Wow— possibly four new pay television services to be licensed this year? Have I got a concept for a channel!
I must hear this once or twice a week, and always from one of the many who are sitting frustrated in commercial and public television.
That may have been fine during the heyday of subscription channels in the late 1990s, but I don’t think it applies today.
Why? Because that was the past. As LP Harley wrote, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
Today we have more media than they ever dreamed of back then. Audiences have media up to their eyeballs, and now, more than ever, they can pick and choose.
After all, a week is only 168 hours long, and by the time you have worked (40 hours), watched television (24 hours), listened to the radio (33 hours) and slept (56 hours), there isn’t much time left. We also spend 6.3 hours a week reading. (Don’t expect those figures to add up to 168, as they are mostly either / or.
We didn’t include the fastest growing media today, which did not exist five years ago: mobile music and cellphones.
My point is that you don’t need a concept for a channel – you need a concept for an audience. These days we don’t start off with the idea for content, but rather the idea for an audience that is large enough, fanatical enough, and wealthy enough to support a niche channel.
It’s actually a bit semantic, but semantics do help to change our mindset, and make it easier to think clearly. It’s not “What about a flower arranging channel?”, but rather, “How many people would happily pay $3 a month to watch flower arranging three hours a day?”
This question is way different to the ones we have been asking. In short, we used to use content as the concept – but now the audience is the concept.
Pay television entrepreneurs don’t even count audiences the same way people in free-to-air broadcasting (FtA) do. FtA operators count audiences through mass media statistics. Pay television operators drill down from the mass media statistics to those that deal with single individuals. They even use different sources. A pay television operator cannot look at AMPS demographics and say, “Wow, I have an audience”. He has to look at numerous sources that count small audiences which altogether add up to a critical mass.
Pay television differs from free-to-air television in a way that nothing else differs. It’s so difficult to find an analogy.
Some say that whereas FtA television is a supermarket, pay television is a boutique shop. Others say that FtA television is like a corner café, whereas pay television is like a shopping centre. None of these analogies work, because they are comparing content, and not audience. They are not comparing the different relationship with the audience between the two types of broadcasters.
This is fundamentally where it starts. An FtA broadcaster picks up large numbers of people by drawing them in with something different at different times of the day. A niche channel pulls in the same people, week after week, with differing aspects of the same subject, repeating it so that sometime during the week, every viewer has a chance to see it.
An FtA broadcaster is a media generalist – a pay television channel operator is a specialist that knows a specialist subject and broadcasts to a specialist audience.
On top of it, to commit yourself to $3 a month forever takes some sort of fanaticism on the part of both the channel and the subscriber. There’s a special relationship – rather like that which exists between the editor of a trade magazine and its subscribers.
It’s an attitude, a mindset, a state of mind. Today Hartley would be writing, “Pay television is anther country, they do things differently there.”
Howard Thomas is a media business consultant, trainer and specialist in audience psychology.