Television Broadcasters have forgotten who really pays the bills.
It has become increasingly evident in recent history that television content providers, no longer give a damn about the end viewer. Whether it is the lack of interest in keeping a viewer up to date on shows, keeping a viewer watching, or an over all disinterest in making it easy on the viewer. It is clear that they just care about over all ratings of a show so that they can get the highest possible revenue on commercial sales.
If we take a quick look at comments on any major television website, we see an increased dislike for their broadcasting habits. Some believe that the push to digital cable over free over-the-air broadcasting was a behind the scenes effort by cable providers to force people in rural areas to buy cable service. I’m not saying that this is entirely true, but it is evident that some people have been forced to make the switch. Other users have started an impromptu call to arms, urging us to swear off TV all together. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m not willing to give up on TV just yet.
Cable providers have forgotten that they need to keep their customers happy in order to get those advertisement sales. I would say that they need a better customer service system, but it wouldn’t do any good they have shown that as soon as they have our money they stop caring about what we think or want. Cable customers have started using DVRs in order to reclaim their nights and weekends and what do the cable companies do, start airing episodes late so that you miss the very end of your show. It is as if they want to punish the very people that they need to stay in business because they don’t watch live. Then they take shows that have decent, but not great ratings, and move them to another day and time slot that will kill the show. I am beginning to think that they are more interested in shilling out new shows based on trending topics to get quick ratings, rather than nurturing a quality program and seeing it through to syndication. They rely to much on skewed statistics and over hyped series premiers to sell ad space. Take “The Unit” for example, canceled before it’s fifth season and is still one of the highest ranked shows of all time, yet it was pulled because it was “too expensive” to make. Which is a nice way of saying CBS was tired of paying FOX for the show.
Not only do we have companies canceling shows before or even during their prime, teaching the viewer that we shouldn’t get to involved with a show, but we have them making it next to impossible to catch up after a missed episode. They air re-runs during the day when most of us are at work, or in the 11pm-2am time slot cutting into our sleep, again beating us into submission for not watching a show on it’s original air date. Well, “Wait, what about watching it on Hulu or on the actual show’s website?” Like you, I was really excited when I found out about Hulu because you could catch up on shows that you had missed for free! Due to new constraints you can no longer catch a show online that you missed the previous week. Hulu and direct network sites no longer provide the previous weeks’ episode prior to the new episode airing. So even if we had every intention of watching an episode on it’s air date but couldn’t because of work or family business, we have no recourse but again to not care about the show because there is no way to keep up to date.
Hang on, did I say Hulu for FREE? Thats right folks Hulu and other online TV outlets will start charging for their service starting sometime next year. Yet another great idea modeled by greed. I understand that they have to make a living and even some profit but it’s not like Hulu isn’t earning a fair price on their service already. If they weren’t they wouldn’t still be here. It’s like the capital gains tax, they want to make money on content that has already been paid for. I have a prediction: if they do start charging, and don’t start getting the most recent episode, Hulu use goes into the toilet, while Netflix use goes up.
“Chuck“, another of my favorite shows will be back this January, instead of it’s original March slate, because “Trauma”, a very new show doesn’t meet expected ratings next to “Heroes” which is in it’s fourth season. Its like a child’s card battle game, the Television is the battle field the shows are the warriors, and we are the pawns (read:: wallets) shelling out for the abuse. “Dollhouse“, the new Joss Whedon cult favorite, was first canceled after it’s 1st season, then because of viewer out cry was picked up for a second season at a different time slot: Thursday. While we were happy about the new season we all cringed at the time slot. Then we hear that “Dollhouse” will be pushed for fall sweeps, and that was the end for the show. “Dollhouse” has officially been canceled, at least Joss and crew had time to rap some things up, unlike “Firefly“. This is yet another example of how studios play with our emotions, keeping us in a constant tug of war with our calender and what we choose to spend our time on.
The Bottom line is: Cable companies, studios and advertisers are all to blame for this trend. The more they fuck with us the more viewers they will lose to other entertainment outlets. This will in turn cause price hikes for the more loyal, making more customers sign off. If you haven’t caught on yet, this is continuing a lose-lose cycle which will give us more bad reality TV and a lack of well written lasting shows, which will cause yet another down trend in viewing. Advertisers will pull their money for new shows. Netflix, or some similar service, will likely become the preferred viewing medium. People will likely lose interest in watching the new episode on original air date and instead opt for waiting until an entire season comes out on DVD and watch it at their leisure. Perhaps even cutting the cord completely.
Personally, I would like a more on demand type tier from my cable provider so I can choose what I want to watch when I want to watch it. Or if that won’t do, how about an a la carte (pick channels) tier. What I will say is that we need to place some serious pressure, on cable content providers to give us what we want at a reasonable price, not what they want to give us at the price they want. This could be said of the studios as well. Television was meant to be an escape from reality. We should stop buying into the Reality TV craze and again focus on good story writing as something worth spending our valuable time on.
-Rob Couch
December 3rd, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Er, TV is still available over-the-air, there was no “push to digital cable” there was a push to a digital SIGNAL.
Cable has stayed virtually the same on a technical level; my local cable company simply OFFERS digital, and some channels require it, but for the local channels you can either upgrade to HD or just keep a regular package and they’ll actually revert the signal back to analog for you.
Which, to me, seems like should be the option that costs since it seems like that more trouble than just piping the full HD through, but maybe not. The standalone HD box I have from when I lived in a more urban area actually does this locally when routed through a basic coax. cable, so why they convert it before piping it I find confusing.
But anyway, the HD signal is lighter and of higher quality, which does come with the catch that it doesn’t travel as far as leaving some people in the lurch. But in the long haul, it will actually be cheaper to transmit; we’re just going through the growing pains right now of adjusting to the new system (though, I honestly DO think they made the switch too soon).
I’m in a said “rural area” and could only ever get one channel via bunny ears prior to the switch anyway (and still oddly can actually get the new HD version of that same channel, though, I’m never home when anything good is on, so I yanked the thing out altogether to make room for game consoles). The U.S. government even gave out vouchers for people to upgrade their equipment.
As for the rest, I pretty much agree. I had cable for a short period of time and discovered that for every three shows I liked there were 10,000 piles of crap. And when I DVR’d the shows I actually wanted to watch, the beginnings or ends were chopped off (I remember this fancy piece of tech called a VCR where you could set the rec. time to 5 min. before and after; wonder what happened to that).
Finally, it came to the point (translation: my trial discount was over) where it cost less to just buy DVD’s of the shows I liked every so often. Sure, I don’t get the excitement of watching stuff as it airs, but so what.
Between DVD, Hulu (for now), Netflix, and, um, “other downloads”, I’ve given up on having cable and/or broadcast TV, but no on watching shows. And really, since I get to watch stuff on my timeline by my terms, I’m okay with that.
As for the marketing stuff, bottom line, TV execs have always been greedy bastards, there’s just more of them now that ever.
Although, I’m still miffed about what they did to Firefly.