Future of OTA TV and the Big Three (or four) Networks?

[beantownradio25]

Is OTA TV becoming obsolete? How does the future of the Big Three (or four) networks look?

 

[landtuna]

If they persist in putting mindless crap on the air, pre-empting, changing air times constantly or re-airing old episodes they will be virtually ignored within a decade.

They are making themselves irrelevant.

Similar to music radio (and the music industry at large)....as their technology gets better and better their content gets worse and worse.

 

[stationless listener]

Well, as long as they continue to think that they have to have sports programming on network TV, not to mention other big events like the Oscars, then the pre-empting with continue. However, as sports slowly migrate to cable channels exclusively that may no longer be a problem. Still, the network model needs a thorough check-up. What would help turn things around. More episodes? Less commercials? More access for independent producers? These possibilities would have to be entertained. Also, do they replace the Nielson rating service, which I think has fallen behind the times?

These days, I can't find myself investing emotionally in a new TV show because of the high "fail" rate. Until any show has established a footing, I won't start checking it out. I didn't see the first season of Legend of the Seeker when it started out. But by the second season I got into it and then caught up to the older episodes. Now, there's a chance that it won't see a third season. That's just life.

 

[KentBrockman]

I think the future of the broadcast networks seems okay at best. They really need to slim down and adopt a smaller programming budget to fit into today's 500 channel world. The REAL losers in the next 10-15 years will be their local affiliated stations and their 60+ year old business model. I think that the nets will eventually abandon their affiliate agreements come renewal time and negotiate directly with cable & satellite companies instead. I really have a feeling that the Comcast/NBC deal is going to break new ground on the way NBC delivers it's programs to the viewer over the next decade or two.

 

[Markxxx]

Until broadband (and I mean at least 3.0mb download) becomes cheap enough for everyone to get (or available to everyone), OTA TV is safe.

I lost TV when we went digital. I can't get OTA signals, but I do fine with downloading any show I want to see and watching it like that.

TV has figure out something has to be #1. If it is reality or comedy, it doesn't matter, whatever is #1 will pull in the top ad rates.

There is no incentive to produce quality shows. In the old days you had limits on commercials and such which drove companies into that need. Now you don't have that.

Another part is the emergence of venture capital companies. And this isn't only in TV it's now everywhere. Sure we have companies like Hilton which are hoteliers and some TV companies, but most are now run by people that want to make money.

This isn't a rap by any means, but what it means is you don't have a William S Paley who was as concerned by image as he was by profit.

 

[KeithE4]

Until broadband (and I mean at least 3.0mb download) becomes cheap enough for everyone to get (or available to everyone), OTA TV is safe.

That'll happen within the next 5-10 years. But high-speed internet is already available in all major markets. Rural areas don't add much of an audience (Markets 101-210 add up to a total of about 15% of the population), and are of little-to-no interest to national advertisers.

I lost TV when we went digital. I can't get OTA signals, but I do fine with downloading any show I want to see and watching it like that.

That's the future. In fact, it's the present. There was a slogan used by video rental houses in the '80s: "Watch what you want to watch, when you want to watch it." It's even more true today. CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox can't dictate when you watch something anymore. They can air shows at certain times, but thanks to TiVo, small PCs with the right software, and good old-fashioned VHS (with a converter or cable box), we've been able to time-shift for 35 years. That cat left the bag before many of you were born.

TV has figure out something has to be #1. If it is reality or comedy, it doesn't matter, whatever is #1 will pull in the top ad rates.

No it won't. Broadcast television has the same problem AM radio has: It's all but irrelevant to folks younger than 50. With a very few exceptions (Depends, Viagra), advertisers don't target folks older than 50.

Young people have better things to do in life than watch TV. That was the case in my youth, 30-35 years ago, as well. And now, the younger demos have cable, satellite, and/or internet. Younger people will watch more TV when they start families, but they grew up with cable/satellite, not antenna.

Some sources say that people are starting to turn off their cable or dish. That may be true, but for how long, and what will replace it? I was one of those folks a few months ago. I use an antenna for local news. Everything else is over the internet. The cable could very easily be the "Cable Company's" secondary service after internet in the not-too-distant future. Once football season begins, I will be reconnecting. If you're a sports fan, cable/satellite is mandatory. Internet-TV packages are still very expensive. and your local teams are blacked out.

There is no incentive to produce quality shows. In the old days you had limits on commercials and such which drove companies into that need. Now you don't have that.

Another part is the emergence of venture capital companies. And this isn't only in TV it's now everywhere. Sure we have companies like Hilton which are hoteliers and some TV companies, but most are now run by people that want to make money.

Institutional investors exist to make money for their investors - 401Ks, pension funds, mutual funds, etc. Those are, in turn, owned by us. Since they, collectively, own most of the stock in publicly held companies, they have the right to direct the profits their own way. Owners get to do that.

This isn't a rap by any means, but what it means is you don't have a William S Paley who was as concerned by image as he was by profit.

If Paley was running CBS today...well, he wouldn't be running CBS today the way he ran it decades ago. The aforementioned institutional owners would have fired him for fiscal incompetence long ago. A CEO and board of directors first duty is to the owners of the company, not the public, or even the paying customers (in this case, the advertisers).

 

[mescutia]

I have a prediction that the first OTA stations to go dark won't be the affiliates of the major networks or the major independent stations, but rather the smaller stations that just can't compete anymore as the second- and lower-tier networks either move to cable or fold.

A side effect is that the FCC will get spectrum back for use in wireless communications, just not quite the way it intended.

 

[Nate Wesley]

Network TV (a la CBS, Fox, not mini-netlets like ThisTV) is still a great place for event programming like sports, news coverage, documentaries, or live reality shows like American Idol or Dancing With the Stars.

 

[FreddyE1977]

Can't speak for the entire country. Where I live OTA makes up a tiny percentage of viewership. (of course, Pennsylvania was the birthplace
of cable, precisely because our terrain made OTA viewing unreliable). One thing that you can say in OTA's favor is that it's FREE...and it is hard to compete with FREE. (although I feel it lost a lot with the transition to digital, because that made it not easily portable)

I suspect OTA will be with us for some time in order to offer the largest possible viewership to major events like the Super Bowl, NCAA Championship, Rose Bowl Parade, etc. I suspect network news divisions will whither away, the returns increasingly not justifying the expense.
And network lineups will begin to resemble more that of basic cable networks like USA or TBS (lots of reruns, reality shows, and cheaper to produce series). I think the days of networks plowing lots of money into big-budget productions are over. I think within a few years they will be streaming their entire lineup on the web, which will not make local affiliates happy. But then, they won't have any choice in the matter. This will also make it hard for them to demand carriage fees from local stations, who may be just as happy to shop their business to TBS, Ion, or anyone else willing to let them broadcast their video webstreams. Local stations will increasingly make this up on local news, which will become increasingly important as daily newspapers shut down and fade into history. And filling in the gaps....Infomercials, Infomercials....and MORE Infomercials. And an increasing amount of the spectrum being filled with Spanish and other foreign language broadcasts, being aimed at new arrivals who aren't yet prepared for cable bills.

 

[vchimpanzee]

Until broadband (and I mean at least 3.0mb download) becomes cheap enough for everyone to get (or available to everyone), OTA TV is safe.

And part of the way to do that will spell the end of broadcast TV as we know it, if you look at certain topics here.

 

[mjlarochelle]

I believe that the major cable providers that also provide Internet service, such as Comcast and Time Warner, will shift their focus on the Internet business. These companies will still be delivering content, but it will be through an IP address more and more. I believe there will come a point cable TV will be delivered through the Internet infrastructure.

As for OTA TV, there are going to be stations shutting down sooner or later. There have already been two shut down in the past year in Canada, and I read on this board that a PBS station in Texas is shutting down this year. I think we will see a scaling back of the number of stations - small markets may end up going down to one or two stations with multiple subchannels delivering all the major networks, and larger markets may end up going down to 4-5 stations. I just can't see an elimination of OTA anytime soon - OTA's strength is local programming, and I see OTA's future in local programming, long after major network shows have migrated to another medium of delivery.

 

[mescutia]

As for OTA TV, there are going to be stations shutting down sooner or later. There have already been two shut down in the past year in Canada, and I read on this board that a PBS station in Texas is shutting down this year. I think we will see a scaling back of the number of stations - small markets may end up going down to one or two stations with multiple subchannels delivering all the major networks, and larger markets may end up going down to 4-5 stations.

That's a better wording of what I was trying to say. Basically, it'll be survival of the fittest, with some interesting side effects [such as Ion giving up on being an OTA network and two or more third-tier stations merging into larger single stations].

 

[Carmine5]

The wild card for OTA television is mobile DTV. Early indicators show that there is a good deal of consumer interest in this technology--if the content is free. What content do consumers most want to see on mobile DTV? Local news. So I think if there is going to be any long term future for OTA television (and I hope there is, after all I work in it) then it will be with handheld devices. 3-DTV, on the other hand, is a distraction and very few broadcasters are putting much stock in its future.

But as was mentioned earlier broadcast television's major strength is being local and it is something I hope stations never lose sight of even as they gear up for mobile DTV.

c5

 

[captex]

tv and cable won't last much longer. with the 4 networks owning half of the cable channels and putting on the same type of lame programs on them. i don't watch to much cable tv anymore. except the local news and leave the tv set on the local weather loop channel. not go on the internet to much also (at home). exercising , reading and other things are important to do.

 

[imhomerjay]

One person's viewing habits don't necesarrily reflect what the vast majority of people are doing. Check the numbers--people watch more TV now than ever before (the number has generally been a straigh upward slope for eons).

 

[KeithE4]

One person's viewing habits don't necesarrily reflect what the vast majority of people are doing. Check the numbers--people watch more TV now than ever before (the number has generally been a straigh upward slope for eons).

Depends on how you define "TV." When I watch baseball on the 32" 720P flat-screen "TV" in my living room, I'm actually watching content received over the internet and processed on the PC that is connected between said internet and "TV." I'm not watching anything over the air or on cable (although the internet is technically delivered via cable), yet I am watching the device that serves as my television.

Does that count? It should if it doesn't. It's one of the reasons why ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox are now dinosaurs, and will be extinct as we now know them in the not-too-distant future.

A "television" in the 21st century is really a computer monitor with digital and analog tuners, plus connectors for multiple video and audio sources, built in. The "TV set" of the analog era is no longer available for purchase, except for maybe at Goodwill or a garage sale.

 

[imhomerjay]

It counts as watching Internet content, measured separately from TV in the more commonly accepted sense. Both measured, and both increasing. You may not be watching anything over the air/on cable (now THAT'S an irrelevant distinction to most viewers), but hard as it may be to believe, that's not a trend that's about to make ABC, CBS et al fade to black anytime soon.

 

[KeithE4]

It counts as watching Internet content, measured separately from TV in the more commonly accepted sense. Both measured, and both increasing. You may not be watching anything over the air/on cable (now THAT'S an irrelevant distinction to most viewers), but hard as it may be to believe, that's not a trend that's about to make ABC, CBS et al fade to black anytime soon.

The studios and maybe the networks' parent companies will continue to provide the content, but today's networks as the delivery system are dead meat as far as over-the-air broadcasting is concerned. The delivery system of the future is here now: Hulu, YouTube, and the like. The parent companies of today's dinosaur networks will still own a piece of that pie, however.

CBS Corporation, Comcast, Disney, and News Corporation aren't going away. But their subsidiaries that carry over-the-air broadcast content certainly will in their present form. CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox may be cable and/or internet only, either via Hulu and its clones or as standalone channels, but the local station that is a "network" affiliate is a business model that is coming to an end.

Those 2 or 3 OTA stations per market that survive will all be what we now call "independents." And most of their viewers will be watching either on cable/satellite (as they do now), on their laptop PC, or (especially) on their phone, not with an antenna pointed toward a tower farm that contains expensive radio transmitters.

 

[imhomerjay]

Whether or not the current broadcast networks shift to all cable with no local presence or simply replicate their current sturcture without using OTA transmitters at all is a long way from being known (and it's nothing near term in any event). But whether the content happens to be zapped over the air in addition to being sent via fiber or satellite to the cable/satellite provider is a meaningless distinction to the viewers. How Fox gets Family Guy to DirecTV means nothing to most subscribers. There's still a lot of money to be made in the current system, even as it inevitably evolves, just as it has since day one.

 

[hubcity]

Well, here's an interesting web address:

http://google.com/tv

Basically, Google wants to sell you a box (or a TV with some additional smarts inside it) that removes the barrier between scheduled content and downloadable content, and puts it all up on your TV. This is an area where Apple is currently failing (and I own an Apple TV) so it'll be interesting where Google heads (and where Apple tries to head them off.)