Link: The Long Tail: Only you can save television.
TV, on the other hand, is just about to hit its crisis. That crisis includes: ad-skipping, the disappearing 18-34 male, rising ad rates despite chronically falling ratings, and the death of the 30-second spot.
TV produces more content than any other media and entertainment industry. There are an estimated 31 million hours of original television content produced each year. Although that isn't as much as radio, most radio is either chat or recorded music that is available elsewhere, so it's not in the same league. In addition, 115m digital video tapes are sold each year for personal camcorders.
Only a tiny fraction of it is available to you. First, the average American household now gets 100 channels of TV. While that sounds like a lot--it's 876,000 hours of video broadcast to the average home each year--that's still less than 3% of the commercial video that's produced for broadcast.
Making matters much worse, unless that home has a DVR (and only 4-5% of US households do) and someone is spending a good chunk of their free time scouring listings to program it, they're going to miss virtually all of that TV. Once TV is missed, it's usually gone. Only a tiny fraction of shows are syndicated, and an even smaller fraction makes it to DVD.
There is no shortage of smart people thinking about how TV can find its way out of its corner. But it's not easy. For starters, most of the networks are content renters, not content owners. (NBC, which bought Universal ten months ago, is now an exception). This means that the archives are often not theirs to monetize.
Rights also continue to be a total hairball, made even more complicated by exclusive geographic distribution deals (which conflict with the Internet's global nature) and syndication options. And then there's music, which is a nightmare. Want to know why you can't watch old WKRP in Cincinnati episodes? It's too hard to license the music that was used in the show.
Bottom line: TV is begging to be reinvented.
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