Unlimited content from a trusted source for no cost….
In the 1990s, television went through its first trauma – the arrival of cable.
Before that, networks pretty much had a monopoly on the attention of the nation.
There were, for all practical purposes, 3 networks dividing a viewership of 100 million households.
One did not have to be a programming genius to garner a viewershipf 20-30 million households, and the ad revenues that came with that.
Those days ended with the arrival of cable, and today there are so many channels that any given cable network is delighted with .3% of the given viewership at any given time.
The first cable channels aped the networks. That is, they tried to be all things to all people all the time: sports, news, drama, comedy, game shows. They were mini-networks. I actually worked for Christian Science Monitor TV in Boston (a failed cable network) as we produced a daily news show for Discovery – Monitor, with John Hart.
Sandy Sokolow, who had been Walter Cronkite’s EP ran the award winning show.
Ah… those were the days.
But cable channels soon discovered that their paths to success lay rather in specialization:
Food Network
Travel Channel
ESPN
Golf Channel
HGTV
And so on….
Each channel carved out its own particular area of specialization and in fact, over time, slowly became recognized for a degree of expertise in that area. This is what we call branding with a vengance.
As if cable weren’t enough of a problem along came the web.
And, as usual, the cable channels initially responded as they had to the networks – they simply continued to produce programs and ‘back’ them with ‘more information’ on the web.
Once again, it will take them time to ‘get it’.
The web is not just another broadcasting platform, putting your show onto people’s computers with the same ease as it puts it onto their television sets.
In case you have not noticed, the web goes both ways – info in and info out.
It’s the info out part that’s the critical difference, though most cablecasters pay little attention to this aspect of the web, much to their loss.
What the web+online communities (ie, viewers of The Food Network all love food), offers is the chance to build a Creative Collective – a hive, if you will, of information and content that can be shared and nurtured.
I would venture to guess that most viewers of The Food Network not only like to watch food shows, they probably have opinions and not a few recipes to add to the mix, if they were allowed to.
Viewers of The Travel Channel, all with a passion for travel, no doubt have favorite haunts, restaurants, hotels and so on that they could also contribute and talk about.
Ever hear of Zagat?
Where do you think the information came from?
In those halcyon days of yore, Tim and Nina Zagat only had a xerox machine and a few Manhattan friends to work with. You have the whole world and this incredibly powerful machine.
Plug it in.
Turn it on.
You would be astonished at how much potential there lies just at your fingertips, if only you could figure out how to use it.
