{"id":3532,"date":"2013-09-10T09:00:18","date_gmt":"2013-09-10T09:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writers.spot-on.com\/?p=3532"},"modified":"2013-09-10T09:00:18","modified_gmt":"2013-09-10T09:00:18","slug":"the-politics-of-the-television-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/2013\/09\/10\/the-politics-of-the-television-business\/","title":{"rendered":"The Politics of the Television Business"},"content":{"rendered":"

For TV and cable, 2012 was a banner year for political ads sales<\/a>. With something like $9 billion in campaign spending on the table – from just the presidential election – it was raining soup for anyone who was in the business of selling space to run :30 of video on a large screen shared by many viewers.<\/p>\n

But 2012 is probably the last year that broadcasters will be able to hold out their bowls.<\/p>\n

The TV business – the ad-supported watching of programs by a large group of people in roughly the same time period – is fracturing in much the same way that the print business fractured at the beginning of this century and for the same reason: New, Internet-delivered services let consumers make choices. The choices are racheted up from the use of DVRs – which change the time at which you watch something. A variety of new services let viewers decide HOW to watch.<\/p>\n

The best publicized example is a company called Aereo<\/a> which has begun serving New York and which plans to expand to 22 other cities<\/a>. It’s so scary that TV broadcasters have sued<\/a> to get the company, which takes over-the-air broadcast signals and sends them to computers, shut down.<\/p>\n

Aereo’s important not just for the publicity but also because one of its investors, Barry Diller, knows the TV business like there’s nobody’s business<\/a>. He created “Movie of the Week” AND he built Fox out of pretty much nothing but a bunch of lame UHF channels. He knows his enemy and his strategy – to create a group of consumer who will email Congress <\/a>when someone takes away their Aereo – is a well-tested strategy. Ask any broadcaster.<\/p>\n

But even if Diller doesn’t get his way – and so far, the courts have given him the green light – other services are changing how voters watch TV. Dish-TV encourages its customers to skip ads<\/a>. Netflix<\/a> and Amazon<\/a> – once happy to just sell movies – are getting into the TV production business at the same time they’re bidding against cable programs to acquire the rights to run TV shows.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to every political person’s favorite show, “House of Cards” and its auteur\/actor Kevin Spacey. A lot of folks have been talking about Spacey’s speech before a gathering of UK media execs in which he spelled out how Netflix – and shows like “House of Cards” are signs of upheaval in the business. For those of you who read Spot-On’s regular blog posts<\/a>, that wasn’t news, of course. But, well, we like to state the obvious more than once. So here’s a link to an interview between Spacey and Charlie Rose previewing the speech. And here’s the MacTaggard lecture<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There’s more to come as New York Times columnist Dave Carr spells out in this column<\/a> which, for anyone wed to the idea that TV ads are the only or best way to reach viewers and voters, is a must read.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For TV and cable, 2012 was a banner year for political ads sales. With something like $9 billion in campaign spending on the table – from just the presidential election – it was raining soup for anyone who was in the business of selling space to run :30 of video on a large screen shared […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spotlight"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spot-on.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}