Today’s Times devotes substantial columnage to the future of television. “In The Living Room, Hooked on Pay TV” is the central article.
Notice the language of addiction – hooked on Pay TV, can’t live without those cable shows. Desire fed by television. In economic terms, addiction is a substantial comparative advantage. Americans spend more time watching TV than engaging in any other form of leisure activity. Who wouldn’t want to take advantage of those revenue flows?
I’m not one for anti-TV paranoia. My generation grew up living with TV; it was never a novelty for us; we cannot imagine life without it. It’s a pleasure to watch, a comfort to have around. But these high doses of TV must be having (and must have had) an effect.
Maybe that effect includes a deepening desire for simplicity, for sameness even across tens and hundreds of channels. For order and dominion over chaos. Look at this week’s New Yorker cover, with a man pointing a remote control at the ocean. We look to television to solve our problems.
From a 1990 essay by David Foster Wallace:
[S]o the gestalt of TV expands to absorb all problems associated with it. The pseudo-communities of prime-time soaps like Knots Landing and thirtysomething are viewer-soothing products of the very medium whose ambivalence about groups helps to erode people’s sense of connection. The staccato editing, sound bites, and summary treatment of knotty issues is network news’ accommodation of an Audience whose attention-span and appetite for complexity have atrophied a bit after years of high-dose spectation. Etc.
There’s a telling line in one of today’s Times articles:
“And so, in the battle for the living room, 2010 seems to be the year that the incumbent is strengthening its foothold.”
The answer to what otherwise might be an onslaught of online video choices (how confusing!) may be in the TV Everywhere plan developed by Jeffrey Bewkes, disarmingly rendered in yet another Times article today. It’s a way to extend online the existing cable model. Americans longing for their favorite shows will line up. They will have the freedom to pay for HBO across all possible platforms.
The question is whether the barriers to entry – comparative advantages – created by access to TV Everywhere products conditioned on subscription to pay TV will make it impossible for independent sources of online video to be successful. If those independent sources of online video don’t take off, there may be no reason for anyone to compete with cable providers to give Americans their single pipe into the home.
And the other question is whether anyone will care.
It was McLuhan in his “Understanding Media” who pointed out the content of any medium is always another medium – that old media does not vanish but becomes absorbed as the content of the new – so the “death” of cable, broadcast, music, film is less a death and more of an assimilation.
Borg-like, the internet moves inexorably forward, absorbing old media as it continues to grow into its own ubiquity. What remains to be seen is if the somatic power of the old media is retained or becomes transformed within the new and operates, as McLuhan also postulated, as an extension of our own nervous systems – allowing us to act as operators rather than mere passive viewers.
That is, of course, if we are allowed to.
Interesting times.