Cord-Cutting: Aye Matey
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. This is the second post in this series. Read also: Watching our Watching Change.
THE EVOLUTION OF BROADCASTING: DOWNLOAD ME
I find it funny how so many people seem to fail to see the relationship between the audio (radio), and video (tv/movie) industries in our world. Every trend in content delivery to date has been started in the audio/music industry, then adopted by the video industry.
Whoa, that’s a new term; “Content Delivery”. We’re we talking about “Broadcasting”. Except we aren’t.
We’re going to take a quick step back before we move forward.
What is “Content”?
Content is what we’re consuming; it can be a radio talk show, music, a news program, an awards show broadcast, tv show, play, etc.
Delivery is how we get that content. In early times that was primarily by radio and newspapers. (But Newspapers have nothing to do with broadcasting.”) Au contraire. It’s a lose definition, but to effectively have a conversation about the “evolution of broadcasting”, we must look at the full picture. Newspapers, in early time, were the primary form of delivering news content to the masses. Those who couldn’t afford a TV or Radio, could often afford a newspaper, or at least pick up one later discarded by someone else. In print form, newspapers “broadcast” the world to the world. To this day newspapers, and now magazines, continue to be an integral part of content delivery, as the space allows for more in-depth reporting (be it factual, satirical, or entertainment) than the time limitations of radio or TV allow.
In the 90’s the entire industry started to be rocked by a rather serious earthquake. One that would affect every aspect of the industry. Where “video killed [only] the radio star”, the internet would take on everyone.
Music had already made the move from analogue recordings on vinyl or cassette to digital recordings on CD. It didn’t take much to figure out how to put these digital recordings onto a computer hard drive instead. Once on a computer, they were just like any other computer file, a collection of ones and zeros that could be transmitted and shared.
Audio files were large though, compared to anything else one had on their computers at the time. The slow speeds of the initial internet connections inhibited our ability to share music this way. It could take a day to download a song, and that tied up your phone line for the whole time.
But the idea of being able to build your music collection without having to leave your home… the music industry, which relied on CD sales to make their profits, was doomed if they didn’t adapt.
Technology advanced. Connection speeds got faster, and computer programmers developed algorithms to compress and reduce the amount of data a single song would require with the mP3 file format.
And thus began a cascading shift that would rock the entire content delivery industry.
For Newspapers it was a fairly easy adaptation at first. They simply started making the content available in their print versions available online as well. They would soon be left scrambling as the medium would take them in ways no-one at the time expected. But they fared fairly well to start.
Connection speeds saved the film and video industries for a while. The sheer data size required for video delivery just wasn’t conducive to the internet at the beginning. So they should have had the benefit of seeing how the music industry responded to better position themselves. (They didn’t appear to pay attention as they should have, but more on that later.)
The mass success of the music stores, video stores, CD Players, DVD players, etc, had already demonstrated a significant demand by consumers for on-demand content. People wanted to watch and listen to what they wanted to watch and listen when they wanted to watch and listen. It should have come as no surprise that the ability to get access to songs online without the need to leave home would huge. But instead of embracing this new delivery medium, the music industry decided to try and fight it.
This old school mentality seriously hurt not only the music companies, but also the artists they represented. But it also opened up a whole new market to indie-artists who now had a way to get their music listened to by more people without the need of being represented by a big label.
File sharing websites like Napster took off and became HUGE. This was where the record companies and industry analysts made one big critical mistake.
A grey area because of how the sites worked, and skirted copyright laws for a while, until the government caught up and changed the laws. The mistake was assuming that people wanted to be pirates.
Apple, a complete outsider, an almost bankrupt at the time computer manufacture, was a leader in saving the music industry. They invented the now wildly popular “iTunes”. Continuing to face resistance from a skeptical and hurting music industry, Apple quickly demonstrated that delivering high quality, original, and legal content on a pay model WORKS. People had no problem paying for the service, they just wanted the convinience of “right now when I want it” that other services like Napster provided.
The music industry finally saw the advantages, sales actually increased, profits rose substantially, more independant artists were able to get content out and grow fan-bases, and ironically it actually fueled a bit of a resurgence of the radio industry. Re-inventing themselves with more of a focus on quality hosts or DJs and talk segments that the iPod lacked.
Physical brick and mortar music stores got hit hard. Many of them closing up shop forever including the iconic Sam the Record Man store in downtown Toronto. But the industry as a whole was alive and well, making record profits.
While this move transformed Apple from an almost bankrupt company into the world dominator it is today, other content producers did not learn from the music industry’s journey; continued to fight change… and continued to lose as a result.
This series on the evolution of broadcasting and exploration of the cord-cutting phenomenon continues soon…
