TV priorities

[miriam_e]

Ever wonder why TV stations show so much cheap crap, cut good shows to ribbons to fit more, and screw around with the screening times and dates?

This is why:

A friend told me about the time he and a lot of people from a science fiction club took a petition to channel 9 to protest about their appalling treatment of science fiction shows. The security guard refused to let them pass, so my friend went to a phone and rang someone in charge to let them know the security guard wouldn't let them in to deliver important viewer feedback to the station. The executive was not impressed. His reply was curt. "Look, we have enough problems running a TV station without worrying about what the viewers want" and hung up.

People often joke about TV stations not caring about their viewers. Well, guess what... it's actually true.

Comments

[thorfinn]

Free to air TV makes its money from advertisers. So, they're the primary target for a TV station execs time. Advertisers pay based on some sort of magical ratings numbers that relates to the size of the viewing audience. So, exactly, they don't care about viewers, other than how many they can get at a particular time. And a bunch of random people knocking on the door? Nice, but unless there's a million of them, the TV exec's not going to care, and neither are the advertisers.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean, and that is exactly how the TV execs think of it, but it is wrong. Viewers are, after all, the primary reason for a TV station to exist. No viewers means no station. TV stations do exist without advertisers, even some commercial ones exist without advertisers (e.g. cable TV). But because the type of person who runs a TV station these days worships money as god, the advertisers become the most important concern. Money can distort things that way.

I believe they are gradually putting themselves out of business. It won't be noticeable for a little while yet. It will appear to happen suddenly, but I think it has already begun.

It is a bit like the passenger pigeon. It was an incredibly plentiful bird. Flocks of them numbered in their millions. They darkened the sky when they flew over. If anybody warned that people were going to render them extinct people would have laughed. But they no longer live. We did kill them off.

The TV stations don't care about their viewers. The idea that they will lose all their audience seems absurd to them, but watch over the next decade or two. It will happen... mark my words. They are building up a great store of antipathy in their viewers. When the next technology comes along everybody will switch to that in the space of just a year or two and the gigantic TV networks will become unimportant quite suddenly.

What technology could possibly do that?
Why, distribution over the net of course. It has already begun in a small way. Expect to see it hot up in the next few years. First mpeg compression opened up the way. More recently DivX compression made it leap forward. Next, watch what happens when machinima hits full stride.