Archive - Imperfect Now

Give Me My MTV, For a Price

The FCC has been dolling out fines like promotional candy to radio and television stations ever since Janet Jackson’s the wardrobe malfunction. Next year, long time radio personality Howard Stern will make a broadcast history when his radio show moves from the traditional airwaves to subscription based satellite radio.

Stern and the FCC have been going at it for years. Radio stations afraid the shock jock’s vulgarities will incur heavy fines have dropped him, even as his ratings remain high. Stern’s show, when it moves to satellite radio, will be entirely free to be explicit, vulgar and indecent. Stern has cited this freedom as the primary reason for his move.

The Soprano’s, the cult hit turned mass market produced and aired on HBO will also be in its final season next year. The mafia based show depicts nudity, sex, and cursing. And last year, HBO’s Deadwood pushed the envelope with more “Fucks” and “Cunts” in one episode than many movie studios have in their entire film library.

While at the same time American’s appetite for vulgarity seems insatiable, traditional network television, which cannot broadcast anything remotely vulgar, nudity, or the seven deadly words, is losing viewers.

Expanded cable offerings have lured viewers away in recent years as hundreds of channels became common place. Also in the last decade, satellite television receiver dishes shrank in size and in cost, bringing multiple channel options to many areas without land based cable. Network staples like the nightly news have been marginalized by twenty-four hour cable news networks. Cable channels also have provided for niche markets that broad based network television does not appeal to.

Meanwhile, recording devices such as TiVo are undercutting advertising revenue as commercials are cut out of show recordings. Television networks are concerned enough that last year, a commercial free variety show was put together including only in show advertisements: skipping the commercials meant skipping the show.

The sale of television programs on DVD has also become a major source of revenue. Dedicated fans of programs flock to stores to buy entire seasons of the show at once. The once cancelled “Family Guy”, an animated comedy, was even resurrected after very strong DVD sales changed the minds of studio executives.

Television fans have proven their willingness to pay for programing by purchasing DVD’s of television shows that otherwise air for free, and by the overwhelming success of HBO’s original programming.

So bring on the subscription channel television.

Consumers have a limited number of hours in their day. American workers are working longer hours now then they were just a few years ago. The internet is also stealing people away from their TV sets, especially among younger audiences. And while now viewers have hundreds of channels, most only watch a few of those.

Instead, programming developers should move to entirely subscription based solution such as HBO or Showtime already implement.

Programs would not longer need commercials to augment their production costs, meaning viewers with digital recorders would not be undercutting the bottom line. DVD sales or video on demand sales would further contribute to the production costs.

At the same time, viewers would only subscribe to television stations that they watched or were interested in. Good programming and bad programming would more easily be winnowed away because stations without enough subscribers would disappear as consumers refused to pay the subscription fees. Subscription purchases and cancellations could be used to determine immediately how many people are actually watching since most people would not pay for a channel they never viewed.

The biggest advantage of moving to a pay per channel would be the lifting of limitations by the FCC. The violence, sex, and vulgarities that audiences crave would be freely available since pay per channel subscriptions are not regulated as strictly.

At the same time, many consumers may reject the business concept. “More is Better” is the mantra of America. Why have five programming channels that you actually watch when you could brag that you have over three hundred?

Television must do something to address the changing culture. Television is being marginalized by other media, mainly the internet, but also video game consoles and DVDs. TiVo and other video recorders will soon decimate advertising revenue and attempts to prevent video recorder users from skipping commercials will likely only infuriate an already disgruntled audience.

One thing is certain: television as we know it will change.