Entertainment has taken over our lives. It along with technological progress are the pixy dust of the American Experience. The internet ate the music industry for breakfast, the movie industry for lunch, and for dinner Television is on the menu. In the next 5 years a few factors are going to change how you watch television forever.
These are the factors that will push people to cancel their cable contract, of course there will be resistance as those who prefer convenience over a cheaper experience- both in terms of money and satisfaction.
The first is the recent Fox Network/Cablevision battle over retransmission rights. When the government made broadcast stations switch from an analog to a digital signal, to free up transmission space for cell phones and other communication technologies, it also unwittingly set up this confrontation. Every station has to broadcast a public signal that is free. However new technology (HDTV) does not come equipped with digital rabbit ears, like the old analog television sets used to. You have to purchase these in order to pick up the digital signal, and in some cases they don't work very well. Recently, Fox Networks renegotiated retransmission rights with Cablevision for both their cable and broadcast station shows- since most people view these shows through cable. Stated simply retransmission rights are an annual fee that television stations charge cable carries for their content. ABC pulled the plug on Cablevision right before the Oscars last March, while Fox blacked out Sunday Football and the early games of the 2010 World Series. In the end Cablevision agreed to pay Fox Networks more than double, $170 million, for retransmission rights. Content is king.
This of course will be passed down to cable consumers in cable rate hikes down the road. How many cable providers are out there and when will those contracts expire? If only cable consumers knew at the time the Fox signal was broadcast for free, with the use of those digital rabbit ears, they could have seen their sports without being held hostage by these corporate babies. Why didn't Cablevision see this as an opportunity to run some well timed informative commercials I don't know.
Comcast, the nation's largest cable provider, has recently purchased a majority stake in NBC Universal from GE. This is the other side of the coin, cable provider gobbles up content provider. Right now content providers and cable companies are engaged in a TRON like game, trying to wall off one another in an order to achieve dominance. The only problem is the internet and the concept of net neutrality.
Net neutrality... is a principle proposed for user access networks participating in the Internet that advocates no restrictions by Internet service providers and governments on content, sites, platforms, the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and the modes of communication.
The principle states that if a given user pays for a certain level of Internet access, and another user pays for the same level of access, then the two users should be able to connect to each other at the subscribed level of access.- wikipedia entry on net neutrality
Right now many internet advocates are drawing attention to sites like facebook that act as walled gardens whose integrity threaten the open source spirit of the internet. But net neutrality poses a big problem for television.
During peak hours, 20% of America's broadband is streaming Netflix movies. That figure will likely increase as more people add this feature to their PS3s, Xboxs, Wiis, and computers. The problem with Netflix is that a lot of their content is old and you'll have to wait longer for new releases. A game changer would be a deal between one of these internet companies with a content provider like ABC or CBS to stream network feeds. Who knows when this will happen, if at all. And if it does what type of experience would it be. For the moment Netflix isn't really in the game yet, at least not to the extent it can be, and Google specializes in eating more established internet companies for lunch.
The web changed the way we experienced music and movies first. How it will affect television is a completely different question. Television viewing is much different from other media consumption. Show lineups and news have an immediacy that can't be replicated at the present moment online. And it is still a shared experience. How will atomizing the viewer experience affect viewership? I am sure these questions will be resolved profitably by someone else.
I have tried to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest 3 times. I know it is an important book and believe it says something of cultural value. It's just too big, complex, and post-modern of a novel for me right now. No matter the form of change what will take place we will be watching just like the characters in his book, sadly. On an endless loop of entertainment.
In addition, new TVs come equipped with things like Netflix and YouTube now. They are completely internet friendly which makes it even easier to access television shows and movies online. Extra equipment (ie: Apple TV, gaming systems) is no longer necessary. All you need is the internet.
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