I’m guessing that you’re young-ish, then? Because that’s not how it was when I was a kid. That changed in the mid-nineties, and it was a fairly controversial decision.
From about 1970 to 93, antitrust regulations were put in place because only three networks could determine over 90% of broadcast media. A judge ended that rule under the rational that upstart networks like Fox and CW were now competitive. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/13/business/judge-rules-netw...
Critics said this would be bad because the networks would be incentivized to broadcast lucrative content over quality content, and subjectively I would say that is exactly what happened. But fortunately the Internet came along and made TV kind of moot… but anyway if you are of the opinion that radical centralization and corporate consolidation lead to crummy content, fewer opportunities for creators, and in a macro scale a widening wealth gap, this all just kinda sucks.
Yes, that’s the difference. There used to be a gatekeeper to reaching your audience, but now there is none. A kid can take their 4K phone and make their own TV show with their friends and distribute it worldwide, or a company can get a professional crew and spend a couple billion dollars and distribute it worldwide.
If the contention is that a few companies owning all the content will raise the prices, then that solution would be removing/reducing copyright protections, or compulsory licensing, but in the current environment, who owns what is mostly immaterial to customers.
> Yes, that’s the difference. There used to be a gatekeeper to reaching your audience, but now there is none. A kid can take their 4K phone and make their own TV show with their friends and distribute it worldwide, or a company can get a professional crew and spend a couple billion dollars and distribute it worldwide.
Until Google or Facebook decide that your content is objectionable. Don't worry, punishment is instant and Court of Big Tech appeals process is even slower than actual due process [1].
Would you rather a business such as Google and Facebook not be able to do what they want with their computers and bandwidth?
No one is entitled to someone else’s computing resources. But unless the ISP is blocking access to your computers or from you to the network, then the point is the barrier to distribution is at its lowest in any point in history.
Ideally, we’d have ipv6 and fiber connections to home so Google/Facebook would be irrelevant. But that is a governance issue, not a Google/Facebook issue.
You would be shocked at the amount of shows that were sold to NBC but produced by ABC Studios or whatever. It still happens today but the trend is going back to the closed loops.
How are the incentives any different now? Why would Amazon not want to be paid for a show it does not want but Apple or Netflix does? Swap around any of the company names.
If a different studio was selling to Apple/Amazon/etc then presumably they would have language that lets them sell to someone else if they did not end up distributing it.
NBC is one of the major studios that chose to license their content to broadcast networks around the country. I do not see how that is related, but in the event it is, you can replace NBC with HBO or any other non broadcasted channel.
Broadcast NBC was only "free" in the strictest sense. Every hour of content requires the viewer to sit through 22 minutes of mind-numbing commercials.
At a labor value of $50/hour, watching ten hours of content a week imposes an economic cost on the viewer of $825/month. By comparison subscribing to all the major streaming platforms would cost about $100/month. Let's not even get into issues of higher quality content and huge on-demand libraries. It's pretty clear ad-free streaming subscription is a massive improvement for consumers over "free" broadcast TV.
The important implication of broadcast TV being "free" isn't that there's zero cost. It's that there's no subscription.
Subscriptions mean you have to pay a certain minimum amount, even if you want to watch just one episode of something. That's a much bigger burden than changing the channel.
Yes, in theory you can carefully manage things and cancel as soon as you've watched what you wanted, but in practice that effort is a cost too (like watching a commercial is a cost).
The heavy load of advertisements is a point well made, however the cost is a bit more nuanced. By your calculation, it would cost $2,166/month (+price of service) to just watch that amount TV.
This is an opportunity cost but only if you have the stamina to be doing billable work during all that time instead of relaxing.
The biggest opportunity cost was having to schedule a specific time to watch something or not being able to pause and watch later or not being able to watch while waiting for your flight to board.
> sit through 22 minutes of mind-numbing commercials
Commercial detection and skipping has worked well for me via MythTV for nearly twenty years at this point.
Seems like there’s a free startup idea in there somewhere. $100 worth of equipment and a webapp and now your parents can watch network TV, local news, sports, and weather without ads.
You can’t skip live without a time machine.
You can disable the audio and replace the video.
Alternatively, you start the game 22 minutes / hour late.
It’s all about trade-offs but attention is being under-valued imho.
And if you lived in a location close enough to a city to receive the airwaves. I do not see what that has to do with it, but you can swap out NBC for a non broadcast media owner like Comedy Central.
Point is content is more accessible and cheaper than it has ever been in history, and that is partially due to the elimination of middlemen like cable/satellite TV distributors.
But media is always going to have an owner, who is always going to be able to license it to whoever they want at whatever cost they want.
Advertising is a thing in netflix productions too, you know. Really takes you out of Stranger Things when you see them set down a coke can with the label perfectly aligned to the camera.
HBO wasn't and you needed to pay to watch an HBO show. There's really not much difference between and premium channel cable offering and these services, at least, it's a lot more similar and closer in time than studio-owned movie theatres.
When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch an NBC show, you had to watch it on an NBC network. What is the difference?
At least nowadays you can just pay, watch, and cancel at your leisure with the click of a few buttons.