Commentary

Column: Gestalt - Programming 'R' Us

I'm sorry, I know all this new technology is changing everything, but people need a place to go to find programming, especially for new programming. 'Desperate Housewives' never would have become what it did without a network backing it, and people being able to find it on cable. People need a destination to find programming in an organized way."

That's according to one of the leading, and for my money, one of the smartest cable executives in America. It's a provocative point. And, she adds, "People just don't want to work that hard."

But here's a set of questions, a continuum really, that raises some provocative conclusions as well: How much do people care about any given station versus the specific program they want to watch? Is Comedy Central our home, or do we just want to make sure we see "South Park," or "Whose Line is it Anyway?" (Oops, the latter is on Disney!)

How much will people want, not only entire programs, but pieces of programs that interest them? For example, not the whole "60 Minutes," but the "ah-ha" moment in an interview, and not the entire "Saturday Night Live," but the two minutes where Ashlee Simpson imploded.

In a world of broadband and increasingly precise search techniques, will people behave differently with video than they do today in front of text? If I can find anything I want in a 500-channel universe and an infinite number of Web destinations, why is finding video harder than it is to conduct any other Google search or find an RSS reader?

The Finnish Broadcasting Company, whose 60 percent weekly ratings share would be the envy of any TV broadcaster in the world, recently completed some startling research with a clear analogy to the U.S. If you were born before World War II, you have strong brand loyalty to a station. If you are a baby boomer, you have stronger ties to subjects that interest you - sports, history, culture, and music.

But if you were raised on the Internet, you are an "individualist." In other words, you have no loyalty to a station per se, and are interested in multiple specific programs at different times.

"No one in broadcasting is prepared for this," the CEO of the Finnish Broadcasting Co. tells me.

Bringing order to consumers' viewing, search, and interaction needs, even in a world of endless choices, has little to do with owning the means of distribution, but it has everything to do with better tools to help people find what they want. Spend 15 minutes watching college kids use BitTorrent, the open source file-sharing application, and you'll see the future. Heck, watch yourself use Google, and you are the future. And what about the idea that "Desperate Housewives" would not thrive if it was directly distributed over the Web?

I will suggest that there has never been a better, more efficient, word-of-mouth medium than the Web, because it allows you to tell a friend about a program and then send them the link, or the program itself while watching it.

I would bet more people saw JibJab online political parodies of Bush and Kerry than watched the televised presidential debates in 2004.

If you haven't done so already, please visit CBS's new 24-hour news operation. Instead of launching it on cable as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox did, this operation is solely online. Why? Because that's where the audiences are, and launching the business online enables viewers to find what they want on their own terms.

Also, to quote the top CBS news executives, online is "how [the cable news channels] would have launched today, if they could," because the interactivity of the product makes it so much richer, and the cost of distribution is a fraction of what it costs in cable.

In a world of search, online content providers aren't worried about people finding them, and don't need a distribution company or network to get in the way.

There's a reason why the CBS executives internally called their online news project "cable bypass."

Next story loading loading..