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"At this point, the model seems to morph every six months." I stopped reading here. The model is ads and subscription revenue. Ads have been around forever.

"At this point, the model seems to morph every six months." I stopped reading here. The model is ads and subscription revenue. Ads have been around forever. Subscription revenue has been around for at least twenty years. For instance HBO is decades old and they have even been producing original shows for over fifteen years. You also have some other revenue sources, like iTunes downloads. No huge change there. Cable operators have been selling pay-per-view for decades. How is that "morphing every six months"?

dalke 11y ago
What you got to what a set up for why that view ("seems") was wrong. You wrote "Ads have been around forever" A few paragraph later, which you didn't get to, the author says: > This is both a new crisis and an old one. When television began, it was a live medium. Replicating radio, it was not merely supported by admen; it was run by them. In TV’s early years, there were no showrunners: the person with ultimate authority was the product representative, the guy from Lysol or Lucky Strike. Beneath that man (always a man) was a network exec. ... > Advertisements shaped everything about early television programs, including their length and structure, with clear acts to provide logical inlets for ads to appear." ending up with: > This sponsor-down model held until the late fifties, around the time that the quiz-show scandals traumatized viewers: producers, in their quest to please ad reps, had cheated. Both economic pressures and the public mood contributed to increased creative control by networks, as the old one-sponsor model dissolved. You write: "Subscription revenue has been around for at least twenty years." The author's starting point is from before pay cable. ("Then came pay cable, the VCR, the DVD, the DVR, and the Internet".) As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United... point out, that was nominally the late 1940s, but 'Original programming over cable came in 1972 with deregulation of the industry.'

dalke 11y ago

What you got to what a set up for why that view ("seems") was wrong. You wrote "Ads have been around forever" A few paragraph later, which you didn't get to, the author says: > This is both a new crisis and an old one. When television began, it was a live medium. Replicating radio, it was not merely supported by admen; it was run by them. In TV’s early years, there were no showrunners: the person with ultimate authority was the product representative, the guy from Lysol or Lucky Strike. Beneath that man (always a man) was a network exec. ... > Advertisements shaped everything about early television programs, including their length and structure, with clear acts to provide logical inlets for ads to appear." ending up with: > This sponsor-down model held until the late fifties, around the time that the quiz-show scandals traumatized viewers: producers, in their quest to please ad reps, had cheated. Both economic pressures and the public mood contributed to increased creative control by networks, as the old one-sponsor model dissolved. You write: "Subscription revenue has been around for at least twenty years." The author's starting point is from before pay cable. ("Then came pay cable, the VCR, the DVD, the DVR, and the Internet".) As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United... point out, that was nominally the late 1940s, but 'Original programming over cable came in 1972 with deregulation of the industry.'