Do you feel their pain, yet?
So the local TV station wants to be saved. Is that in the religious sort of saved, or the swimmer in dangerous water sort of saved, or the instant balm of money from me sort of saved? I thought so.
Here’s the deal. Local TV stations, back in the early days, received dedicated frequencies to “serve the locals”. In return, the station was free to rake in as much profit as the market would bear. No holds barred. You want the advertising dollars, then you offer something the consumer wants. Capitalism in the regular way. As the cost of production rose, those same stations formed networks, to guarantee a return on investment. Still with dedicated channels and protected territories.
Along comes the spider, spinning a web of coaxial cable. Wires to any home that would pay a little extra per month, and in return, the weak point of the television distribution model (the antenna that tended to twist in the wind) would be obsolete. Some believed; others continued to point the rabbit ears and watch a local snowstorm of activity. The advertisers still paid for our eyes, and all was well. Then, the cable networks discovered that a little production went a long way, and the consumer would pay for those extra, special channels. Fractioned audiences, the bain of the demographics spindoctors.
Now, the local TV stations are crying foul. How dare those spiders with their webs (we’re not going to touch the Internet, at this point in the story) use free content to prop up their fractitious business model. Remember, the rabbit ears still work, and the eyes are still out there, but business models require “more, more, more” (thanks to the Andrea True Connection for that). For a biased example of the latest pain felt by local TV, I suggest Save Local TV from the folks over at CTV. And for the record, I don’t believe them, not for a Maritime Minute.
