Television: Failure of Effort.

There are failures that are unpredictable. There are failures of imagination, where the solution exists, but no one can discover it in time. And there are failures of effort where you have a model that is failing, a model that would clearly work, and an obvious way to join them. And you don’t.

Television is going to be the most catastrophic failure of effort in my lifetime.

Audiences are dwindling, and people are only going to become less tolerant of being told when and where they can watch a program. Selling individual episodes via iTunes, etc is a stopgap solution, but ignores the behaviours that have been ingrained over time - people will pay for access to the cable network, but paying per show feels exploitative. TV has always been supported by ad revenue, and the recent additions of DVD sales and product placement fill the gaps somewhat.

Advertising revenue is a matter of eyeballs, location, and measurement. Precisely none of these things is attached to the idea of time-locked, living room based TV.

Put up torrents of each show, at the beginning of the scheduled air date. Sell ad space based on which region the user lives in, and use unsold space to promote internal projects, PSAs, etc. Monitor the number of downloads of each regional version, and use that to set the prices of the next episode’s ad slots.

Pay for a few studies on how many times the average viewer watches a downloaded program, how long they keep it, average income, etc. Use that to further justify increasing ad prices, the same way commuter papers use ‘readers per copy’ to justify what they charge for print advertisements.

If you want to get fancy, segment further. Make iPod, cellphone, PSP, etc friendly downloads, and sell advertising space priced to the demographics of that market. You could do the same with those who choose to watch on game consoles.

None of this is a technical challenge. None of this is expensive. And it stands a chance of beating piracy because you will have an inevitable lead on releasing the torrent, you will have a straightforward lead on quality, and advertising doesn’t offend the current generation of consumers as much as everyone likes to pretend - we see it everywhere, all the time.

People don’t download television because they hate advertisements. They do it for time-shifting, format portability, re-watchability, and simplicity. It is EASIER to ‘steal’ TV than it is to shape your life around the schedule set by the network. If you make the experience of watching ad-supported television at least CLOSE to the experience of watching illegally downloaded television, you stand a chance.

The only reason I can think of not to do this, is the comparatively low price of advertising online. Put bluntly, if you can’t charge the same price, for the same audience size, for the same content, with BETTER metrics, then advertising is overpriced on broadcast TV. And there isn’t a fix for that, other than adjusting production budgets and salaries. So get online, and charge what it’s worth.

Anything less is a failure of effort.