Why should television be any different?
Supermarkets! Now I understood the proliferation of look-alike channels. After all, there’s no real choice among the hundreds of detergents, not when Procter &Gamble and Unilever have filled up the shelves with scores of their own brands.
That was a lesson the media industry learned hard in the early eighties, when ABC and Westinghouse closed the Satellite News Channel, convinced that there was no future in all-news channels. A few years later, after CNN had turned into one of television’s most successful ventures and had relentlessly drawn viewers and advertisers away from the mainstream networks’ news programs, the media giants vowed that it would never happen again.
So in 1989, when Time Warner’s HBO unit launched a network devoted to comedy, Viacom–fearful that the new web would draw the same adolescent audience that had been glued to MTV’s music videos–hastily slammed together plans for a competing network. The yearlong combat between Comedy Channel and HA!–which finally forced the two to merge into Comedy Central–led to unrecouped expenditures that one executive involved put at $300 million. « You see someone move into an area that you have, you gotta fight back, even if it means losses. » the executive said.
And six health networks
« Competition doesn’t consist of being different from your competitors but of being the same, » Andrew Ehrenberg, a professor at London’s South Bank University and one of the world’s leading experts on brand marketing, told me. « Everybody has large, small, and decaf. Same with television. Are they going to do anything radically different? Of course not! If they did, they’d fail. »
Of course, you’ve got to be big to play in this game–the more so because technology is promising to make the shelf far longer than the five hundred channels we’ve been awaiting. Microsoft executives predict that it will be only three to five years before real-time, interactive video can be delivered straight to people’s desktops via computer. At that point, a million networks–a billion networks!–is within imagination’s realm.
Only those with the resources to cover that shelf now–with talk shows, reruns, infomercials, Julia Child wanna-bes, obscure sporting events, documentaries, current-affairs programs featuring old white men shouting at one another, with whatever inventory they might have on hand to repurpose–will be able to survive what some executives bluntly call the death of television. The fledgling Web sites started recently by such conventional TV networks as CNN and NBC are steps in this direction, designed to etch into consumers’ brains brand names that will survive the transition from one medium to another
And twelve news networks
« That’s going to happen, » said Tom Rogers, the president of NBC’s cable division and the architect of thirteen network–all of them using repurposed information from the company’s news division–that NBC has created around the world in less than a decade. « So if you don’t start the process now, our feeling is you’ll just be one of those infinite, indistinguishable choices. »
A million channels and nothing on? Could it be? I called the Conglomerateur, who calmly told me, Yes, it could. And it would.
« Imagine a world where a company like Disney controls ABC, 80 percent of ESPN, important cable positions, and then stations in 30 percent, 40 percent of the country, » he said. Now imagine that situation matched by Time Warner, Turner, Viacom, Sony, News Corp., MCA, TCI, and NBC. « Insofar as you believe in diversity, it’s a loss. »
I had to calm my nerves, so I took the chantal tea kettle to make a cup of tea. I put on the kettle to boil some water. Fortunately, I knew how.
TEA KETTLE FOR YOU 