{"id":443924,"date":"2010-03-18T11:30:36","date_gmt":"2010-03-18T15:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/business\/archive\/2010\/03\/cable-tv-is-doomed\/37675\/"},"modified":"2010-03-18T11:30:36","modified_gmt":"2010-03-18T15:30:36","slug":"cable-tv-is-doomed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/443924","title":{"rendered":"Cable TV Is Doomed"},"content":{"rendered":"

The death of cable television would
\nprobably still be inevitable without the Federal Communications
\nCommission’s national broadband plan<\/a>,<\/p>\n

which aims to expand broadband Internet access to 90% of Americans and
\ndramatically increase access speeds. But the measure, if it passes, will
\n accelerate the demise of cable television as the standard method of
\nconsuming television. Now that Google is leading the way<\/a> in developing Internet TV, the rise of this technology will come even faster.<\/p>\n

Cable
\nTV was always a bad model for the consumer because, in a sense, you’re
\npaying twice. When you watch The Daily Show, for example, you pay the
\ncable company to bring Comedy Central’s programming into your home. But
\nyou also contribute to Comedy Central’s bottom line by watching its
\nads. However, the Internet allows you to connect directly to Comedy
\nCentral without the cable company go-between. You only pay once — either with your eyeballs on ComedyCentral.com, or with your wallet on iTunes. (Sure, you have to pay for Internet
\naccess, but if you consider it a necessary utility rather than an
\noptional luxury, as the FCC’s national broadband plan clearly does,
\nthen that cost is incidental. That is, access to streaming TV shows
\nisn’t the primary reason you buy Internet access. It’s a bonus.)<\/p>\n

We’re already familiar with two business
\nmodels for web TV: Hulu’s ad-supported programming and iTunes’
\nmicro-payment system of about $2 per ad-free show. Both of these are
\npreferable to cable not only because they’re more cost-effective but
\nbecause they allow the viewer a greater degree of control. You only pay
\nfor what you watch, whereas with cable you pay primarily for things
\nyou’ll never watch.
\nAmericans watch on average 5 hours of TV a day<\/a>, so a
\ncable subscriber with 100 channels is only consuming 0.2% of the
\nprogramming he or she is charged for. With the average cable bill swelling to
\n $64 a month in 2009<\/a>
\nfrom $47.50 a month in 2004, ditching cable for web-based TV is an
\nincreasingly attractive option.* High-end consumer electronics companies
\nlike Sonos and Sony already sell products to link your TV wirelessly to
\nyour computer or directly to the Internet.<\/p>\n

The two greatest obstacles for web TV are video quality, which lags
\nonline, and certain programming. While more TV shows are available
\nonline all the time, news and sports remain the big holdouts. The
\nproblem is that these shows are best viewed in real time, but live
\nstreaming technology still produces jumpy and relatively low quality
\nvideo. Foxnews.com just can’t sustain a million viewers flooding its
\nweb site for four hours every evening. So news shows opt to upload
\nhigh-quality clips after the broadcast is over and sports events tend
\nto not make it online at all. But broadband speeds have risen for years
\n(excepting a recent stagnation) and the FCC aims to make it many times
\nfaster.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, broadband capacity will catch up to the
\nmonumental demands of live-streaming 60 Minutes and Monday Night
\nFootball to millions-strong audiences. The gradual rise in capacity will also close the gap in video
\n quality between web and cable. When YouTube launched in 2005, few users
\n had the bandwidth to watch the videos. Five years later, not only can
\nnearly everyone watch, but YouTube has introduced progressively higher
\nresolutions to take advantage of growing bandwidth. Eventually, the
\n picture quality of web videos could match or even exceed that of
\nhigh-definition TV. After all, cable video quality is fixed. Ratcheting
\nup the resolution, as with the introduction of digital high-definition TV,
\nrequires cable providers to overhaul entire networks of physical
\ninfrastructure and requires consumers to buy new hardware. Cable can’t keep that up.<\/p>\n

It’s
\nnot hard to foresee a day when Americans come home and, using an Internet TV system
\nthat would probably look a lot like your DVR menu, queue up the latest
\nsituation comedy or key in to a live news broadcast. Maybe shows will
\nhave traditional ads, maybe they’ll be ad free but cost a dollar each,
\nor maybe viewers will get to choose. But payment model would be just the
\n beginning of the changes. Networks, no longer forced to fill exactly 24
\n hours of daily programming, would act more like movie studios,
\nreleasing as many or as few titles as they wished. High-quality shows
\nwould prosper as networks dropped the unneeded filler. The market would
\nopen up to anyone with a camera and a server host, inviting a flood of
\nindependent TV shows produced on a shoestring by directors with broad
\ncreative license. Ironically, the much-troubled print journalism
\nbusiness could find its way into broadcast. Outlets like the New York
\nTimes and the Atlantic already put out video. One day, Atlantic TV could
\n compete with Nightline and Meet The Press. We’re no Katie Couric, but
\nit’s better than paying a cable bill.<\/p>\n

_______________<\/p>\n

*Of course, I know that cable is cheaper because it bundles. Five hours of TV a day multiplied by $2 per hour-long show would means $300 a month on cable. That’s too much. So what’s more likely is that iTunes or Hulu begins experimenting with different pay models. One can imagine, say, $10
\na month for infinite access to Hulu, or a Sam’s Club-style program where
\npaying a low monthly subscription rate gives viewers a cheaper micropayment rate on each iTunes-sold show. The specific strategies don’t particularly matter now. The point is that there’s no cable-bill
\nmiddle-man, and that cuts significant fees on manpower and infrastructure upkeep. <\/p>\n



\n

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The death of cable television would probably still be inevitable without the Federal Communications Commission’s national broadband plan, which aims to expand broadband Internet access to 90% of Americans and dramatically increase access speeds. But the measure, if it passes, will accelerate the demise of cable television as the standard method of consuming television. Now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6271,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-443924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6271"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}