Saturday, July 09, 2005

According to Paul Guyot, the president of News Corp told him, "By this decade's end the only free television will be reality, news and some sports. Everything else will be subscription in one form or another."

I can dig it.

12:05 PM

6 Comments:

and yet there's the "freeSat" movement in europe where they are broadcasting free satellite channels to those who buy a set top box. Notably BBC's, ITV's and BskyB's move into this area...

http://informitv.com/articles/2005/02/02/bskybchieftalks/index.shtml

Free, ad-driven television will stay. It WILL be altered by things such as Tivo and satellite, but it will be here. Perhaps free tv will be the ones doing "second run" TV after it has already premiered elsewhere.

Everyone has to remember that corporations have invested billions upon billions over the years in the free tv model. They are not about to throw the baby out with the bathwater in the next ten or twenty years.

Hell, now we have ad-driven programming "broadcasts" to cell phones. In light of that do you truly think that model is done for?

By  Cunningham, at 12:56 PM  

An interesting flip-side to this, if News Corp guy is right, is how will the big companies create brand identity and advertise if they no longer have TV?

I wouldn't be too happy paying for a subscription to some show plastered with product placement and I'm not clear how well PP works anyway.

Radio and newspaper ads certainly don't strike me as the way to get people to pay 40-80 extra dollars for a Nike swoosh.

I'm wondering if an upshot of this might be to make brands that currently suffer from small advertising campaigns -- like 7-Up and RC Cola -- more competitive.

By  Steve Peterson, at 1:26 PM  

BBC is also providing some of their shows on download for free (or so I've heard). I believe its only open to the British right now though.

By  Jason Sanders, at 1:33 PM  

I can't wait to get cable or satellite channels that get away from having to purchase the entire tier of programming. Lets get it a la carte people and break it down from that even. Lets pay for each show we watch individually. Lost is most popular so it is $1.50 per episode, re-runs of Buffy a bargain at 30 cents per, listen to a preacher 10 cents...

By  Anonymous, at 10:22 PM  

"listen to a preacher 10 cents..."

Please, that's just his TWO cents. Not that I would buy it at any price.

By  writergurl, at 11:33 PM  

I read somewhere that TiVo is planning on running popup commercials of their own when you fast forward through the show's commercials. Could that possibly be true?

By  Unknown, at 4:29 PM  

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