The Beginning of The End for Cable Television?

History of Cable TV

My first memories of Television in the 70′s where the days of VHF and UHF.  You may remember those days too…

You know, the ones where we changed the dial by hand on our 13″ black and white TV?

And then my sister got ON TV…  I still remember watching Cheech and Chong’s Up In Smoke!  And then, when everyone fell asleep, I remember the late night programming.

And then came Cable to our neighborhood.  (Cable TV has been around since the 1940′s?) And life was never the same.

I Want My MTV……  Hours and hours of Def Leppard, Quiet Riot and Twisted Sister…

Well, today people want their FOX.  FOX wants to charge Time Warner more for it, and Time Warner doesn’t want to pay.

If you’ve been following the Time Warner vs. Fox issue you probably know that FOX wants Time Warner to pay another $1.00 per subscriber.

And here’s the crux.  Fox is asking Time Warner for about $30,000,000 per month, or $360,000,000 per year.

According to Wikipedia, Time Warner’s 2007 Net Income was about 1.12 billion.  And their numbers appear to have been dropping ever since.  (No thanks to AOL which they’ve now spun off).

So , effectively, FOX is asking for 1/4 of Time Warner’s earnings?

That’s pretty expensive.  And both companies have a duty to their shareholders to keep as much money as possible.

But what would be the effect of channel darkness?

If there was no FOX/Time Warner agreement – what would be the outcome?

How many subscribers would they lose to DirectTV or Dish?  How many subscribers would they lose to the Internet in general?

What’s interesting is that Cablevision has dropped HGTV and FOOD – for similar reasons – they can’t afford the content – and with the economy, they don’t want to ask their subscribers to dig deeper into their pockets scrounging for change.  Worse for Scripps Network, owners of HGTV/FOOD, Cablevision has said outright tat they have no future plans to ever air their content again.

Now, HGTV and FOOD are nowhere near as important as Fox – but are we seeing the beginning of the end for Traditional Television Media as we know it?

I mean it’s been coming right?

Did You and I Contribute to the 86′ing of Some Great Programming?

From what I understand My Name Is Earl and a few other great programs were canceled during the last few seasons because too many of us were recording them on our DVR’s rather than exposing themselves to the commercials.

And when we do this, the advertisers who are paying for programming don’t see the same benefit.

So funding goes and so do the shows.

And then we end up in the same situation that we’re in today with Fox and Time Warner.

Fox can’t afford to continue to produce the same quality programming that they have been without the advertiser dollars.  And they can’t keep dropping successful shows in attempts to trick the advertisers into buying ads on the new programs because people aren’t yet habitually recording them to the DVR…

And the Cable Companies abound certainly can’t stop the DVR’s from fast-forwarding through the commercials right?  I mean that’s the whole point of the DVR.

Or, will they be forced to stopping the fast-forwarding of the commercials?  They could – but it would take the incentive away for a lot of us – and we wouldn’t pay the $25 per box (we have 3 of them) per month to own one.

So, interesting things have and continue to happen in Radio.

Some stations have literally stopped broadcasting over the air, like Indie 103 FM in Los Angeles – and they’ve opted to go strictly over the internet because it’s not regulated the same way, nor does it come with the same costs and fees.

And think about telephone?  We don’t even have a traditional landline.  We’re mobile and VOIP with Skype.

Will we or are we seeing the same things happening with the Television content providers and small networks?

Will the cable companies simply turn into bandwidth providers?

The next several years are going to be interesting.  The convergence that everyone was talking about in 1996 has been taking place right in front of us – and now we’re starting to feel the effects.