Cord-Cutting: I Want it NOW
It’s a popular term among analysts of the broadcasting industry: “Cord Cutting”. Identified as a trend plaguing the cable industry, marking it for certain death. But there’s a lot more to it than that.
Bias Disclaimer:
This is a topic that I’m personally very passionate about. Back in college, in the year 2000, I touched on it in my senior thesis. Since then it’s been an area of extreme interest, both from a geeky into-it kind of way, but also, as my day job is doing audio for live broadcast television, of potential direct impact on my career and life. Now I’m a freelancer, so while I have no loyalty to anyone, I also have loyalty to everyone in broadcasting. But being a low-level operations tech, my access to “inside information” doesn’t exist. I get my information on the topic from the same place as everyone else… the internet… and twist it with some analysis that comes from over 16 years of experience working and observing the industry in which I make my living.
The topic of the evolution of broadcasting is quite in depth and will take multiple posts to fully break down.
The Evolution of Broadcasting: Watching our watching change
The broadcasting industry isn’t actually that old. I’m 35 years old, and it’s my parents who witnessed the first TVs coming into homes. I myself lived through and can remember the 12 channel era, the advent of UHF adding more channels, and the cable system growing from 12 fuzzy analogue channels, to the multi-thousand channel digital universe.
There’s a joke in the industry amongst technicians: “TV without video is just radio, but tv without audio is just surveillance”. What’s often overlooked when telling this joke, is that TV actually started as radio. Radio, unlike it is today, had great power. Families would join around the family radio to listen to variety shows, live music presentations, and radio plays. On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles scared the nation with his radio adaptation of H.G. Well’s story “War of the Worlds”.
In 1941 the US finally agreed on a standardized 525 line format for television, and radio shows started moving off the radio and onto TV. While still very similar in their production, they now included pictures so people could see the person talking. We still see remnants of the bygone era in the name of our french-language national broadcaster “Radio-Canada”.
By 1953 colour had begun to make it’s appearance in television broadcasts. However, the expense of the format led to a very slow adaptation by both broadcasters and viewers alike. Very reflective of the more recent introduction of HDTV in the 2000’s.
While the move to the HDTV format was huge for the industry, a more critical advancement made that development possible, while also setting the groundwork to rock the industry in ways we still haven’t fully realized yet, the invention and move to digital video.
When TV first started, it was actually film based. News was gathered using film cameras. The actual electronic transmission was just that, transmission, it could not be electronically recorded. A telecine was used; an electronic video camera was pointed at a projection screen where the film was played back, and the electronic camera captured the image and transmitted it to televisions around the country.
I was actually lucky enough that when I was in school at Niagara College, we still had a telecine. While it was no longer part of the actual course program, we did still use it for converting film projects from the film program to video so they could keep their projects, and watch at home. Also us in the tv program may have experimented with it while doing late-overnights prepping our studio for our own projects the following day.
Obviously this was a slow process, as the film needed to be developed and edited in a cut and splice manor, while also being painstakingly synced with sound. An easier, faster, and cheaper method of recording needed to be developed. In came the video-tape.
At first videotape was used exclusively by broadcasters. The machines were huge, and the tape itself, very expensive. Slowly the format became smaller and cheaper. While not as high of quality, videotape was introduced to the consumer market. And the whole industry started changing at a record pace in ways nobody could imagine.
While still somewhat expensive and requiring of direct attention, a person could now record a show off of television at home, and either watch it later, or watch it again, at their own leisure.
But it was the film industry that really moved things along. Video stores popped up all over the place. A person could now go to one of these stores, and rent a tape which had a movie recorded on it. Take it home, and watch it whenever they wanted. They were no longer restricted to only being able to see movies at a theater on a schedule. If they liked the movie well enough, the could even buy the tape, and watch the movie multiple times, whenever they wanted.
While not called that at the time, the videotape was actually the beginning of the “On-Demand” evolution.
Something else was also starting to happen at the same time. As technology advanced, and costs came down, the personal camcorder made its debut. People could now affordably record their own “home movies”, capturing moments and memories as moving pictures with sound, and not just still photographs.
Now that control was in hands of the consumer, demand skyrocketed, and technological advancements started coming much faster. People wanted better quality, faster delivery, easier access, more content, and cheaper costs.
Viewing habits evolved. No longer was TV viewing a family experience, all sitting around the radio together listening to a radio play. Now we had TVs in every room in the house. Mom might watch a talk show in the kitchen while preparing dinner (yes highly sexist I know, but still the socially-accepted gender-restrictive roles of the time), while dad might watch the news or sports in the den, the kids gathered round the tv in the livingroom watching the latest teen shows.
Broadcasts themselves moved from being limited to 12 VHF channels in a region, to up to 83 potential channels via UHF over the air channels broadcasting if you lived in a major center. Then it all moved off of antennas and onto a single coaxial cable that would come into your home.
All of a sudden you had to PAY to get the content into your home. Filters on the cable that fed into you home allowed the cable companies to limit which channels you had access to, creating the ability to have PAY-TV, and specialty channels.
No longer restricted to a few major conventional networks, hundreds of specialty channels started forming, creating more choice for consumers to pick what they wanted to watch, rather than be told what they were going to watch. The concept was a winner.
YTV had all-day content for young viewers, while stations like TSN started feeding the sports fans. While major networks already carried many live sporting events, having a readily available sports-only channel allowed professional sports to explode into a multi-billion dollar industry unto itself.
Demand was high. People continued to want more content to choose from. More specialty channels were created, but delivery capacity became a major problem. Even on cable, while it make it possible to bring in national channels, and specialty channels and deliver them to consumers, they were limited by basic physics, and the amount of frequency spectrum able to be modulated within. They needed ways to fit more content into a limited amount of space.
At the same time as all of this TV broadcasting development, a lot of work and advancement had been being done on computer technology, and the sharing of data via digital means… breaking information down into a collection of highly manageable ones and zeros.
Massive amounts of data could be transmitted this way using far less resources. By looking at the recorded video image as a chunk of data instead of a magnetic linear set of radio waves, this too should be able to be transmitted via digital means.
This lead to two innovations around the same time. The progression to digital cable, vastly increasing the capacity of the existing copper networks that fed into everyone’s home. By selling people a “cable box” which could decode the digital signal, cable companies could offer significantly more channels, which means more choice of what to watch. It took off by storm.
The problem was, the physical cable networks, the actual physical cable that went into people’s homes, was extremely expensive to install and maintain. While in larger urban centers basic economic principles of economy-of-scale made this highly profitable. Those who lived in smaller communities or rural areas were still left with only the couple of channels they might be able to bring in off large antennas. As with many different industries, Canada faces a particular challenge with deliver of services (water, gas, telephone, hydro, tv), in that because of the realitively small population (customer base) is spread over a relatively huge land-mass, getting the physical service to much of the population is extremely expensive. Often times this expense is prohibitive to the point where people just don’t get the service at all. Many living on farms for example live off wells for water, have fuel for heating delivered via truck and stored in tanks on their properties. Getting a luxury like cable tv delivered just wasn’t going to happen.
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Enter Direct-to-home satellite. With the move to digital television delivery, massive amounts of channel selection could be delivered in a comparibly small amount of actual “bandwidth” or capacity. Starting off using a small part of existing satellites orbiting the earth, all of a sudden nearly every channel available could reach nearly 100% of the population, significantly increasing the customer base, and connecting more people to the rest of the world.
People had more choice of what to watch. But lives continued to go crazy, society was getting busier, and people didn’t necessarily have time to watch their favourite program when it was scheduled to air.
At first VCRs had timers built into them so the could automatically record a show, and you could watch it later when you got home. But while delivery technology was changing to digital, so was recording technology.
First video stores where you would rent a movie to watch when you wanted to watch it changed from videotapes to DVDs, then to high definition BluRay discs.
DVD Recorders became available for the home to replace the out-dated VCR, but those never really caught on, because at the same time, the cable and satellite industry developed and released the PVR (Personal Video Recorder). A hard-drive built right into your set-top tuner box, that could not only automatically record your favourite shows, and let you watch them later, but also could allow you to pause live tv so you wouldn’t miss a thing when you got interrupted by the kids coming home, or the phone ringing.
Content was becoming more and more conducive to when a consumer wanted to watch it, and less restrictive of traditional linear broadcast schedules. Consumers were loving it.
But then… there came a bit of a game changer… the internet…
This series on the evolution of broadcasting and exploration of the cord-cutting phenomenon continues… “Aye Matey”
