It started back in late July when George Gilder anounced that TV would die at the Always On conference:
“TV is dying fast and it will be followed by Hollywood. These industries fed on scarcity. There are only a few channels available. TV was technology of tyrants. It fed this advertising model that has collapsed,” Gilder told an audience at the conference. “The thirty-second spot is just going to die. Nobody is going to watch any ads they don’t want to see.
“Book culture and blog culture can redeem a civilization,” he said.
But skeptics pointed out that Blogs do not equal TV:
BUT TV & movies will not die because Economies of Scale and Scope. The entertainment industry business model relies heavily on economies of scale and scope. To create a truly profitable content requries huge capital investments in order to create contents that are “scalable” and with mass appeal. Those investments in technology, marketing, distribution, brand (of actor/actress), and production are so large that no “blogger” or individual content producer can hope to ever match.
Even Mark Cuban jumped into the fray announcing that ”Broadcast TV will never die.”
The internet can’t support the equivalent of broadcast TV because the internet can’t broadcast. It can deliever individual (unicast streams) streams, but that’s it. This is why AOL streaming 350k simultaneous Live8 users was a big deal. Instead of a single 300k video stream that every one tuned into, every viewer had to have their own 300k stream. That’s a boatload of bandwidth and is expensive.
What happens when 80mm people want to watch the SuperBowl? What happens when a measly 4mm want to watch a show? What happens when they want to see the show in 1080i HD?
As long as there are TV shows or events that can capture audiences in the millions, the only place to deliver those shows live will be on good old fashioned cable, satellite or broadcast or some other broadcast spectrum delivered TV. It ain’t gonna be the net anytime soon. That’s why broacast TV ain’t going away.
And Paul Kagan at Access Intelligence’s Cable Group heaped on relevant counter-arguments:
Not everyone listening, even in the newly productive blogosphere, agreed. A blogger--from the U.K., judging by his spelling--quickly typed across the big webcast screen: “Gilder is wrong about TV. Distribution can be a huge competitive advantage. Technologists often underestimate consumer habits. Modifying people’s behaviour is a huge cost burden.” Later, during the panel entitled “Dislocation of Media,” it may have been the same viewer who wrote that “ownership is important. The subscription model still works.” Indeed it does. A decade after Gilder’s dark prediction, the force is still with the movie, TV, cable and satellite industries ("big media” in Stanford terms). They’re doing nearly $150 billion in annual revenues. That’s one reason it’s called mass media.
The most salient criticism of Gilder comes from Canada’s Mark Evans:
Let’s be honest, this is an old mantra being recycled for 21st century if you recall Gilder pounded the table in the 1990s on how the power of fiber-optic technology was going to dramatically change how information was delivered. While Gilder was on the mark, he was far too bullish about the rate and impact of change. This didn’t prevent people from enthusiastically following his advice, which made Gilder quite wealthy - at least on paper - from selling newsletters and giving speeches.
Bringing up the rear, Om Malik summarizes the conflict in his beautiful succinct tone ”Why TV Won’t Die:”
Consumers, not the early adopters, have a certain expectation from television. The quality of image is one such expectation. The networking infrastructure challenge of video-over-the-Internet cannot be understated. I think it will be many years before we will be able to get the same QoS on what Anderson describes as “Internet TV.” A proof of consumer expectation is VoIP services and the 911 brouhaha. Back to Gilder - before we take him seriously again, folks remember the past… just saying!
Seeing this debate slowly make its rounds across the blogosphere made us realize that there is a fundamental problem no one is addressing: When anyone says “TV will die” they all have a different meaning. There is a SEMANTIC problem here. Here are just a few of the different definitions that people are bandying about:
1. The death of the 30-second spot (TV advertising).
2. The death of TV distribution (IP vs. broadcast, optical fiber vs. copper cable).
3. The death of the livingroom TV as we know it (convergence, PVR, Tivo).
4. The death of TV content/networks (reality tv, quality of programming).
5. The death of studio control of channels (the long tail, million channel universe).
6. The death of programming exec’s control over scheduling (Video-on-Demand, Tivo, BitTorrent).
And there are probably a few more that I’ve neglected to mention. Each individual in this debate takes one or more of these definitions and uses it to debate someone who is using a different definition. For example, Gilder seems to be promoting a combination of #5 and #6 but Mark Cuban is using definition #2 and #3. Since everyone is comparing apple’s and oranges its impossible for anyone to make heads or tails of the arguments because everyone is simultaneously right AND wrong at the same time.
