Wednesday, November 14, 2007

57 CHANNELS (AND NOTHIN' ON): As recently as 1979-80, ninety percent of prime-time TV viewers were tuned to NBC, CBS, or ABC. Today, even after the addition of Fox and UPN/WB/CW, the broadcast networks collectively grab just about forty percent of the viewing audience. How did the television business and the TV-watching experience change so dramatically in just a generation? To a great extent, it's all technology's fault. (For a good, brief rundown of this period, see the last couple of chapters in Richard Butsch's The Making of American Audiences.)

Home video dealt the first blow to network dominance. Sony introduced the Betamax in 1975; a year later, JVC/Matsushita countered with the VHS format, which was soon adopted by other companies like RCA. As the commercials at those links show, most early consumers bought VCRs for the purposes of "time-shifting" -- taping broadcasts for later viewing. Although VCRs took a while to catch on (partly because of their expense, partly because of the VHS-Betamax format war), by 1985 they could be found in 27% of American homes.

Television networks were frustrated by VCRs because they disconnected audiences from timeslots, thereby complicating the business of measuring a show's viewership, analyzing its demographics, and selling advertising. Hollywood studios were even more worried, haunted by visions of millions of VCR owners taping movies off the air and then selling them on the market; consequently, the studios decided to sue VCR manufacturers, charging them with encouraging film piracy. In 1984's "Betamax case," the Supreme Court ruled that off-air taping for personal use was legal, and that the manufacturers couldn't be held responsible if some VCR users employed their technology for illegal purposes.

By that point, however, Hollywood had already begun to change its tune on VCRs, thanks to the boom in pre-recorded cassettes. In the early '80s, local retailers had started renting videotapes of popular movies. Although the studios had initially intended that these cassettes be sold, not rented, retailers defied Hollywood's demands, citing both the explosion of consumer demand (from 30 million rentals to 262 million between 1983 and 1985) and the legal protection of the first-sale doctrine. Studios soon recognized the huge revenue streams waiting for them in video rentals, which in turn reoriented both Hollywood's marketing plans and audiences' movie-going and TV-watching habits. By 1990, three out of four households owned a VCR -- and the networks' share of viewers had dropped to 65%.

The other key force in remaking American viewing habits was cable television. Originally designed as a means to get broadcast signals to rural viewers, cable became a programming arena in the 1970s and 1980s, thanks particularly to the increased availability of satellite technology. HBO debuted in 1975, ESPN in 1979, CNN in 1980; by 1990, some two hundred non-network stations had appeared. As with VCRs, consumer adoption of cable was slow but steady, growing from 23% of households in 1980 to 60% in 1990. And as its reach grew, so did cable's share of the TV audience, with viewers flocking to the greater variety and (in some cases) more daring content available on cable.

Over the past decade, three other new technologies -- DVDs, DVRs, and online downloads -- have further perpetuated the trends of network decline and audience fragmentation. In Sunday's New York Times, in fact, Damon Lindelof (of Lost fame) argued that television as we've known it for the past sixty years is "dying," and that the WGA is striking for "a future generation of writers, whose work will never 'air,' but instead be streamed, beamed or zapped onto a tiny chip." Is Lindelof right? Are DVRs and downloads merely another phase in the history I've described above? Or are they game-changing innovations that will utterly transform the medium of TV? How will we watch television ten years from now? Will we watch "television" ten years from now?

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