On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television CURTAINS FOR THE TRIOPOLY By Reuven Frank After more than two decades of unbridled soothsaying, gloomy foreboding and wild surmise, the shape of what television will soon be...
...Meanwhile, the prospect is for even more TV outlets, as technology brings us digitization, set-top boxes and, finally, the convergence of television, computers, telephones, and the Internet into one receiver...
...It was the fear that they would schedule only programs they had a stake in that led movie studios without network connections to start their own—Warner Brothers the WB network, and Universal and Paramount UPN...
...Matt Drudge started on the Internet...
...On Television CURTAINS FOR THE TRIOPOLY By Reuven Frank After more than two decades of unbridled soothsaying, gloomy foreboding and wild surmise, the shape of what television will soon be is finally emerging...
...Then they will get out, leaving the field to all-news networks and local cable systems...
...Those profits from off-network repeats of I Love Lucy, M*A *S*H and the others go to the Hollywood studios who made them, not to the networks that first put them on...
...ESPN and other cable networks...
...Fox was, and is, an extension of Murdoch's international media empire...
...Several producers refused to talk to NBC...
...All three of the old networks have been talking to CNN about a regular supply of news pictures...
...Barry Diller, who built Fox for Murdoch before going solo, has a ragtag little network that is associated with Universal Pictures...
...The latest report is that General Electric plans to "spin off" NBC as a separate company—presumably to enrich its own shareholders, while allowing NBC to compete for financing in the totally different context and ground rules of communications and entertainment...
...a publishing house...
...It, too, can face the future with confidence...
...and, importantly, the Warner Brothers movie studio...
...Fox did not so much rise to the level of its main competitors as lose the least...
...While they are still in, they will keep reducing costs...
...It hardly matters, so long as it enhances shareholder value...
...It has now happened...
...Rupert Murdoch started Fox a dozen years ago, to the public derision of some in the Big Three...
...WB and UPN were launched by movie studios afraid of being frozen out of the profitable field of producing network comedy or entertainment series...
...cable distribution systems in New York and elsewhere around the country, something quite different, and more profitable, than cable networks...
...This, too, is dictated by economics...
...The rule limited their income to the commercials sold when they showed these programs, once, or twice, even three times...
...When advertisers figure out how to make their messages effective on the Internet, it will become the principal news medium...
...So it is said to be talking to this one and that one...
...For a popular series, its basic costs having been paid off, after-network sales are almost all profit...
...There are also persistent rumors about NBC, which has all the stuff necessary to face the future except, of course, a movie studio...
...Could Sony "spin off" a separate American company to get around the problem...
...There will be no editing, none of what sociologists call "mediation...
...Today it is a full-fledged network, and despite its shorter prime time schedules and lack of a strong news presence, it finished the latest "sweeps" ratings period at or near the top of the network list...
...It must also own cable systems, and, ideally, should own or be owned by a movie studio...
...the 20th Century Fox movie studio...
...Seinfeld's appeal to large, young, advertiser-friendly audiences, and its benign effect on viewing for the entire Thursday evening, kept NBC profitable...
...It happened this way: As the networks' decline accelerated, their executives pleaded with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for help to make up for their shrinking incomes...
...publishing houses on two continents...
...That future may have been foreshadowed recently when ABC's Sports Night, this season's only highly praised new comedy on any network, shoehorned a long plug for Disney's Broadway musical, The Lion King, into a tense sequence about nervous reporters waiting for TV pictures from Mount Everest...
...Eventually, everybody's news pictures will be the same...
...Similarly, Murdoch's TV Guide, the ultimate American consumer magazine, found its editorial columnist on the staff of his small, rigidly Right-wing opinion magazine, the Weekly Standard...
...Gathering news requires sending a reporterto cover it, which is expensive, and maintaining bureaus in centers where news often happens, which is more expensive...
...All this is being driven by technology...
...For better or worse, we will not know again the shared national experiences that were unique to the decades of the triopoly: the John F. Kennedy assassination weekend, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, Man walking on the Moon, the political conventions of the '60s...
...CNN, other cable networks, and the Atlanta "superstation" WTBS...
...major newspapers on three continents...
...As for news, the networks will stay in it so long as it earns more than it costs...
...It was agreed from the beginning that, given the spread of cable and satellite broadcasting and the proliferation of independent stations, the broadcast networks would lose their dominance...
...Following years of eroding audiences, the crashing blow came with the end last May of NBC's hugely successful Seinfeld, a comedy narrowly based on the putative lifestyles of New York City-dwelling, unmarried, deracinated, third-generation ethnics...
...Thirty-second spots within the game itself fetched $1.6 million, up from the previous year's $1.3 million...
...It costs less to have a couple of authority figures explain what happened still less for unqualified zealots shouting down each other's opinions, and next to nothing to show someone listening to people talking on the phone...
...Rumors keep surfacing that Time Warner is talking to CBS, the weakest of the old triopoly in terms of breadth of ownership...
...The Associated Press and a few foreign services are already in that business...
...The public policy issues such concentration raises aside, it works just fine for Murdoch, his family and his investors...
...The disagreement was about how long this would take...
...they could not share in profits from subsequent sales to local stations or cable outlets...
...Commercial time for 1999 sold out early...
...Together, though, the networks attract fewer viewers than did the old triopoly, ABC, CBS and NBC...
...cruise ships, and other leisure and entertainment companies...
...and many magazines...
...There have been others, with specialized appeal...
...Love Lucy, an early network hit, is still on the air—as it has been for 32 years, since its reruns on CBS while other networks were carrying the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Vietnam War hearings so outraged the late Fred Friendly that he resigned as president of CBS News...
...theme parks on most continents...
...Less than a decade ago, the FCC obligingly allowed networks to own all or part of the programs they show...
...And so on, and so on...
...There are too few writers and directors and comedians to go around...
...Its success also deferred the date when all networks would have to confront their increasing irrelevance and turn their minds to surviving...
...Liebling observed years ago, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one...
...All-news channels will spend a little time gathering news, more time interpreting it, and even more taking positions and expressing opinions...
...That second point, made often in this space, has become conventional wisdom...
...TV news will become more and more what is said and less and less what is seen...
...As a result, it almost beat NBC, the biggest loser yet still the leader in total audience, and may actually have won— calculations vary—in the younger age groups advertisers prefer...
...CBS couldmake Time Warner complete...
...It should further be noted that entertainment entrepreneurs keep founding new networks...
...It may be more democratic that way, yet something will be missing...
...satellite-to-home TV in Europe and Asia...
...What will tomorrow bring...
...It lacks a broadcast network, but its properties include: Time, Fortune, People and In Style, described to me by a staff member as being "for those who find People too taxing...
...Things happen because they are possible, not because they fill a need...
...The distinctiveness—and distinction—of each network's news operation will depend on the anchors...
...All such rumors are...
...They wanted the FCC to repeal the rule forbidding them to own equity in the entertainment programs they ran...
...This has been denied at GE's very top...
...Time Warner is almost as well-placed as Fox...
...In other words, radio...
...Although CBS has minor cable holdings, it is basically just a network with stations and that is no longer enough...
...As AJ...
...Compared to Matt Drudge, Geraldo Rivera is Walter Lippmann...
...Many will watch whensimilar events happen, perhaps most, but there will be dozens upon dozens of other things available, and some will watch those...
...several cable systems, including Fox News, Fox Sports and Fx...
...Not surprisingly, Rupert Murdoch, the last entrant among the big networks, is best situated for the future...
...Last season, NBC alone was still showing a profit from its network activities...
...Doubling the number of publishers does not double the number of poets...
...But a warning: Too much can be made of this...
...most took their best shows elsewhere...
...Some attribute NBC's slide this season in part to that semiboycott...
...One day he is reported talking to NBC, the next to CBS...
...Murdoch surrendered his Australian citizenship so he could buy his stations...
...M*A *S*H does even better...
...Now it, too, has to pay its shareholders from the earnings of the stations it owns and from its share of after-network resales of the programs it shows...
...Sony Pictures, the former Columbia Pictures now owned by the Japanese conglomerate, lacks a network...
...And, in an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, as the role of television news declines its anchors' incomes will increase...
...Why start new networks when they seem to have lost their efficiency...
...The obverse occurred last fall when NBC demanded equity in any programs it showed, reaping a backlash the consumer press missed that was the raging debate in Hollywood for months...
...UPN and WB are more recent creations...
...Two networks, Fox and NBC, have hired programmers who made their reputations in cable, not with the classic network formula of something for everybody, but by attracting what the trade calls "niche" audiences—pronounced "neesh" in the better circles...
...They came out of the November 1998 sweeps having lost a tenth of the audience they had the year before...
...He owns the Fox network and stations by the dozen...
...But no network can exist without stations, and the law forbids foreigners from owning stations...
...As TV outlets multiply the old networks' audiences shrink—in part because there are other things to watch, and in part because quality suffers when the pool of talent is spread thin...
...Beyond all logic, it engaged a generation of Americans whatever their origins, wherever they lived...
...Disney, currently Hollywood's most powerful producing organization, owns ABC's network and stations...
...Networks alone can assemble very large audiences for advertisers with events like professional football's Super Bowl...
Vol. 82 • January 1999 • No. 1
