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>when I was a teen we watched music videos, but a 70-year old man bought the network and decided that he didn't want us to watch music videos. That's funny, bu

>when I was a teen we watched music videos, but a 70-year old man bought the network and decided that he didn't want us to watch music videos. That's funny, but empirically that's not what happened. A quant working at MTV realized that reality TV like Real World, Jackass, and The Osbournes were way more lucrative and way more popular. At the same time music exploded in access (Napster). People voted with their eyeballs. To make sense of the decisions that the TV industry makes you should also consider what their moat is and how they tried to protect it from the internet. Studios still made content people wanted to watch, monetizing it became a lot harder which is why (strictly) ratings became less important. Bundling came around because it was easier for Disney to force Comcast to swallow channels like Lifetime and Toon Disney if they needed that to get access to ESPN. ESPN (live sports) has no digital compliment and for many people is the only reason they pay for Cable. The name of the game then became "How much money can we extract out of the remaining ESPN subscribers".

PaulHoule 6y ago
I think the last part is right. In reality it is slow motion suicide to lose engagement with your customer. That is, the industry would have transitioned to a "harvesting" model with increasing cable bills and fleeing subscribers no matter what the competitive threat (internet, netflix, ...) is. The competitive threat determines where the crisis happens, but the crisis is built into the product. I don't believe it about MTV. I don't think anybody watches the Real World, Jackass, or the Osbournes. They read in the newspaper that somebody got killed acting out a scene from Jackass or they watch the highlight reel for the Osbournes on Entertainment Tonight. The meaning of that kind of television is not in the watching, but in being a subject for the rest of the media.

PaulHoule 6y ago

I think the last part is right. In reality it is slow motion suicide to lose engagement with your customer. That is, the industry would have transitioned to a "harvesting" model with increasing cable bills and fleeing subscribers no matter what the competitive threat (internet, netflix, ...) is. The competitive threat determines where the crisis happens, but the crisis is built into the product. I don't believe it about MTV. I don't think anybody watches the Real World, Jackass, or the Osbournes. They read in the newspaper that somebody got killed acting out a scene from Jackass or they watch the highlight reel for the Osbournes on Entertainment Tonight. The meaning of that kind of television is not in the watching, but in being a subject for the rest of the media.