Posts Tagged ‘television’
“Badger hates Society, and invitations, and dinner, and all that sort of thing”*…
Americans are now spending more time alone– mostly at home– than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality. While the pandemic certainly enforced some of that isolation; the post-COVID world remains extraordinarily atomized.
In a bracing essay, Derek Thompson, explores the emergence of this wide-spread isolation, unpacking its drivers, enumerating its considerable (personal and civic) costs, musing on the possible impact of AI, and pondering what might lead to a return to sociability…
… “I have a view that is uncommon among social scientists, which is that moral revolutions are real and they change our culture,” Robert Putnam [author of Bowling Alone] told me. In the early 20th century, a group of liberal Christians, including the pastor Walter Rauschenbusch, urged other Christians to expand their faith from a narrow concern for personal salvation to a public concern for justice. Their movement, which became known as the Social Gospel, was instrumental in passing major political reforms, such as the abolition of child labor. It also encouraged a more communitarian approach to American life, which manifested in an array of entirely secular congregations that met in union halls and community centers and dining rooms. All of this came out of a particular alchemy of writing and thinking and organizing. No one can say precisely how to change a nation’s moral-emotional atmosphere, but what’s certain is that atmospheres do change. Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade.
The anti-social century is the result of one such cascade, of chosen solitude, accelerated by digital-world progress and physical-world regress. But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century. New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time. Independent bookstores are booming—the American Booksellers Association has reported more than 50 percent growth since 2009—and in cities such as New York City and Washington, D.C., many of them have become miniature theaters, with regular standing-room-only crowds gathered for author readings. More districts and states are banning smartphones in schools, a national experiment that could, optimistically, improve children’s focus and their physical-world relationships. In the past few years, board-game cafés have flowered across the country, and their business is expected to nearly double by 2030. These cafés buck an 80-year trend. Instead of turning a previously social form of entertainment into a private one, they turn a living-room pastime into a destination activity. As sweeping as the social revolution I’ve described might seem, it’s built from the ground up by institutions and decisions that are profoundly within our control: as humble as a café, as small as a new phone locker at school…
On how we spend our time and what that yields: “The Anti-Social Century,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social in @theatlantic.com (gift article).
See also: “You’re Being Alienated From Your Own Attention,” from @chrislhayes.bsky.social (also in @theatlantic.com, also a gift article)
* Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
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As we call a friend, we might recall that it was on this date in 1915 that Alexander Graham Bell placed the first transcontinental phone call, from New York to San Francisco, where the Panama–Pacific International Exposition celebrations were underway and his assistant, his assistant Thomas Augustus Watson stood by. Bell repeated his famous first telephonic words, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you,” to which Watson this time replied “It will take me five days to get there now!” Bell’s call officially initiated AT&T’s transcontinental service.
And, on ths date 45 years later, in 1959, The first non-stop transcontinental commercial jet trip was made by an American Airlines Boeing 707, from Los Angeles to New York. The sleek silver plane made the flight in airline official time of 4 hours and 3 minutes, half the usual scheduled time for the prop-driven DC- 7Cs then in regular use on that route.
“The sentiment of justice is so natural, and so universally acquired by all mankind, that it seems to be independent of all law, all party, all religion”*…
Yunsuh Nike Wee, Daniel Sznycer, and Jaimie Arona Krems on an example of human values that seems due more to shared intuitions than local customs or social practices…
The Bible’s lex talionis – “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (Exodus 21:24-27) – has captured the human imagination for millennia. This idea of fairness has been a model for ensuring justice when bodily harm is inflicted.
Thanks to the work of linguists, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, researchers know a lot about how different body parts are appraised in societies both small and large, from ancient times to the present day.
But where did such laws originate?
According to one school of thought, laws are cultural constructions – meaning they vary across cultures and historical periods, adapting to local customs and social practices. By this logic, laws about bodily damage would differ substantially between cultures.
Our new study explored a different possibility – that laws about bodily damage are rooted in something universal about human nature: shared intuitions about the value of body parts.
Do people across cultures and throughout history agree on which body parts are more or less valuable? Until now, no one had systematically tested whether body parts are valued similarly across space, time and levels of legal expertise – that is, among laypeople versus lawmakers.
We are psychologists who study evaluative processes and social interactions. In previous research, we have identified regularities in how people evaluate different wrongful actions, personal characteristics, friends, and foods. The body is perhaps a person’s most valuable asset, and in this study we analyzed how people value its different parts. We investigated links between intuitions about the value of body parts and laws about bodily damage…
… If people have intuitive knowledge of the values of different body parts, might this knowledge underpin laws about bodily damage across cultures and historical eras?
To test this hypothesis, we conducted a study involving 614 people from the United States and India. The participants read descriptions of various body parts, such as “one arm,” “one foot,” “the nose,” “one eye” and “one molar tooth.” We chose these body parts because they were featured in legal codes from five different cultures and historical periods that we studied: the Law of Æthelberht from Kent, England, in 600 C.E., the Guta lag from Gotland, Sweden, in 1220 C.E., and modern workers’ compensation laws from the United States, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates…
… Our findings were striking. The values placed on body parts by both laypeople and lawmakers were largely consistent. The more highly American laypeople tended to value a given body part, the more valuable this body part seemed also to Indian laypeople, to American, Korean and Emirati lawmakers, to King Æthelberht and to the authors of the Guta lag. For example, laypeople and lawmakers across cultures and over centuries generally agree that the index finger is more valuable than the ring finger, and that one eye is more valuable than one ear.
But do people value body parts accurately, in a way that corresponds with their actual functionality? There are some hints that, yes, they do. For example, laypeople and lawmakers regard the loss of a single part as less severe than the loss of multiples of that part. In addition, laypeople and lawmakers regard the loss of a part as less severe than the loss of the whole; the loss of a thumb is less severe than the loss of a hand, and the loss of a hand is less severe than the loss of an arm…
… Much of what counts as moral or immoral, legal or illegal, varies from place to place. Drinking alcohol, eating meat and cousin marriage, for example, have been variously condemned or favored in different times and places.
But recent research has also shown that, in some domains, there is much more moral and legal consensus about what is wrong, across cultures and even throughout the millennia. Wrongdoing – arson, theft, fraud, trespassing and disorderly conduct – appears to engender a morality and related laws that are similar across times and places. Laws about bodily damage also seem to fit into this category of moral or legal universals…
“An eye for an eye: People agree about the values of body parts across cultures and eras,” from @us.theconversation.com.
* Voltaire
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As we contemplate corporeal consensus, we might recall that on this date in 1974 (after the 1973 airing of a series of made-for-TV movies that established the character), The Six Million Dollar Man debuted as a weekly hour-long series.
Unlike superhero movies today, The Six Million Dollar Man TV series was not based on a comic book title. Instead, the science fiction, fantasy, adventure series was based Martin Caidin’s 1972 novel Cyborg and its three sequels. The series starred Lee Majors as an astronaut whose life is forever changed after a NASA test flight accident. Colonel Steve Austin awoke after the accident to find that his body had been rebuilt with bionic parts including two legs, one arm and one eye. The cost of the operation ran roughly $6 million. Now a super-human, Austin could run over 60 mph and had incredible strength. He found work as a secret agent for the Office of Scientific Intelligence. Before the show debuted on this day in 1974, three movie pilots had already been shown on ABC the year before. In 1975, a two-part episode featured Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner), a professional tennis player who experienced a parachuting accident and was given bionic parts as well. However, her body rejected these parts and died. Then again, he character was so popular, Sommers’ character came back to life to star in her own series, The Bionic Woman. Both series were hugely popular and ran through 1978. Then, three new made-for-TV movies starring the couple aired in 1987, 1989 and 1994 and all three also starred Lee Majors’ son (Lee Majors II) as OSI agent Jim Castillian… – source
“It turns out that we’re actually capable of something other than neoliberalism and actually we’re really capable of enjoying ourselves more than we do under neoliberalism”*…
… but the path from here to there, the estimable Brad DeLong warns, could be overcast. In notes for his lectures to his Econ 135 class at Berkeley (“The History of Economic Growth,” shared in his terrific newsletter, Grasping Reality) he begins with an explanation of neoliberalism [also explained here– source of the image above], then considers what might be next…
So what is coming after neoliberalism?
First, one thing that is coming, at least here in America, is renewed or perhaps novel attention to places. Places have never been important in American identity. American identity has, instead, long been defined by a focus on mobility and opportunity. Americans are people who have moved to new places—undertaken errands unto the Wilderness—precisely because of the mistakes being made in and the limitations circumscribing their choices where they were. Americans are people who have abandoned some Old World because of its mistakes, and have moved to a New World to remake themselves and make a new society that will at least make different mistakes. The promise of more abundant resources and the chance to build a better life has driven this pattern of migration and reinvention. Thus the advice given to those who find their birth-region constraining or insufficiently prosperous has always been “go west!”: move to opportunity.
My Richardson ancestors were farmers in the hilly, rocky terrain of New England in the 1840s. Farming the land was difficult. To say that New England soil is “stony” is to greatly understate the case, as you can see even today from the ubiquitous stone walls found throughout New England all built from rocks that had to be removed from the fields before farming could even begin.
The Richardson family decided to leave New Hampshire and traveled down the Ohio River to St. Louis, where they established a pharmaceutical company: the Richardson Drug Company. The family story is that they specialized in cocaine—legal at the time, and their cocaine products were very low concentration, nothing like lines or crack. But, still, my ancestors became the very first cocaine pushers west of the Mississippi in St. Louis. The company was quite successful for two generations. Then, one New Year’s Day, a catastrophic fire destroyed their chemical plant. The fire department was, the story goes, slow to respond, as they were recovering from New Year’s Eve. And how does a catastrophic fire start when the plant is entirely shut down for the holiday. I am suspicious of my ancestors.
Rather than rebuild the plant, the Richardsons opted to take the large insurance settlement and shift their focus to banking. The course of the Richardsons is thus a very American story: change who you are and what you are doing and where you are doing several times over the course of even a few generations.
The Neoliberal Order was about capitalism but it was also about freedom. And one aspect of this freedom was freedom to successfully organize to resist being dominated by the behemoths of the New Deal Order: Big Government, Big Business, Big Labor, and also Big Cultural Expectations. The assumption that your husband should get a job with a large corporation and commute by car as you moved to suburbia and that you alone should raise the children was an essential part of the New Deal Order. And it called forth a middle-class feminist rebellion. The assumption that Blacks should largely stay in their place and be happy with slow advances toward equal rights and a small share of the benefits from social-insurance programs was an essential part of the bargains in the 1930s that formed the New Deal Order. The Black Civil Rights movement was not in itself neoliberal, but was an expression of the underlying anti-system anti-bureaucracy current. And with respect to land-use planning—Big Government bureaucrats should not be able to assist Big Finance money and Big Business bulldozers to order you around and bulldoze and “renew” your community. It was individual unbureaucratic enterpreneurship that was supposed to be beautiful. Hence NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard-ism) as we know it today is an important piece of the Neoliberal Order, as it actually was on the ground.
Consider San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway, an 8-story, 90-foot high structure that blocked views of the ocean and bay. Residents preferred to maintain the open views rather than prioritize faster commutes for drivers from Marin County. This was seen as a victory for rational, people-centered development at the time. And the post-1989 earthquake removal of the initial parts of the Embarcadero Freeway was a huge win—it resulted in a much more pleasant and open waterfront area for residents and visitors to enjoy.
But in the long run NIMBYism has been a disaster. Berkeley houses no more people now than it did fifty years ago. So housing prices have skyrocketed, and the guy who runs the Little Farm Children’s Center in Tilden Park has to commute from beyond the Altamont Pass.
NIMBYism killed America’s tradition of moving to opportunity stone dead. This has been a very powerful if indirect cause of rage against The Neoliberal Order Machine. Thus the growing call for place-based policies to make opportunity move to where people are, instead of assuming people will move to opportunity. The Polanyian right to the land—to keep Schumpeterian creative-destruction from destroying your community as a side-effect of its pursuit of profit—is and will take a more prominent role in whatever comes after the Neoliberal Order.
Second, the “after” will include explicit industrial policies. The Neoliberal Order was about hyperglobalization. Under the Neoliberal Order it was assumed that free trade and laissez-faire policies were beneficial for all. They were beneficial for the Global North as they heightened the concentration of high-value and high-externality activities like science, engineering, and worthwhile manufacturing within itself. And they were beneficial for the Global South because only the threat that economic activity and talented people would leave could curb the predatory instincts of Global South governments. The concerns of economists like W. Arthur Lewis that trade in a globalized market on terms increasingly tilted against primary products actually developed the fact of underdevelopment were pushed to one side.
But now the assumption that free trade works to concentrate high-value and high-externality activities like science, engineering, and worthwhile manufacturing in the United States is very much in doubt. The CHIPS Act of the Biden administration signals the end of the belief that the global market was working in America’s favor. The CHIPS Act represents a shift away from the implicit acceptance of the global market’s inequities now that they no longer seem to be working so strongly in America’s favor. Instead, there is now a demand for more explicit industrial policies as an alternative..
Third, the “after” will include a strong demand for champions of the people. There is growing recognition that neoliberalism has led to an unfair domestic plutocracy. The 2008 Republican presidential and vice-presidential ticket was almost composed of individuals who collectively owned 20 houses—John McCain owned 12 houses, and Mitt Romney owned 8. Political advisors felt that that foreclosed choosing Romney as likely to make the ticket look ridiculous, and so they prevailed on McCain to choose the very odd Alaska Governor Sarah Palin insted.
What to do about plutocracy, where there is a growing belief that the system is working not for the people but for the super-rich and for their rootless cosmopolite allies and clients? Power requires countervailing power. Hence what is needed is someone powerful to vindicate the interests of the common people, rather than of some privileged élite: a strongman to disrupt the status quo and the inertia of “business as usual”.
It has never been the case that the “strongman” has to come from the people. Indeed, often in history a plutocrat, oligarch, or aristocrat has been preferred—a “class traitor” as other members of Harvard’s Porcellian Society whispered about their fellow member, New Deal President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The idea is that only someone who has thoroughly benefitted from being in the system and knows it inside and out will know enough about its vulnerability to be able to disrupt it.
Analogously, consider Andrew Jackson. He positioned himself as a defender of the common people against the system—land speculators, Philadelphia financiers, and corrupt politicians who together made sure that the people could not prosper as America grew.vJackson presented himself as an outsider who would protect the interests of the “Kentucky frontiersmen” against the domestic élite, even though he himself was no true frontiersman.
Indeed, the earliest examples of strongman politicians overthrowing existing oligarchic systems to vindicate at least the short-run interests of a broader “people” come from the early days of Classical Hellenic civilization. Peisistratos, Tyrant of Athens in the -500s, is the prime historical example. The Tyrants abolished debt slavery, canceled the debts of the overindebted, and redistributed land more equitably—paving the way for the establishment of Hellenic democracy, which was a very attractive civilization as far as the societies of domination of those days went.
Unfortunately for us, the champions of the people being chosen today appear more fascist than populist—more interested in telling people what to do to make them followers to burnish the glory of the leader than in lifting the burdens from the people by cancelling the debts and redistributing the land—and more kleptocrat than plutocrat, with the leader’s skills more in running a con game than in understanding the workings of the system.
Fourth, what is coming after the Neoliberal Order appears to be a politics of fear: fear of the diverse, fear of the woke, fear of the other—whatever the other is, people who seem strange and weird—and fear of the rootless cosmopolite.
In the last analysis, the Neoliberal Order fell because it did not deliver the goods. Free markets and largely ineffectual gestures at freeing-up individual autonomy from bureaucracy were not enough to create a society where people felt at home, even if there was a great expansion of individual freedom to choose elsewise than commanded by formerly-dominant social norms. But the failure of the past Order did not in itself bring a new one into existence. In this sense we are in a similar period of uncertainty to that of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Back then, before he died in Mussolini’s jail, the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci observed: “The Old Order is dying, and the New Order appears perhaps to be stillborn: now is a time of monsters”…
Oh, to be able to go back to school… Eminently worth reading in full: “Neoliberalism & After,” from @delong.bsky.social. See also the notes from a proximate lecture: “Post-2010 “Polycrisis”: Culture, Communications, Politics, & War.”
* “It turns out that we’re actually capable of something other than neoliberalism and actually we’re really capable of enjoying ourselves more than we do under neoliberalism. It feels that if neoliberalism is first about privatizing desire and imagination before the economy, then we’re in this process of publicizing it again.” – Rebecca Solnit
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As we fumble with the future, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that 60 Minutes, which had premiered two months earlier, introduced its trademark “ticking stopwatch” opening logo/transition. 60 Minutes is, of course, the most-watched television news show in history.
Since near the show’s inception in 1968, the opening of 60 Minutes features a stopwatch. The Aristo (Heuer) design first appeared in 1978. On October 29, 2006, the background changed to red, the title text color changed to white, and the stopwatch was shifted to the upright position. This version was used from 1992 to 2006 (the Square 721 type was changed in 1998). Source
“If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour… then you are the sucker”*…
Patrick Redford in the always-enlightening (and entertaining) Defector, on ESPN’s pivot to wagering…
Like an anglerfish lighting its lure, ESPN is attempting to use the shiny bauble of its broadcast rights and import within the sports media world to tempt people onto its gambling platform. The Worldwide Leader signed a 10-year, $2 billion deal with Penn Entertainment one year ago, on the theory that a fusion of ESPN’s brand with Penn’s sportsbook would make for a serious player in the sports gambling world. That theory, which has borne dubious results thus far, depends upon ESPN transforming itself into a gushing firehose of gambling sludge.
To that end, the company broadcast its gambling show ESPN Bet on regular ESPN for the first time this week, shuffling it over from lesser auxiliary ESPNs onto the main channel for the purpose of shoving the words ESPN Bet—also the name of the company’s sportsbook—in front of as many people as possible before football season. I watched both of this week’s episodes, curious what sort of impression the company would try to make. What strategies would it use to turn parlays into paydays? What I saw was an hour-long advertisement that made thin, watery attempts to justify itself as programming, which it is not. The point of ESPN Bet, italicized, is not to make you smarter about sports or give you good picks, but to divert the nascent gambler away from the two biggest sportsbooks in the country and onto ESPN Bet, plain text.
The show is hosted by Tyler Fulghum and Joe Fortenbaugh. It adheres to a very simple pattern: Here is something you can bet on (e.g.: NFL Comeback Player of the Year, the Cincinnati Reds, Israel Adesanya); here are the odds; here is an affirmative or negative case for why to bet or not bet on or against those odds. There are various gimmicky setups that don’t so much disguise this basic loop as they merely vary its cadence…
…
… Something as abstract as LSU and Miami’s making the College Football Playoff four months from now is already banal talk-show fodder on its own; ESPN Bet‘s outlook is even more refracted. The topic is not whether one or both of those teams make the CFP, but rather how correctly those teams’ respective chances of making the CFP are calibrated on this gambling app. The drama, to the extent there is any, is located not in anything that happens on the field or court, but essentially in arbitrage. ESPN Bet is SportsCenter, but about a number instead of a game.
The ostensible point is to make you, the viewer, a more informed gambler so you can make money. There are a number of lies being told here. The most obvious one concerns the topline nature of the operation: Casinos exist to separate you from your money, not to help you take theirs. No matter how spiffy Fortenbaugh’s mustache is—personally, I think he looks cool; Ray Ratto says he looks like “Ronald Colman in a 1953 black-and-white movie” and clearly means this as a bad thing—and how convincing he is about the solidity of the Orioles money line, anyone who is thinking about this rationally has to know there is no algorithmic way to beat the computers. Rather, if there is, it will not be broadcast in public by the very entity that stands to lose money off anybody learning it. There are sharps and there is everyone else, a dissonance that makes ESPN Bet‘s false performance of gambling knowledge all the more icky.
If you are serious about any of this, you know you’re being sold something. The show knows it’s selling you something, and while this is occasionally acknowledged—Fortenbaugh mentioned on Monday where the sharp money was going, which should prompt any viewer to ask what that makes them—the predatory artifice of ESPN Bet is only barely subtext. The specifics are interesting to the extent that they’re pushing a ton of football futures bullshit, as football is the most gambled upon sport in the U.S. But really, all that matters is that Fulghum and Fortenbaugh look you in the eye and say the words “ESPN Bet.” The show is straightforwardly an ad for the app, which ESPN executives have openly talked about on earnings calls.
The incentives are obvious. DraftKings and FanDuel have roughly equal shares of a combined 74.5 percent of the U.S. gambling market. ESPN Bet, meanwhile, controls a paltry 3.2 percent as of the second quarter of the fiscal year, which is down from 4.7 percent in the first quarter. They are getting crushed. ESPN Bet’s competitors are an order of magnitude larger because of first mover advantage, and the only strategic fulcrum ESPN has to utilize is its essentiality as a broadcaster. ESPN’s value proposition is that unlike DraftKings or FanDuel, it operates a vast media apparatus, one that can set itself on a gentle slope, sliding its audience inexorably toward gambling on their phones. An example of that approach’s noxiousness in practice, as Kathryn Xu wrote earlier this year, is the win probability graphic ESPN slaps on baseball broadcasts. But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s Penn CTO Aaron LaBerge on his company’s earnings call last week:
For example, when we have account linking in November, if you place a parlay on ESPN Bet, it’s going to appear in the ESPN app. You have to do no work. It’s going to be seamless. If anyone here has placed a parlay of more than two or three legs, you know that’s a struggle. And so, it’s just going to be like magic for you to actually consume that within ESPN. (source)
“Magic” is offensively lofty rhetoric to use about “consum[ing] that” when the sum total of “that” is losing $15 on a Jalen Williams-centric parlay without having to leave the ESPN appsphere. In the case of something like the Tigers’ birdbrained same game parlays, there is at least baseball (albeit Detroit Tigers baseball) at the core of the experience. Gambling content that is attached, remora-like, to the side of a sports-watching experience is annoying but ultimately ignorable. ESPN Bet is the gambling content shorn of the sports, like if your spam folder was a TV show.
Consider the question of what sort of audience ESPN Bet is even for. Anyone sharp and dedicated enough to actually make money on sports gambling is not getting their picks from two energetic guys on the TV. A viewer rational enough to know this is a sucker’s game will find ESPN Bet equally useless if not outright reprehensible. A viewer who wants to learn something about sports or have fun will find far better options.
What is actually sinister about this show isn’t its adjacency to gambling, but its nihilism. At best this is a show for nobody. Background music hums along behind the hosts throughout the broadcast, an obvious sign that this is intended less as programming you are meant to pay any actual attention to and more as something engineered to run in the background while you wait out an oil change or a connecting flight, a dog whistle audible to the most abject of marks. It is scarcely distinguishable from the commercials that break up its runtime, as it is itself a commercial. The show walks backward, away from the viewer, hoping to draw them into the void…
“‘ESPN Bet’ Is A Black Hole” (gift article) from @redford in @DefectorMedia.
See also: “Sports Betting Is Legal, and Sportswriting Might Never Recover.”
And for a different (and equally astounding/depressing) example of the outsized impact of money on sports see “Ex-Pac-12 Teams Will Face Some of The Worst Travel Distances in Power-Conference History,” from @Neil_Paine.
* Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) in Rounders
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As we look for the line, we might recall that it was on this date in 1991 that the World Wide Web was introduced to the world at large.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim) proposed the system to his colleagues at CERN. He got a working system implemented by the end of 1990, including a browser called WorldWideWeb (which became the name of the project and of the network) and an HTTP server running at CERN. As part of that development, he defined the first version of the HTTP protocol, the basic URL syntax, and implicitly made HTML the primary document format.
The technology was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991, and then– with the publication of this (likely the first public) web page— to the whole Internet 32 years ago today. Within the next two years, there were 50 websites created. (Today, while it is understood that the number of active sites fluctuates, the total is estimated at over 1.5 billion… more than a handful, gambling sites.)
“How television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged”*…
… and, as Mark Sweney reports, that staging is undergoing a fundamental transition. Case in point: Warner Bros Discovery’s recent massive write-down of traditional broadcast assets as it struggles to play catch-up with streaming and video services…
Warner Bros Discovery’s announcement… of a $9bn (£7bn) writedown in the value of its TV networks is a stark acknowledgment of the damage the streaming wars are inflicting on traditional broadcasting models.
The astonishing figure, which pushed the US entertainment group to a quarterly net loss of $10bn (£7.9bn) and sent shares sliding 12% in early trading on Thursday, lays bare how channels such as CNN, TLC and the Food Network can no longer rely on a captive cable subscriber base.
The rapid consumer shift away from high-priced TV packages, coupled with the inexorable decline in advertising, has forced traditional TV companies to invest billions in low-cost streaming services to catch up with first movers such as Netflix.
The question is now whether companies such as WBD – home to TV and film content including Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, The Big Bang Theory, Succession, Friends and all Olympics events – can build the scale and make significant profits from their streaming operations before the death of linear television delivered by cable, satellite or aerial…
…
… Disney has more than 200 million global streaming subscribers, and WBD exceeds 100 million globally, with Discovery+ now the fastest-growing service in the UK thanks to winning the rights to show every Olympic discipline. But the battle is not just to continue to drive scale.
Boosting revenue and profits per subscriber has become critical through strategies including rapid rounds of price increases – Disney has just announced a set of price rises for later this year – as well as driving slightly cheaper ad-funded tiers to pull in cost-conscious consumers.
While traditional TV companies struggle with managing the decline in their legacy businesses, with drastic rounds of cost-cutting after a decade of profligate spending on content in the first decade of the streaming wars, Netflix points to a viable future.
The streaming giant, which once struggled with mounting losses running into tens of billions of dollars, has seen its market value surge by more than 50% over the past year after turning the profitability corner while continuing to see significant growth in subscribers.
WBD’s chief executive, David Zaslav, who has considered breaking up the company but concluded that is not currently the best option, said the market was being hit by a “generational disruption” that requires traditional TV companies to take “bold, necessary steps”.
Richard Broughton, director at Ampere Analysis, said: “Legacy TV businesses are in decline but the shift is not so rapid that it can’t be managed. There are still a lot of broadcast TV viewers, they have the time to pivot to profitability in the streaming world.”…
Dealing with disruption: “‘Traditional TV is dying’: can networks pivot and survive?” from @marksweney in @guardian.
Corollary damage: “two venerable TV trade publications, Broadcasting & Cable and Multichannel News, will shut down“
See also: “The music industry is suffering from a streaming hangover” (gift link) and on a more upbeat note, “Radio shows surprising resilience even in a rapidly changing media world.”
For (just one example of) the kind of speculation that tectonic shifts of this sort can elicit: “Why Apple should buy Warner Bros. Discovery. No, seriously.“
And for one take on why all of this is underway: “The Addiction Economy.”
* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
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As we muse on media, we might spare a thought for Dominick George “Don” Pardo Jr.; he died on this date in 2014. A member of the Television Hall of Fame, Pardo had a 70-year tenure with NBC, working as the announcer for early incarnations of such notable shows as The Price Is Right, Jackpot, Jeopardy!, Three on a Match, Winning Streak, and NBC Nightly News. His longest, and best-known, announcing job was for NBC’s Saturday Night Live, a job he held for 38 seasons, from the show’s debut in 1975 until his death.
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