I have a feeling that insomnia is seldom a good thing. I found myself awake in the middle of the night, still very tired but too tired to fall back to sleep. So I went ahead and got out of bed after flipping through many channels of lame TV, got on the computer and played way, way, way too many hands of spider solitaire. This has happened before but not in a long while. I know I am going to pay for this later, probably before lunch time.
If you get up in the middle of the night and are a TV addict like I am, the first thing you notice is that the state of middle of the night television is extremely weak. I had cable when I lived in an apartment many years ago that I gave up when I bought my first house. I lived in that house for 12 years without cable and only saw what cable had to offer when visiting friends and family or staying in motels on the road. After a couple of days viewing I got the idea that I wasn’t really missing much. Definitely not enough to be paying for it, however I did miss my Formula 1 races, and Tour de France.
I have since gotten married and my wife had DirectTV and is a fan of HGTV in particular, so we kept the dish and the programming but it still gives me frustrations. It was bad enough to have thirteen channels with nothing worth watching but now to have 100+ channels with nothing worth watching and to be paying for it seems like the definition of madness.
Why is it that we have to pay for all these channels when they are still driven by commercials? And in the middle of the night it is even worse. 2/3 of the channels are devoted to infomercials, the worst form of punishment to mankind. There has got to be a better business model to follow, one where the advertisements pay to support the producers, and the producers try the best to produce something that the audience will want in order to get a large enough audience so that they can charge the advertisers for reaching said audience enough to pay for the cost to produce and distribute the product to the audience. Wait just a minute. That is the business model used since the inception of TV. Why aren’t they doing that now?
Don’t get me wrong, I like many of the channels on DirectTV, such as SPEED, History, Discovery, BBC, and CNBC. I have also been known to hit VH1 classics to see if there is anything good on, but each of these channels has commercials. Each of them is being paid by advertisers to draw an audience with their content. Why then do we have to pay for them to deliver it to us? Shouldn’t we as the target audience be the ones as consumers to generate sufficient demand by the advertisers that they would willingly provide enough revenue to cover the costs for delivery into our homes?
Local broadcast TV and radio have provided a service of entertaining programming that has been funded by advertisement for years. It is the thinning out of quality content that allowed pay services to establish a foothold as an alternate source but at what cost. And now that the quality of content is thinning out again where will the consuming public turn? If you are reading this, you already know one of these competing outlets. The internet can provide a great deal of tailored product but if you have used it very long you quickly realize that there is a great deal of noise out there.
I just wish it was white noise, it might help me fall back to sleep.
Pleasant Dreams.
This is Ed Nef with a view from the Farr West.
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