More Television Future Shock

Do you need a TV station to have a TV show? Yes and no. The advantage of a TV station is, it is a known commodity, usually with a well visited address.

If our newscasts on Channel 8 were to move tomorrow to the SciFi Channel, ratings would plummet. That’s not to say bad things about SciFi, we just have better channel position with more traffic.

The disadvantage of a television station is it usually has high fixed costs. Smart operators are trying to work those costs down through automation and other technical advances. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t – but it’s obviously the wave of the future.

This leads to a question. Is it possible to have a successful TV show without having a TV channel (or cable network) behind you?

I’m wondering if the answer is yes after having seen a show produced by systm.org. It features Kevin Rose who was on Tech TV’s The Screen Savers.

The show I saw last night was well produced, but on a topic so technically dense that few except the chronically nerdy would have watched. There were no commercials – how can it be economically sustained? Using the bittorrent protocol it took around 10 minutes to download.

Of course, it was free.

What I watched looked as good as anything produced for over-the-air or cable TV. If it had been something more attractive to a wide audience, with some way to pay the freight, I think it might be successful!

Bittorrent is an interesting distribution method, because it uses the collective bandwidth of the users, not a central server paid for by the program’s distributor. That’s a major cost saving when each viewer needs to receive hundreds of megabytes of data.

For attractive media (defined as something a specific group of viewers would seek out, because it scratches a specific itch) this might be a godsend.

Think of subject matter like photography, knitting, ham radio and kayaking. Each of these has a dedicated base of fans who want to see more on their hobby or avocation, but there’s not enough audience tonnage to make this work on an established channel. Because the audience would be sharply targeted, each set of eyeballs would be worth more to advertisers or underwriters (this is non traditional media – why not a non traditional economic model).

It could be commercially viable – though more on the retail level than the mass marketing we’re used to on TV. In other words, it makes sense for a person or small group of persons to do this. It doesn’t make as much sense for a larger, high cost basis organization to get involved.

The big question is, will people do all the things necessary to download these files? Is there a way to preserve the cost structure as it is and make it seamless for the end user?

This could be very exciting.

The Computer As An Auto

I am a computer hobbyist. This is neither good nor bad – just a fact of life. I’ve been attracted to them since my first touch of a keyboard in high school circa 1967. This computer I’m typing on, and the one next to it, were built on my floor from parts – some ordered for the projects, others that I had lying around.

I remember my friend Jerry Emdur in Cherry Hill, NJ, who owned an Imsai 8080, a very early personal computer. It really couldn’t do anything – but it was very cool.

For years, I have subscribed to Computer Shopper. It was, at one time, the great builder magazine, published every month. I used to feel guilty when the mailman delivered it. It was heavy as a brick and as thick as the Manhattan Yellow Pages… OK, almost as thick.

Back then the ads were for little specialty houses. Some sold custom built computers, others components. There were even actual designers and manufacturers selling down at the retail level. All these people knew we were on to something that would be big. They all wanted to be involved.

I’m not sure if he advertised in Computer Shopper back then, but this was the age when people like Michael Dell could start a company in his college dorm, correspond to customers via CompuServe – and sell a PC to my friend Peter in New Jersey.

Dell is huge, but so many of those companies are no longer around. It’s very sad.

Today, the Computer Shopper is a shadow of its former self. I just got a 166 page issue today. If I remember correctly, they were often 10 times that size. There are more articles, or at least they stand out more without the deluge of ads. Most of the editorial content is how to and hobbyist, versus business, oriented stories.

Missing are the page upon page of ads. Often they were long lists in tiny type of things I just had to have – but wasn’t going to get just yet.

I suspect most of those companies failed during the dot com bust. Many have probably just moved to EBay, where the cost of doing business is much lower.

I miss the ads.

Hey, this isn’t TV. I’m not getting a random mix of adult diaper and Viagra spots. These were targeted ads for products I was interested in. And, I figured the more ads, the more non-advertising content. That wasn’t necessarily true.

The problem with this kind of magazine today is that computers are commodities. You get one right off the line. They’re made to be mass produced. You can buy off-the-shelf hardware that’s fast enough for any application and buy it for less than you’ll pay to build it yourself!

I won’t be surprised if some day soon my ability to build my own machine is taken away, victim of digital rights management or some other tough to control power of the PC. When it’s just an appliance, in every sense of the word, I’ll feel we’ve lost something.