy Hearings. Wisconsin’s Republican junior senator, Joseph McCarthy, was called in 1954 to give testimony before his fellow senators regarding his claims that the army was rife with Communists, Reds, and “fellow travelers.” Network coverage of the senator’s erratic behavior helped bring the despot into disrepute. © Everett Collection Historical/ Alamy
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radio, recording, and popular music for more on ratings). The A. C. Nielsen Company began in 1923 as a product-testing company, but soon branched into market research. In 1936 Nielsen started reporting radio ratings and was doing the same for television by 1950.
To produce the ratings today, Nielsen selects 37,000 households thought to be representative of the entire U.S. viewing audience. To record data on what people in those TV households are watching, Nielsen employs the Global Television Audience Metering meter (GTAM met er), which actively (requiring viewer input) and passively (automatically reading digital codes embedded in video content) measures viewing as people, with increasing mobility, consume video on a growing array of technologies. The data are then sent to Nielsen via the Internet, and the company determines the programs watched, who watched them, and the amount of time each viewer spent with them. But the same convergence that required the development of the GTAM meter is upsetting the business of audience measurement in many ways. CBS president Les Moonves calls Nielsen’s overnight ratings “worthless” and feels that even its C3 rating, counting audiences across three screens—TV (original airing plus DVR), Internet, and mobile video, and the expanded C7 rating are “antiquated” (in Maglio, 2015). The “3” and “7” represent the viewing of the commercials that appear in a specific program within three days (or seven) of its premiere telecast in order to capture DVR playback and Internet viewing.
To present a fuller picture of a show’s total audience by accounting for multiplatform and on- demand viewing, many broadcasters are calling for a new rating that measures a program’s 35- day performance. A single episode of Fox’s Empire, for example, draws an audience of 9.9 million when originally aired; four million
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more viewers watch it in the next seven days, and expanding to 35 days— counting DVD, on-demand, and streamed viewing—its total audience is actually 20.4 million. The four major broadcast networks not only believe that a truer measure of their viewership will show the much-discussed falloff in its prime-time audience to be something of a fiction, but that the undercounting of viewers costs them nearly $100 million a year in lost ad revenue (Littleton, 2015). Nielsen has responded with several fixes, such as counting the smartphone and tablet viewing of its sample homes, releasing Twitter data to augment perceptions of programs’ popularity, and mathematically expanding its ratings to include nonmetered homes (Mandese, 2015). Industry response is unenthusiastic. In fact, NBC has begun releasing its own daily digital video viewing audience estimates, and CNBC has dropped Nielsen altogether, signing on with competitor Cogent, which uses Web-based surveys for its audience estimates.
To draw a more complete picture of the viewing situation and to measure local television viewing, Nielsen conducts surveys of viewing patterns four times a year with technology that tracks a show’s audio by “listening” to embedded watermarks in a station’s offerings. These sw eeps periods are in February, May, July, and November and help stations to set their advertising rates for the next three months.
Sweeps may soon be a thing of the past. These quarterly extravaganzas of heavily promoted network programming and titillating local news (High School Binge Drinking? Story and Shocking Video at 6!) are likely to disappear for two reasons. First, the rhythm of broadcast television scheduling is changing because of competition with cable and streaming services. These outlets introduce new shows and big movies throughout the year, rendering such concepts as “The Fall Season” and “Premiere Week” obsolete. Fox has long had year-round premieres, and the other networks have followed suit. CBS’s Survivor and NBC’s Fear Factor both debuted in summer, formerly network television’s programming graveyard. With the basic structure of the programming year disrupted, broadcasters can no longer afford to save their best or biggest programming for sweeps weeks. Second, the GTAM meter delivers detailed viewing and demographic data every day of the year, making the four-times-a-year, data- intensive ratings periods unnecessary.
A second, more important measure of television’s audience is its share, which is a direct reflection of a particular show’s competitive performance. Share doesn’t measure viewers as a percentage of all television households (as do the ratings). Instead, the share measures a program audience as a percentage of the television sets in use at the time it airs. It tells us what proportion of the actual audience a program attracts, indicating how well a particular program is doing on its given night, in its time slot, against its competition (Figure 1). For example, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore normally gets a rating of around 3—terrible by prime-time standards—but because it’s on when fewer homes are tuned in, its share of 11 (11% of the homes with sets in use) is quite respectable.
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The Coming of Cable Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, appliance sales representative John Walson was having trouble selling televisions in 1948. The Pocono Mountains sat between his town and Philadelphia’s three new stations. But Walson was also a powerline worker, so he convinced his bosses to let him run a wire from a tower he erected on New Boston Mountain to his store. As more and more people became aware of his system, he began wiring the homes of customers who bought
̖ Figure 1 Computing Ratings and Shares.
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his sets. In June of that year, Walson had 727 subscribers for his community antenna televi sion (CATV) system (Chin, 1978). Although no one calls it CATV anymore, cable television was born.
The cable Walson used was a twin-lead wire, much like the cord that connects a lamp to an outlet. To attract even more subscribers, he had to offer improved picture quality. He accomplished this by using coaxial cable and self-manufactured boosters (or amplifiers). Coaxial cable—copper-clad aluminum wire encased in plastic foam
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insulation, covered by an aluminum outer conductor, and then sheathed in plastic—had more bandwidth than did twin-lead wire. As a result, it allowed more of the original signal to pass and even permitted Walson to carry a greater number of channels.
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As Walson continued to expand his CATV business, Milton Jerrold Shapp, later to become Pennsylvania’s governor, noticed thousands of antennas cluttering the roofs of department stores and apartment buildings. Seeing Walson’s success, he set up master antennas and connected the sets in these buildings to them, employing a signal booster he had developed. This was the start of master antenna television (MATV).
With expanded bandwidth and the new, powerful Jerrold boosters, these systems began experimenting with the importation of distant signals, using wires not only to provide improved reception but also to offer a wider variety of programming. They began delivering independent stations from as far away as New York to fill their then-amazing 7 to 10 channels. By 1962, 800 systems were providing cable television to more than 850,000 homes.
The industry today is composed of 5,208 individual cable systems delivering video to 54 million households, high-speed Internet to 55 million, and digital telephone to 28 million. The industry generates revenues of over $105 billion, with about a quarter of that amount earned through advertising (NCTA, 2015).
̖ John Walson. © The Barco Library of The Cable Center, Denver, CO
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Television and Its Audiences The 1960s saw some refinement in the technical structure of television, which influenced its organization and audience. In 1962 Congress passed all-channel legislation, which required that all sets imported into or manufactured in the United States be equipped with both VHF and UHF receivers. This had little immediate impact; U.S. viewers were now hooked on the three national networks and their VHF affiliates. Still, UHF independents and educational stations were able to at least attract some semblance of an audience. The UHF independents would have to wait for the coming of cable to give them clout. Now that the educational stations were attracting more viewers, they began to look less educational in the strictest sense of the word and began programming more entertaining cultural fare (see the essay “The Creation o f Sesame Street”). The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 united the educational stations into an important network, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which today has nearly 400 member stations.
The 1960s also witnessed the immense social and political power of the new medium to force profound alterations in the country’s consciousness and behavior. Particularly influential were the Nixon–Kennedy campaign debates of 1960, broadcasts of the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination and funeral in 1963, the 1969 transmission of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, and the use of television at the end of the decade by civil rights and anti–Vietnam War leaders.
The 1960s also gave rise to a descriptive expression often used today when television is discussed. Speaking to the 1961 convention of the National Association of Broadcasters, John F. Kennedy’s new FCC chair, Newton Minow, invited broadcasters to
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sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and loss sheet, or ratings book to distract you, and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.
Whether or not one agrees with Minow’s assessment of television, then or now, there is no doubt that audiences continue to watch:
There are more than 116 million television households in the United States, 97% of all U.S. homes. The average American watches television 37 hours and 50 minutes a week.
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USING MEDIA TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE The Creation of Sesame Street
In 1968 a public affairs program producer for Channel 13 in New York City identified a number of related problems that she believed could be addressed by a well-conceived, well-produced television show.
Joan Ganz Cooney saw that 80% of 3- and 4-year-olds and 25% of 5-year-olds in the United States did not attend any form of preschool. Children from financially disadvantaged homes were far less likely to attend preschool at these ages than their better-off peers. Children in these age groups who did go to preschool received little academic instruction; preschool was the equivalent of organized recess. Large numbers of U.S. children, then, entered first grade with no formal schooling, even though education experts had long argued that preschool years were crucial in children’s intellectual and academic development. In addition, the disparity in academic preparedness between poor and other children was a national disgrace.
What did these children do instead of going to preschool? Cooney knew that they watched television. But she also knew that “existing shows for 3- through 5-year-old children . . . did not have education as a primary goal” (Ball & Bogatz, 1970, p. 2). Her idea was to use an interesting, exciting, visually and aurally stimulating television show as an explicitly educational tool “to promote the intellectual and cultural growth of preschoolers, particularly disadvantaged preschoolers,” and to “teach children how to think as well as what to think” (Cook et al., 1975, p. 7).
Cooney established a nonprofit organization, the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), and sought funding for her program. Several federal agencies, primarily the Office of Education, a number of private foundations including Carnegie and Ford, and public broadcasters contributed $13.7 million for CTW’s first four years.
After much research into producing a quality children’s television show and studying the best instructional methods for teaching preschool audiences, CTW unveiled Sesame Street during the 1969 television season. It was an instant hit with children and parents. The New Republic said, “Judged by the standards of most other programs for preschoolers, it is imaginative, tasteful, and witty” (cited in Ball & Bogatz, 1970, p. 3). Originally scheduled for one hour a day during the school week, within months of its debut Sesame Street was being programmed twice a day on many public television stations, and many ran the entire week’s schedule on Saturdays and Sundays. Today, nearly 45 years after its debut, Sesame Street still airs 26 new episodes a year, and in 2015 it made HBO (with its streaming service) its new home network.
Did Cooney and her show make a difference? Several national studies demonstrated
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that academic performance in early grades was directly and strongly correlated with regular viewing of Sesame Street. The commercial networks began to introduce educational fare into their Saturday morning schedules. ABC’s Grammar Rock, America Rock (on U.S. history), and Multiplication Rock were critical and educational successes at the time, and a traditional children’s favorite, CBS’s Captain Kangaroo, started airing short films influenced by Sesame Street on a wide variety of social and personal skills. The program has been nominated for more than 250 Emmy Awards, winning nearly 110 times. It recently expanded its preschool curriculum to include subjects such as nature, math, science and engineering concepts, and problem solving.
There can be no doubt, either, that television is successful as an advertising medium:
Television reaches more adults each day than any other medium, and those people spend more time with television than with any other medium.
Traditional television is the dominant choice for viewing video for every age group. Twenty-five to 34-year-old adults spend eight times more hours watching video on television than on the Internet, and 55 times as many hours as watching on a smartphone (all data from Television Advertising Bureau, 2015).
Total annual billings for television are around $80 billion, with approximately two-thirds generated by broadcast and one-third by cable television. Together they collected 40% of all U.S. ad spending. The average 30-second prime-time network television spot costs $100,000 (on American Idol ads have gone as high as $705,000; spots on a mid-season Sunday Night Football game cost $627,300; 30 seconds on Modern Family run $239,650).
Prime ad time on the February
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2015 Seahawks–Patriots Super Bowl broadcast cost $4.5 million for 30 seconds. (And 47% of the 114.4 million Americans who watched the game tuned in just for the commercials; Faw, 2015.)
Consumers cite television as their most influential advertising medium. A 30-second local spot can fetch up to $30,000 on a top-rated special in a major market (Television Advertising Bureau, 2015).
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Scope and Nature of the Broadcast Television Industry Today, as it has been from the beginning, the business of broadcast television is dominated by a few centralized production, distribution, and decision-making organizations. These networks link affiliates for the purpose of delivering and selling viewers to advertisers. The large majority of the 1,390 commercial stations in the United States are affiliated with a national broadcasting network: ABC, NBC, and CBS each have over 200 affiliates and Fox has close to that number. Many more stations are affiliated with the CW Network, often referred to as a “weblet.” Although cable has introduced us to dozens of popular cable networks—ESPN, MTV, Comedy Central, and A&E, to name a few—for decades most programs that came to mind when we thought of television were either conceived, approved, funded, produced, or distributed by the broadcast networks. Although, as you read at this chapter’s outset, that’s quickly changing. More on that soon.
Local affiliates carry network programs (they clear time). Until quite recently, affiliates received direct payment for carrying a show, called compensation, and the right to keep all income from the sale of local commercials on that program. But loss of network audience and the rise of cable have altered this arrangement. Now networks receive reverse compensation, a fee paid by the local station for the right to be that network’s affiliate. It is typically based on the amount of money the local cable operation pays to the station to carry its signal, called retransmission fees.
The Networks and Program Content
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Networks control what appears on the vast majority of local television stations, but they also control what appears on non-network television, that is, when affiliates program their own content. In addition, they influence what appears on independent stations and on cable channels. This non-network material not only tends to be network-type programming but most often is programming that originally aired on the networks themselves (called off-network programs).
Why do network and network-type content dominate television? Availability is one factor. There is 75 years’ worth of already successful network content available for airing on local stations. A second factor is that the production and distribution mechanisms that have long served the broadcast networks are well established and serve the newer outlets just as well as they did NBC, CBS, and ABC. The final reason is us, the audience. The formats we are most comfortable with—our television tastes and expectations—have been and continue to be developed on the networks.
How a Program Traditionally Gets on the Air The national broadcast and cable networks look at about 4,000 proposals a year for new television series. Many, if not most, are submitted at the networks’ invitation or instigation. Of the 4,000, about 90 will be filmed as pilots, or trial programs, at a cost of $3 million for a 30- minute pilot to $7 million for an hour drama (the pilot for Lost cost $10 million; Guthrie, 2010). Perhaps 20 to 30 will make it onto the air. Only 12 of these will last a full broadcast season. In a particularly good year, at most three or four
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will succeed well enough to be called hits. The networks spend over $500 million to suffer this process. For this reason, they prefer to see ideas from producers with established track records and financial and organizational stability—for example, Jerry Bruckheimer is the source of CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, The Amazing Race, Cold Case, and Without a Trace in addition to 16 other prime time series aired in recent years.
The way a program typically makes it onto the air differs somewhat for those who have been asked to submit an idea and for producers who bring their concepts to the networks. First, a producer has an idea; or a network has an idea and asks a proven producer to propose a show based on it (possibly offering a put, a deal that guarantees the producer that the network will order at least a pilot or it has to pay a hefty penalty). The producer must then shop the idea to one of the networks; naturally, an invited producer submits the proposal only to the network that asked for it. In either case, if the network is persuaded, it buys the option and asks for a written outline in which the original idea is refined. If still interested, the network will order a full script.
If the network approves that script, it will order the production of a pilot. Pilots are then subjected to rigorous testing by the networks’ own and independent audience research organizations. Based on this research, networks will often demand changes, such as writing out characters who tested poorly or beefing up story lines that test audiences particularly liked.
If the network is still interested, that is, if it believes that the show will be a hit, it orders a set number of episodes and schedules the show. In television’s early days, an order might be for 26 or 39 episodes. Today, however, because of escalating production costs, the convention is at first to order six episodes. If these are successful, a second order of nine more is placed. Then, if the show is still doing well, a final nine episodes (referred to as the back nine) will be commissioned. Few shows make it that far.
The reason television program producers participate in this expensive enterprise is that they can make vast amounts of money in syndication, the sale of their programs to stations on a market-by-market basis. Even though the networks control the process from idea to scheduling and decide how long a show stays in their lineups, producers continue to own the rights to their programs. Once enough episodes are made (generally about 88, which is the product of four years on a network), producers can sell the syndicated package to the highest bidder in each of the 210 U.S. television markets, keeping all the revenues for themselves. This is the legacy of Lucille Ball’s business genius. The price of a syndicated program depends on the market size, the level of competition between the stations in the market, and the age and popularity of the program itself. The station buys the right to a specified number of plays, or airings. After that, the rights return to the producer to be sold again and again. A program that has survived at least four years on one of the networks has proven its popularity, has attracted a following, and has accumulated enough
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individual episodes so that local stations can offer weeks of daily scheduling without too many reruns. In a word, it is a moneymaker. Paramount has already earned more than $2 billion from its syndication of Frasier; Warner Brothers collected more than $5.8 million an episode from its original syndication of Friends and gets $4 million an episode for The Big Bang Theory, although it is still in its network run.
So attractive is syndication’s income potential, especially when coupled with the promise of profits from digital downloads and sales of DVD collections of television shows, that the networks themselves have become their own producers (and therefore syndicators). In fact, the major broadcast networks now produce the vast majority of all the prime-time programming on their own and the top 20 cable networks.
It is important to note that there is another form of syndicated programming. First-run syn dication is programming produced specifically for sale into syndication on a market-by- market basis. It is attractive to producers because they don’t have to run the gauntlet of the network programming process, and they keep 100% of the income.
Satellites have improved the distribution process for first-run syndicated series, increasing the number and variety of available programs. Game and talk shows, staples of the business in the past, have proliferated and been joined by programs such as Judge Judy, a court show distributed daily by satellite to hundreds of stations. They are inexpensive to make, inexpensive to distribute, and easily stripped (broadcast at the same time five evenings a week). They allow an inexhaustible number of episodes with no repeats and are easy to promote (“Watch the case of the peeping landlord. Tune in at 5:30.”).
And despite the fact that the most-watched programs in history were all aired by the traditional television networks (Figure 2), the process by which programs now come to our screens is changing because the central position of networks in that process has been altered. Because they must compete with the streaming services, the networks are no longer the only
̖ Two of syndication’s biggest winners, The Big Bang Theory and Friends. (left) © CBS/Photofest; (right) © NBC/ Courtesy Everett Collection
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game in town for top talent, so they themselves are increasingly offering producers more straight-to-series production deals. In addition, as we saw in the opening vignette, much quality programming gets to us not because a network elected to air it, but because a streaming service asked its subscribers which shows they wanted to watch or simply paid quality artists to come work with them. After rejection by the traditional network and cable channels, for example, the producers of House of Cards approached Netflix who said, “We believe in you. . . . We don’t need you to do a pilot. How many [episodes] do you wanna do?” (Auletta, 2014, p. 58). Of course, all this change is the product of the introduction of new technologies—cable, VCR, DVD, digital video recorders, satellite, the Internet and digitization, and even the remote control— that have upset the long-standing relationship between medium and audience. Convergence is also reshaping that relationship.
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̖ Figure 2 Top 10 Most-Watched Nonsports Television Broadcasts. Source: Television Bureau of Advertising (www.tvb.org).
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Cable and Satellite Television John Walson’s brainchild reshaped the face of modern television. During cable’s infancy, many over-the-air broadcasters saw it as something of a friend. It extended their reach, boosting both audience size and profits. Then, in November 1972, Sterling Manhattan Cable launched a new channel called Home Box Office. Only a handful of homes caught the debut of what we now call HBO, but broadcasters’ mild concern over this development turned to outright antagonism toward cable in 1975, when new HBO owner Time Inc. began distributing
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the movie channel by satellite. Now premium cable was eating into the broadcasters’ audience by offering high-quality, nationally produced and distributed content. The public enthusiastically embraced cable and that, coupled with the widespread diffusion of fiber optic cable (the transmission of signals by light beam over glass, permitting the delivery of hundreds of channels), brought the medium to maturity.
Programming Cable’s share of the prime-time audience exceeded that of the Big Four broadcast networks for the first time in 2002. Its total audience share has exceeded that of ABC,
CBS, NBC, and Fox every year since. What attracts these viewers is programming, a fact highlighted by two pieces of recent industry data: cable shows annually earn the majority of all prime-time Emmy Awards nominations, and cable viewing exceeds network viewing for every single American age demographic. Even home-shopping channels such as QVC (whose annual revenues of over $9 billion exceed those of traditional networks ABC and NBC) have made their mark.
As we’ve seen, cable operators attract viewers through a combination of basic and premium channels, as well as with some programming of local origin. There are more than 900 national and regional cable networks. We all know national networks such as CNN, Lifetime, HBO, and the History Channel. Regional network North-West Cable News serves Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, northern California, and parts of Alaska; New England Cable News serves the states that give it its name; and several regional sports-oriented channels serve different parts of the country. The financial support and targeted audiences for these program providers differ, as does their place on a system’s tiers, groupings of channels made available to subscribers at varying prices.
̖ Satellites like this one made national distribution of HBO possible in 1975. © Jason Reed/Getty Images RF
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BASIC CABLE PROGRAMMING In recognition of the growing dependence of the public on cable delivery of broadcast service as cable penetration increased, Congress passed the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992. This law requires operators to offer a truly basic service composed of the broadcast stations in their area and their access channels. Cable operators also offer another form of basic service, expanded basic cable, composed primarily of local broadcast stations and services with broad appeal such as TBS, TNT, the USA Network, and Comedy Central. These networks offer a wide array of programming not unlike that found on the traditional, over-the-air broadcast networks. Ad- supported cable networks such as these want to be on cable’s basic tiers because sponsors covet those large potential audiences. This is the dispute, for example, at the heart of the NFL Network’s long-running fight with the nation’s cable operators. Most operators want to put the network on a premium tier to attract more subscribers. NFL Network wants placement on basic cable where more viewers means more ad dollars.
Because of concentration, operators are increasingly choosing to carry a specific basic channel because their owners (who have a financial stake in that channel) insist that they do. M ultiple system operators (MSOs) are companies that own several cable franchises. Time Warner, Liberty, and Cablevision own truTV. Comcast has an interest in numerous prime channels. Viacom owns BET. Naturally, these networks are more likely to be carried by systems
̖ Revenues of cable shopping network QVC exceed those of traditional television networks ABC and NBC. © McGraw-Hill Education/Mark Dierker, photographer
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controlled by the MSOs that own them and less likely to be carried by other systems. This pattern also holds true for MSO-owned premium channels such as HBO and Showtime.
The long-standard concept of different pricing for different packages or tiers of channels is currently under attack by the FCC and some members of Congress. Concerns over viewers’ accidental access to unwanted, offensive content and rising cable prices (at twice the rate of inflation)
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are leading to calls for à la carte pricing—that is, paying for cable on a channel-by-channel basis. The industry itself is split on the issue, system operators versus programmers. You can read more about the dispute in the box entitled, “Bundle or À la Carte?”
PREMIUM CABLE As the FCC lifted restrictions on cable’s freedom to import distant signals and to show current movies, HBO grew and was joined by a host of other satellite-delivered pay networks. Today, among the most familiar and popular premium cable networks are HBO, Showtime, the Sundance Channel, and Cinemax.
In addition to freedom from regulatory constraint, two important programming discoveries ensured the success of the new premium channels. After television’s early experiments with over-the-air subscription TV failed, many experts believed people simply would not pay for television. So the first crucial discovery was that viewers would indeed pay for packages of contemporary, premium movies. These movie packages could be sold less expensively than could films bought one at a time, and viewers were willing to be billed on a monthly basis for
̖ MSOs want the NFL Network on a premium tier; the NFL is happy to stay on basic cable. © Joe Robbins/Getty Images
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the whole package rather than pay for each viewing. The second realization boosting the fortunes of the premium networks was the discovery that
viewers not only did not mind repeats (as many did with over-the-air television) but welcomed them as a benefit of paying for the provider’s slate of films. Premium channel owners were delighted. Replaying content reduced their programming costs and solved the problem of how to fill all those hours of operation.
Premium services come in two forms: movie channels (HBO, Starz!, and Encore, for example) that offer packages of new and old movies along with big sports and other special events—all available for one monthly fee—and pay-per-view channels, through which viewers choose from a menu of offerings (almost always of very new movies and very big sporting events) and pay a fee for the chosen viewing.
People enjoy premium channels in the home for their ability to present unedited and uninterrupted movies and other content not usually found on broadcast channels—for example, adult fare and championship boxing and wrestling. Increasingly, however, that “content not usually found on broadcast channels” consists not of movies and sports but high-quality serial programming—content unencumbered by the need to attract the largest possible audience possessing a specific set of demographics. Premium cable series such as Game of Thrones, True Detective, Veep, Homeland, and Girls attract large and loyal followings.
The other dominant multichannel service is direct broadcast satellite (DBS). First available to the public in 1994, it has brought cable’s subscriber growth to a near standstill because from the viewer’s perspective, what is on a DBS-supplied screen differs little from what is on a cable- supplied screen.
DBS in the United States is dominated by two companies, DirecTV and Dish Network. DirecTV has 20.2 million subscribers; Dish Network, 14 million. These two companies, along with Verizon’s fiber optic FiOS-TV and its 5.5 million subscribers, have recently been peeling away subscribers from cable. Look at the list of the 10 largest MSOs in Figure 3. Note that Dish, DirecTV, and Verizon are all among that group. Cable’s ever-increasing monthly rates encourage this move to DBS. But DBS providers, like other MSOs, face the troubling problem of cord-cutting, viewers leaving cable and DBS altogether and relying on Internet-only television viewing. Cable suffered its first annual drop in total subscribers in 2013 and has averaged a yearly loss of two million subscribers over the last half-decade (Tice, 2014). Much of this decline is attributed to what the industry calls over-the-top (OTT) television, delivery of video without the involvement of an MSO, as in “over (avoiding) the set-top box.” Because of OTT, the number of zero-TV homes, those with sets that receive neither over-the-air nor cable/satellite television is growing at a rate of 16% a year (Stenovec, 2015).
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Look at Figure 4. You’ll notice that there were two non-MSO services, Netflix and Hulu, among the country’s top 10 providers of pay television in 2015. One OTT, Netflix, was number one by a very wide margin.
̖ Figure 3 Top 10 MSOs, 2014. Source: Statistica, 2015. (Keep in mind that concentration is just as rampant in cable as in other media industries, so these rankings are sure to change.)
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̖ Figure 4 Top 10 Video Subscription Services, U.S. Subscribers, 2015. Source: Adapted from NCTA, 2015.
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CULTURAL FORUM Bundle or À la Carte?
The debate over how to price a cable subscription has entered the cultural forum because of a perfect storm of concern. Many consumers are upset over rising subscription rates, which are growing at more than 5% a year (Flint,
̖ Viewers and critics agree that much of television’s most sophisticated (and enjoyable) programming is available on premium cable. Unafraid of offending advertisers, cable networks can present challenging, often controversial content. Can you match the title with the image? Veep, True Detective, Girls, Homeland. (clockwise form top left) © Photos 12/Alamy; © AF archive/Alamy; © Showtime Networks/Photofest; © HBO/Photofest
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2014). Some politicians worry about people accidentally seeing material they find offensive, and more than a few MSOs are chafing under big hikes in what they have to pay for the channels they carry. For them, programming costs have escalated between 6% and 10% a year for the last decade, and for popular channels like ESPN, for example, MSOs must pay more than $6 for each of their cable households (Molla, 2014). The solution to meeting these different concerns is to let the market (meaning viewers) decide with à la carte pricing. That way, consumers wouldn’t have to pay for unwatched channels (an average household will watch only 17 of its available 129 channels; “Why Don’t,” 2014); there would be reduced risk of exposure to unwanted content; and MSOs wouldn’t have to pay programming costs for all their subscribing households, just for those deciding to watch a specific channel.
But, argue cable network programmers like Disney and Viacom, our costs have escalated dramatically as well. ESPN spends more than $5 billion a year on programming (up 50% from five years ago); TNT spends $1.1 billion (up 55%); the History Channel spends over $283 million (a 50% rise; James, 2011). Viewers have decided, say the programmers, and this expensive content is what they want. In fact, they argue, à la carte would actually raise consumers’ costs because those expensive popular channels make possible the smaller, niche channels. There might be a lot of people willing to pay $6 for ESPN, but how many viewers would pay
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for C-Span, or a foreign-language channel, or a religious channel, and how much would they be willing to pay? À la carte means the menu gets much, much smaller. And besides, continues the programmers’ position, people are already comfortable with bundles. Newspapers and magazines are bundles—we buy the whole publication, not individual stories. Subscription channels like HBO and Cinemax are bundles— we pay for all their programs, not just the ones we watch (and of course, HBO and Cinemax are themselves already available à la carte from MSOs). Even amusement parks are bundles—one price gets us in and we can ride all, some, or even none of the rides.
Enter your voice, à la carte or bundle? Would you be happier paying for only the channels you watch, or do you find value in having a lot of options, even if you don’t take advantage of them all the time? And what about serendipitous viewing, running across something you might not have thought to watch, but it catches your eye? Isn’t this one of the great gifts of cable? Have you ever become a fan of something you inadvertently saw?
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Trends and Convergence in Television and Cable The long-standing relationship between television and its audiences is being redefined. This profound change, initially wrought by cable and satellite, has been and is being driven by other new technologies as well—VCR, DVD, DVR, the Internet, digitization, and even the smartphone.
VCR Introduced commercially in 1976, videocassette recorders (VCRs) quickly became common in American homes, but they have almost completely disappeared as newer video technologies that give people even more control over viewing choices have emerged. Still, their introduction further eroded the audience for traditional over-the-air television, as people could now watch rented and purchased videos. VCR also allowed time-shifting, taping a show for later viewing, and zipping, fast-forwarding through taped commercials. As a result, people became comfortable with, in fact came to expect, more control over when, what, and how they watched television.
DVD In March 1996 digital video disc (DVD) went on sale in U.S. stores. Using a DVD, viewers can stop images with no loss of fidelity; can subtitle a movie in a number of languages; can search for specific scenes from an on-screen picture menu; and can access information tracks
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that give background on the movie, its production, and its personnel. Scenes and music not used in the theatrical release of a movie are often included on the disc.
Innovations such as these made DVD at the time of its introduction the fastest-growing consumer electronic product of all time. Sales of DVD players exceeded those of VCRs for the first time in September 2001, and DVD players now sit in 80% of U.S. homes. Because of the many viewing options now available, DVD sales and rentals have fallen dramatically for the last several years (Graser, 2014), and in 2012, the number of online movie transactions (sales and rentals) exceeded the number of physical, that is disc, transactions for the first time, 3.4 billion to 2.4 billion (Smith, 2012).
DVR In March 1999 Philips Electronics unveiled the digital video recorder (DVR). It contains digital software that puts a significant amount of control over content in viewers’ hands.
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They can “rewind” and play back portions of a program while they are watching and recording it without losing any of that show. By designating their favorite shows, viewers can instruct DVR to automatically record and deliver not only those programs but all similar content over a specified period of time. This application can even be used with the name of a favorite actor. Type in Adam Sandler, and DVR will automatically record all programming in which he appears.
DVR does not deliver programming the way broadcasters, cablecasters, and DBS systems do. Rather, it is employed in addition to these content providers. All DBS providers and almost every MSO now offer low-cost DVR as part of their technology platform, significantly hastening its diffusion into American homes. Today, about half of all TV households have DVR. Naturally, traditional broadcast and ad-supported cable networks find the rapid diffusion of DVR troubling, and while it is true that DVR is dramatically changing television viewing as we have known it, it has not had as negative an effect on those traditional programming sources as originally anticipated. More than 60% of all U.S. television homes that subscribe to an MSO have a DVR; 55% have more than one (Friedman, 2015). And while DVR does allow viewers to fast-forward through commercials (as many as 73% of the ads in Mad Men and 66% in The Walking Dead; Perlberg, 2014), we saw earlier in this chapter that traditional broadcasters rely on DVR playback to boost their ratings and therefore profits.
Streaming Video Television on the Internet was slow to take off because of copyright and piracy concerns, and because few viewers had sufficient bandwidth, space on the wires bringing content into people’s homes. So for several years the most typical video fare on the Internet was a variety of short specialty transmissions such as movie trailers, short independent films, music videos, and news clips. But the development of increasingly sophisticated video compression software and
̖ Who has time for TV when there’s so much video to watch? HI & LOIS © 2011 by King Features Syndicate, Inc. World rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
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the parallel rise of homes with broadband Internet connections (95% of all U.S. Internet homes have broadband; Burger, 2014) have changed that. Because broadband offers greater information-carrying capacity (that is, it increases bandwidth), watching true television on the Internet is now common. Much of that viewing is of content that originated on network and cable television, but much is also Web-only video (most if the number of streamed videos is the measure).
But as we saw in this chapter’s opening, the distinction between Web-only and broadcast/cable programming is disappearing. Internet video sites Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and YouTube commission original content. YouTube, with only 600,000 unique monthly viewers in 2005, started the online video revolution, but it is no longer alone. We watch 1.57 billion videos a day on that site, but we also watch 1.3 billion every day on Facebook (Walsh, 2014). And there are many other successful, more narrowly targeted Internet video sites. Blip.tv, for example, is a springboard for high-quality original Web series like Fred and iJustine that it eventually distributes across the Web, and Atom.com focuses on comedy. This wealth of Internet video is altering viewing habits, especially among young people. You can see where 16- to 24-year-olds watch video in Figure 5.
Ultimately, the convergence of the Internet and television will be even more seamless as there are several new technologies further discouraging the distinction between
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the two. Slingbox, for example, allows users to “sling” television content to their computers and cell phones. Viewers can buy the device as a stand-alone, and several cable and satellite companies are investigating making it available to their subscribers. Viewers can also sling video in the other direction with devices such as AppleTV and Roku that send Web video to home sets. In addition, using video game consoles and Internet-enabled HDTVs (commonly called Smart TVs), two-thirds of all U.S. homes have direct Web-to-TV connections (Briel, 2014), half of those on Smart TVs (Hoelzel, 2014).
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Interactive Television The Internet is not the only technology that permits interactivity. Cable and satellite also allow viewers to “talk back” to content providers. But it is digital cable television, the delivery of
̖ Figure 5 Where 16- to 24-Year-Olds Watch Video. Source: Ault, 2014. Photo Source: © Andersen Ross/ Getty Images RF
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digital images and other information to subscribers, that offers the truest form of interactive television. There are 55 million digital cable subscribers in the United States (National Cable and Telecommunications Association, 2015).
Cable’s digital channels permit multiplexing, carrying two or more different signals over the same channel. This, in turn, is made possible by digital compression, which “squeezes” signals to permit multiple signals to be carried over one channel. Digital compression works by removing redundant information from the transmission of the signal. For example, the set behind two actors in a movie scene might not change for several minutes. So why transmit the information that the set is there? Simply transmit the digital data that indicate what has changed in the scene, not what has not.
This expanded capacity makes possible interactive cable, that is, the ability of subscribers to talk back to the system operator (extra space on the channel is used for this back talk). And this permits the following services, many of which you already use: video-on-demand (VOD), one-click shopping (you see it, you click on it, you buy it), local information on demand (news, traffic, and weather), program interactivity (choose a camera angle, learn more about an actor’s career, play along with game show contestants), interactive program guides, and video games. But it is video-on-demand—the ability to access pay-per-view movies and other content that can be watched at any time—that best shows the economic advantage of putting more control into viewers’ hands. American television homes annually log 4.4 billion hours of on-demand movies and TV shows via cable (Friedman, 2014).
Phone-over-Cable Another service offered by many MSOs is phone service over cable wires. Currently there are 28 million cable-delivered residential telephone subscribers (National Cable and Telecommunications Association, 2015). Phone-over-cable offers a special benefit to MSOs. If telephone service can be delivered by the same cable that brings television into the home, so too can the
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Internet. And what’s more, if the cable line is broadband capable of handling digitally compressed data, that Internet service can be even faster than the service provided over traditional phone lines. Cable, in other words, can become a one-stop communications provider: television, VOD, audio, high-speed Internet access, long-distance and local phone service, multiple phone lines, and fax. This is bundling.
How valuable is a bundle-receiving subscriber to an MSO? Add together the bills you’re probably paying right now—basic or premium cable, your Internet service provider, and your phone bill. What does that total? Now speculate on how much pay-per-view and VOD you might buy now that you have broadband and a superfast cable modem. And what would you pay for home delivery of real-time sports or financial data? And the MSO would collect each time you accessed an interactive classified or commercial ad. That’s how valuable a bundled subscriber will be.
Smartphones, Tablets, and TV Everywhere As Figure 5 should make amply clear, smartphones and tablets, just as they have for other media, have made television watching an anywhere, anytime activity. But so have two other developments. The first is the popularity of handheld gaming devices like Nintendo’s DSi and Sony’s PlayStation Portable and Vita, all of which can stream video and play video discs or cartridges (see the chapter on video games). The second is the TV Everywhere Initiative, content providers’ ongoing efforts to make digital on-demand programming available to all mobile devices. Slowed by concerns over pricing, advertising models, audience measurement, and release-of-content strategies, its participants include MSOs like Comcast, Dish, and Verizon and broadcast networks like Fox and CBS. In addition, 900 over-the-air commercial and public broadcasters, through the Open Mobile Video Coalition, are working to bring their signals to TV Everywhere. Their goal is to make themselves OTT providers, allowing people to view their programming on mobile devices, eventually without a cable subscription. For example, NBC, Fox, and ABC stations stream their shows to cable subscribers in the cities where they operate; and NBC O&Os stream content to taxis, gas stations, and bus and train stations.
This mobile viewing activity promises to alter the television/viewer relationship in a way other than mobility. Time with mobile devices is slowly replacing time with the television set. Already, mobile device users spend more time with those devices than in front of a television screen—177 minutes a day versus 168 (Marvin, 2014). And when they are in front of a set, 86% of smartphone owners use their devices as second screens, searching for information on characters, storylines, and performers, texting about what they’re watching, and Tweeting— nearly a billion Tweets about TV a year (Nielsen, 2014).
DEVELOPING MEDIA LITERACY SKILLS
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Developing Heightened Expectation of News Anchors The end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015 saw four of the country’s most prominent news anchors not only make news themselves, but force media-literate television viewers to reassess exactly what it is they expect from these very visible media personalities.
Not everyone might have considered Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart news anchors, but numerous surveys conducted over time demonstrate that people who got their news primarily from the satirical news shows were better informed about current events and political issues than those who watched traditional news programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. And while Stewart insists he’s not a newsman (see Moyers, 2007), polls consistently identify Stewart and Colbert
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as among the country’s most trusted journalists (Meyers, 2015; Linkins, 2009). Colbert and Stewart were in the news because both announced their retirement from fake TV journalism, Colbert leaving The Colbert Report in December 2014 and Stewart leaving The Daily Show in August 2015. Reaction was immediate and deeply felt (Itzkoff, 2015). Even HBO, a more established network than Comedy Central, features John Oliver’s satirical news show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which also brings a mixed perspective of humor and outrage to serious news events.
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Two other “most trusted” television news anchors made news that February for a different reason. NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was accused of and then admitted to exaggerating the level of danger he encountered while flying in a fleet of helicopters under rocket attack in the Iraq War. His network suspended him for six months. About the same time, Fox News Network’s Bill O’Reilly of The O’Reilly Factor was accused of exaggerating or flat out falsifying a number of reports he’d made on television and in print about his involvement in covering the 1980 murder of Catholic nuns in El Salvador, the 1982 Falklands War, the 1984 Belfast Bombings, the 1992 L.A. Riots, and his coverage in 1997 of the Kennedy assassination investigation. The network supported its anchor and his denials, and his viewership increased (Flood, 2015). News may be journalism, but television news is also a television show, and as such it must attract viewers. Television newspeople have an obligation to truthfully and accurately inform the public, but they also have an obligation to attract a large number of people so their station or network can be profitable.
Stewart, Colbert, and Oliver have no obligation to uphold journalistic standards; their job is to entertain, but in doing so they nonetheless manage to generate trust and inform. Williams and O’Reilly are “real” journalists and must uphold standards of truthfulness and accuracy, but they must also entertain; they must draw viewers, and their experiences covering the news are central to their on-air personalities, which helps draw those viewers. This raises a number of questions for media-literate television news viewers. What is it about satirical news anchors Stewart, Colbert, and Oliver that makes them effective reporters of the news? What do we expect of them? Must our reward for the hard work of keeping up with current events be entertainment? Why was Williams cut loose by his network and O’Reilly defended by his? Is it that there are different expectations for different anchors? For different news organizations, for
̖ What are your expectations of news anchors, even satirical anchors like John Oliver? © Jesse Dittmar/The Washington Post/Getty Images
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example “objective” broadcast network (NBC) versus “politically partisan” cable channel (Fox)? Should there be?
The answers to these questions are not easy or necessarily straightforward. But with the growing mistrust of the traditional media, might we simply be getting the media we deserve? If, as money-making entities, news programs and their anchors simply give us what we want, that is, meet our expectations, aren’t we the authors of our own decline in trust? For decades, studies have shown that a majority of the American public turns to television as the source of most of its news and that viewers rank it as the most believable news source. But this is no longer the case. In 2015 search engines like Google surpassed “traditional media” as people’s most trusted news source (Ries, 2015). True, “traditional media” is not necessarily television news alone, but because that medium was the most trusted for so long, there’s no doubt that loss of trust in it has contributed greatly to this state of affairs. How do you, as a media-literate person, explain why this has happened? Where do you get most of your news, and what are your expectations of the professionals who provide it?
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