Some TV folks recently commented on what might happen if our television channels were "unbundled," and instead of being forced to buy groups of channels, we could just pay for and watch the ones we wanted to.
For most of us who watch television, that would be a great thing. If I land on more than a dozen different channels in a month, that means that Kathy Ireland, Angie Harmon and Phoebe Cates must have teamed up to kick Guy Fieri's bleached blowout off Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives or Firefly is back with a deal to be aired on Lifetime, OWN, QVC, TLC, HGTV and C-SPAN 2.
For the people who run the cable companies or who own those channels with whom we would make some bye-bye, it would be a bad thing. Advertisers are funny about the concept of buying commercials on shows no one watches. No commercials means no shows, which means no channels. The people in the story estimate no more than 20 of our current national channels would survive unbundling. No one seems to be able to offer any reasons why this would be a bad thing for anyone other than the companies that can't survive unless they force you to buy something you don't want in order to get the few things you do want.
Such a move might focus the spotlight on the fact that some of the shows that have the biggest buzz and get the most media attention are really niche items more than anything else. Read online entertainment news or even print entertainment magazines and you might think that HBO's Game of Thrones and Girls were shows that most of the country was watching. But Thrones' rating highs during season three were between 5.5 and 6 million viewers. The May 14th episode of NCIS (spoiler: Gibbs wins) racked up more than 18 million watchers. That same night, the shows Grimm, Body of Proof and Golden Boy all had as many or more people watching them as the Thrones high, and the latter two of those have been cancelled. Girls is even more of a niche item, with its high-water viewer mark around a million and usual audience about the size of Oklahoma City.
The ratings for the HBO shows are thought of a little differently, of course, because they are on a premium channel -- one you have to pay extra to get. And many viewers are OK with waiting until the episodes are released on DVD (or with pirating them) instead of paying the extra HBO cost. A future of nothing but premium channels is a nightmare for any cable company and for the overwhelming majority of television networks subsidized by the 20 or so that most people watch.
Unbundling would probably also be a step along the road of switching from a network model of broadcasting to a show model of broadcasting, in which people might just buy only particular shows they want to watch. For example, I am a big fan of Justified, but I don't imagine I tune in its network, F/X, more than twice a month for anything else, and probably not at all during the show's off-season. If F/X is unbundled from other networks I don't want to watch and wouldn't pay for (Hey, Comedy Central! How you doing?), then I am sure someone somewhere will start to ask the question, "Why am I paying for this whole network when I only watch one show?" You might hope that F/X would think about that and start to make more shows that would grab people's interest (and as I understand it, they have other good shows people like. I'm probably not any network's target demo anyway).
But instead, they could react like the cable companies are doing and fight tooth and nail to keep their network from being "unbundled." Rather than adapt as Chicxulub approaches, they would prefer to roar and stomp the ground and say, "Pay no attention to that impending meteor of doom behind the curtain!"
Imagine with me one step further, in which you not only didn't pay for channels you don't want to watch and shows you don't want to watch, but within individual shows you didn't pay for segments you don't want to watch. I could pony up whatever the price was to watch any Dennis Miller segment of The O'Reilly Factor and ignore the rest of the Factor's blowhard host and his shenanigans. It's what I do anyway, but this way I'd be doing it for less money. I'm having trouble finding the downside to that.
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