Sometimes it takes a few different stories, appearing in different news outlets, to tie an issue together and put it in its proper context. Case in point were several articles that came out this week dealing with television content, and the sale of such content to Apple’s iTunes, allowing consumers to download and watch programs at whim.
On Tuesday, the Fox television network announced that it had reached an agreement on the terms by which it would start selling some of its programming on iTunes. Shows like 24, Prison Break and The Shield became available for download on Tuesday morning for $1.99 each.
And thus, Fox joined ABC, NBC and CBS, which have also swooned under the iTunes spell. But is this really a win-win for the networks?
Well, not necessarily. As Businessweek‘s Jon Fine reports this week, the networks might be selling their content to Apple’s iTunes, but they’re not sharing these revenues with local station affiliates.
Still, it’s not all bad news for the guys at the local level. Fine writes that “Other big networks have signaled a willingness to cut the local stations in on such revenues, as evidenced by NBC’s late-April deal to jointly sell its 213 affiliate stations’ video programming. Which is nice, but it doesn’t stop local station guys’ nightmares from now coming true. Take, for instance, the media executive who told me he got hooked on Lost via iTunes, tried to watch it on television one Wednesday night, realized he didn’t know what network it was on, started fumfering around with TV listings, and then decided it was just easier to stick to downloads.”
Fine says that local television stations have been slow to catch up to the Web, since until now they (unlike print media) haven’t looked at the Web as a competitor. In fact, he points out, last year newspapers pulled in 41 percent of local online revenue last year, as opposed to 6 percent for local TV sites.
In a story that ties in to this increasing desire by consumers for on-demand, ad-free entertainment, Mediaweek reported earlier this week that “advertising clutter,” which is counted as non-programming minutes per hour in prime time among broadcast networks in 2005 increased by 2 percent, and 5 percent on the cable networks, according to an annual study on the topic.
While that might not seem all that bad, the research director for the study (which was conducted by “media agency” MindShare), called the results “disturbing” because, as Mediaweek’s John Consoli writes “more consumers are believing that TV has the most commercial clutter, even though the medium ranks behind print and online.”
So while new technologies like iTunes and TiVo have consumers fleeing from what they view as heavy advertising on television, Businessweek‘s Fine counsels that local stations start looking in to heavily promoting online ads to try and make up some of the revenue they may lose. “The growth of these ads may not make up all the money local TV players would lose should many viewers forsake their local station for streamed or downloaded shows,” he writes. “But given the high prices online video ads command, they might get close, or at least closer than newspapers would get if their consumers and advertisers defected to online. All local TV needs is to pick up, fast, on some of the online lessons newspapers learned a decade ago.”
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.