From we cable cutters to you, please stop screwing us over.
It’s just unnecessary! By holding your content hostage all you do is reduce your potential viewership and your chances for advertising tie-ins, merchandise sales, and other advertising.
TV, for the longest time, has been a tightly controlled environment. In the decades before cable, TV was controlled by the big 3: CBS, NBC, ABC. With the advent of cable new sorts of channels popped up but it was still controlled through a box from the cable company. The revenue was controlled and easily created through advertising based on Nielsen statistics of viewership and share. I get that TV is still wedded to that system but it need not stay that way.
The reality is that cord cutting is not going away. People are moving away from cable and towards viewing things on any device, anywhere, and at any time online. The popularity of binge-watching is also not going away. The way in which people are consuming content is changing and trying to force people to watch content in a certain place to protect revenue is not a good long term bet. People just won’t watch your content or at best pirate it and watch it anyway. The practice of holding content for 6 months before putting it on Netflix or Hulu is simply infuriating. Still worse is the fact that many channels’ content isn’t available anywhere online without a cable subscription. Often, the current season of shows isn’t available either. This is not productive. What is even worse is that while we in America complain about content delays, many people overseas can’t ever see the shows because they don’t appear on a service they have access to.
Content companies are still trying to figure out the monetization models for streaming and I understand that but it’s time to face some facts. People aren’t leaving their
TVs on as background anymore. People are not interested in channels as much as they are interested in shows themselves. I do not care as much about ABC as a network as I do the programming on their network that I watch like Elementary, Agents of Shield, and General Hospital. The same holds for AMC (
Better Call Saul) or CBS (Madam Secretary).
TV networks need to think less about lineups and channels and more about content and programming. In other words: learn fluent Netflix. Netflix has delighted and amazed with programming and wooed people onto their service to watch it. Hulu is in the same boat and is launching more independent programming. Amazon is
coming in from behind with the same idea. It’s not about the channel, it’s about the program involved. Back in the 1990s we talked about appointment television. All content is now appointment television.
So please, do us all a favor and set your content free!
Let us watch it
online the same day as soon as it airs on any device at any time. Delight with exciting programming, sell ads and memberships around it but don’t hide it behind unnecessary requirements and walls. As the music industry learned, you can’t save an old business forever. The best content happening right now is in TV and it deserves to be set free. What is even more exciting is that there are more
ways to make money off of content than ever before. Between
product placement and merchandise the TV business is in a very exciting place. Not everything lives and dies by advertising. It is far better to get other services paying directly and customers paying directly rather than trying to force meaningless content down the viewers throats. I would much rather have “Elementary brought to you by Ford” than sit through 4 minutes of ads that may be for products I don’t care about or already have opinions about.
Broadcast and cable are on their way out, lead the charge and let us watch what we want when we want it and charge a small amount of money for the privilege. It is really that simple.
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