It seems like over the last several years, in every major interview, the same general questions are being asked of entertainment executives: “Where do you see the future of television?”
“How is digital media going to impact programming?” “What’s next for digital and entertainment?” All major conferences or events I’ve attended have addressed these
topics through multiple sessions.
While it may seem that these questions were on everyone’s mind only in recent years, it’s fascinating to take a step back and see that the reverse
is true. 2012 marks the 15th anniversary of the Television Academy Foundation’s Archive of American Television’s
extensive video interview collection, which began in 1997, a year in which the concept of digital TV was already top of mind for many TV executives. Back then, even before we knew how or when our
content would enter the digital realm, one of the boilerplate questions we asked our interviewees was, “Where do you see the future of television?” Not surprisingly, many of the answers
are the same answers we’d hear today:
Betty White, Actress, June 1997
“Networks are a little troubled at this present day and age,
because suddenly their whole world has fragmented, what with the various channels available now, and getting stronger all the time. Now the listings, you look down the list, you've got a zillion
choices. You can't say, ‘oh television is so terrible now’ because, you've got another choice somewhere along the line. The networks just really have no way to fight that
undermining. It's like a river running through, and pretty soon the banks get shallower and shallower.”
Thomas W. Sarnoff, TV executive, June 1998
“I
think there’ll be some dramatic changes. I think there’ll be more of what we see today, but the Internet operation, the computer operation, will materially change the way people look
at television and at entertainment and I think there’ll be more interactive participation by people -- on television as well as on the computers and the Internet. But basically
there’ll always be programming, there’ll be news... and I think it hasn’t really changed that much. The forms of programs may have changed, but the substance is still the
same.”
Dick Clark, Host/Producer, July 1999
.... Could television be dead? No, it will take its place along with some form of a thing that’ll be
probably covering the wall of your room, that will feed you music, television, sports, news when it happens. That entertainment center, I’ve been talking about that for 30 years, will be a
wall-sized television....
Radio didn’t disappear when television came along, magazines and newspapers didn’t go out when radio came along. So television is in
that same spot. We’ve just got to find our niche. If I were 40 years younger I wouldn’t be the least bit concerned. I’d be looking to the new stuff to see what can
I do to amalgamate what I know from the old media into the new. It’s all distribution.”
Ted Turner, Executive, June 1999
“Television’s
really not much over 50 years old today. It wasn’t invented and employed till 50 years ago. We now have the Internet and telephone companies getting into television and television
and the cable companies, it’s very hard to ah, predict what we’ll see 50 or 100 years from now or even 20 years from now. It’s very hard to see, at the current time, for the
time horizon of the next five to ten years, the networks will not go away, and the broadcasters will not go away. …Only the rocks last forever. You know nothing’s going to
last forever. Not even this digitalized image that we're doing. It ain’t going to last forever.”
Dick Wolf, Producer, March 2003
“If
anybody knew [what the future of TV will be,] they could turn themselves into a truly wealthy individual because the whole system is going to go on its ass in about five or six years, because what's
going to happen -- and it's already happening -- [is] that once you have video streaming and video-on-demand, 'Law And Order' will come on at 10 on Wednesday and it will start streaming and it will
stream that episode. You will be able to call it up whenever you want until 9:59 the next Wednesday when the new episode will come on.
What that means is that advertising on a
cost-per-thousand basis won't make any sense at all because you're not going to be delivering the same number of mass eyeballs, but over the course of an entire week, a lot more people may see the
episode…
What's going to happen is,s you're going to have targeted consumers. And if you go into a BMW dealer over the next month, you're going to get sixteen BMW ads because that's
going to go into their database. Then those will be tracked. All of a sudden, you'll get four Mercedes commercials because I know you're thinking about a BMW, but maybe you should come in and test
drive the E-320. This is going to be targeting consumers….
And once that happens, I don't know what the economic model is. Because you are not going to be selling a cost per thousand.
You're going to be selling a cost per consumer. Because they will be able to tell you, we can target your prime consumer on a basis that has never been possible before. What's that worth? God
knows.”
Don Ohlmeyer, TV executive, November 2004
“One of the big problems going forward is that people are on overload. They’re actually missing a
lot of great stuff cause they just don’t know it’s there. You can only keep track of so many channels. You can’t comprehend what’s on 400 channels, so people narrow
it down and the statistics show that up to 100 channels people will make room in their lives for. There’s too much to absorb...."
Leslie Moonves, TV executive, December
2006
“The business is all about content and providing stories. We should look at the world as, now people can get our content in a hundred different ways. It used to be they
just got it over the air. Then it became over the air and repeats. Then it became over the air, repeats and syndication. Over the air, repeats, syndication, DVDs. Now it's
everywhere, TiVo, U-Tube, DVRs, Amazon – either in whole episodes, whatever.
So our content is being distributed in 100 places, while 10 years ago it was distributed in one place
or two places. So the world is rapidly changed. The key is to get paid for that. Because that’s going to have to replace advertising revenue, which may or may not go up or down
or whatever--– that will be a key.
But everybody should remember that the storytellers are always going to be needed. That it's always going to be about that, no matter how
you get that content. So I think we should all be secure in the fact that if we do the good work, it will still translate. TV is not any different than it was 50 years ago, really, in a lot of
ways. Yes, it's more sophisticated. But you watch a sitcom from then and you watch a sitcom from now, it's about telling a story. And some of the stories are exactly the same. I am bullish
about broadcasting and creativity and the fact that we serve a major purpose in society. We inform people, we entertain people and we will continue to do that.”