17 Comments Add your own

• 1. Don Moore  |  February 18th, 2007 at 3:48 pm

  Unfortunately, there are few broadcasters who realize their audience is aging and after the analog cut-over, the younger generations are going to discover video over the internet as a much cheaper alternative to the $100+ a month cable or satellite bill.

  Broadcasters have ONE unique advantage - Live Events. Unfortunately, those events are becoming few and far apart.

  Broadcasters have yet to effectively market what they do offer. Content is often hidden behind arcane menu systems, lack any RSS functionality and is often users are forced to watch unimaginative commercial clips first.

  The Analog Cut-Off in 2009 may end up as the beginning of the end for OTA broadcasters.

• 2. thesacramentochannel  |  February 18th, 2007 at 7:15 pm

  dma’s will be a thing of the past.

  no more dial positions either.

  scrap iron prices for that antenna and guy wires too.

  otherwise than that local broadcasters will do just fine.

• 3. Z  |  February 18th, 2007 at 7:37 pm

  And only a small handful of local stations are producing original video for the web that’s not reworked from TV.

  Well, get me the funding for more people, and I can do that. Until then, everyone in the station is used to put product on air, since that’s where the money is.

  Or allow viewers to upload and share video.

  First, you have to get past viewer apathy. In the last two snow storms, we asked people to send us video. We even linked to the various online editing sites and YouSendIt.com to get around the fact that we don’t yet have upload tools. Care to guess how many videos came in?

  And we go look at the vaunted Motionbox product over in Phily’s NBC site, and you know what we see? The same videos that were there six months ago (Jia’s Summer Vacation 2006 is still considered a “recent” upload???). And that’s held up as a successful product?

  Or allow their video to be embedded elsewhere.

  Now that’s an area that hardly costs a damn thing or require more people, so I don’t know why we don’t do that.

  Believe me, I’d like to see viewer video and original video. But if it doesn’t work out of the gate, the beancounters shake their heads and remember that the next time you have a great idea.

• 4. Joe  |  February 18th, 2007 at 7:50 pm

  TV turned its back on the Internet from the beginning. If there had been a YouTube or Revver back in 1995, things would be different. Instead, they left it to the innovators and now are reaping what they sowed. Z’s experiences with the bean counters sounds so familiar. The sad thing is, TV stations are gripped with fear and indecision, and there are still too many people working against new media from the inside. We’re about where the newspapers were in 2002 or so. Soon we’ll have our “Come to Jesus” moment like the newspapers did. But will it be too late? It’s probably already too late now.

• 5. thesacramentochannel  |  February 18th, 2007 at 7:54 pm

  dude, that’s an NBC site. i wouldn’t put it past ge to manipulate their sites so as to fail.

  gotta protect the mothership ya know.

• 6. Eric Kanagy  |  February 18th, 2007 at 10:16 pm

  As comment #3 mentioned, it’s all about the money. The local TV market has a working business model that they’ve used for a long time. Getting any organization to fundamentally change their business model, unless they’re in a state of crisis, which I don’t think they are (yet), is a very difficult thing to do.

  I have a friend who works for a local Fox affiliate and they keep their staff pretty lean and don’t pay too well (they’re not in a big market).

• 7. StephM  |  February 19th, 2007 at 6:22 am

  There are variety of reason as noted above, and what a shame, huh. An emerging industry evolving too fast for an existing traditional industry with old management philosophies, whose actions will hurt their chances long term over the short term survival. It’s sad, but true. How can they invest in progress when keeping the lights on is imperrative. This game of survival is clouding the way for progress in local TV. At the core, journalism is what is going to slow and prohibit sustained and competitive growth for local TV news stations. I know that sounds odd, and I am not poo pooing on journalism for what it means to our society and history books.

  Let’s face it… (Saf, I know you may disagree) News stations have to walk the line of journalism, which makes it diffifcult to take advantage of current trends with user generted content to its fullest potential. Stations are slowed down by their own filters and standards that must be vetting by layers of legal and discussion to determine if this fits within their goals/brand. After that, it’s who will do the work to get it up on the site, as though it takes buckets of people. In the pefect UGC world, it takes very little people on the station side, but with all the layers of indecision and fear it suddenly takes many people to moderate incoming submissions, then post manually.

  Local TV had such an advantage that is suddenly not as important is it was 4-5 years ago… video production facilities. Newspaper didn’t have that, but now they don’t need it to get to ahead.

  I also agree with the note above about producing video beyond news clips. People can get news anywhere. Make sure you provide them with the option, but for goodness sake give them something more relevant to the community you serve for your consumers than great pictures that mean nothing to me or my family.

  As much as we post LR, if you had a chance at your station to really go for UGC, niche sites, real local video content that goes beyond traditional news… could you now? If not what is holding you back? Why not just do it? What are the real stop gaps, is it us, them, or all?

• 8. Hussman  |  February 19th, 2007 at 7:02 am

  Eric was very close with his comments, but from what I’ve seen, a lot of it comes down to the fact that you have too few people in the newsroom doing too much. Think you can convince a producer to add clips from her show after she’s spent 8 hours trying to herd cats getting her show together?

  Or the 20-something reporters who feel entitled to do that extra work after they’ve already done the story?

  Create a utility that shoots a completed story, merged with script to the web sutomatically, or have one that breaks outs the story with anchor leads and tags from the actual newscast and you’ve got yourself some video.

• 9. Michael Rosenblum  |  February 19th, 2007 at 7:27 am

  Local TV news is inherently a very conservative business. They don’t WANT to change. They are aware of what is happening (they’re in the NEWS business) but while they acknowledge what is happening, they also, for the most part, hope this will all go away.
  They pay lip service to the concept, but at heart, they don’t want to change. They will, instead, simply go out of business.

• 10. thomas  |  February 19th, 2007 at 8:06 am

  @ Huss

  Pretty much everything related to publishing video to the web can be automated, well, except for the shoots a story part.

• 11. thedetroitchannel  |  February 19th, 2007 at 8:27 am

  what?

  no mention of terry heaton/nbc17’s blogger meetup in raleigh today @ noon today?

  if you fly out now you still could make it!

  just not jetblue.

• 12. big.time.teevee  |  February 19th, 2007 at 8:39 am

  I’m at a local station in a big network group, and many of these issues are exactly the kinds of things that frustrate those of us here at ground level. There are so many great things we could be doing to advance our video abilities… but we can’t because our corporate masters won’t get in gear, and they control the functionality of the site. Ultimately, any reasons for not doing it are just excuses, and they’re excuses that are going to drive us out of business.

• 13. thedetroitchannel  |  February 19th, 2007 at 11:14 am

  “big.time.”,

  it amazes me that these “corporate masters” haven’t even done the rudimentary; is the practice of linking your properties as elusive as lightning in a bottle?

• 14. andy  |  February 19th, 2007 at 11:31 am

  This post and thread does a wonderful job of summarizing the “Innovator’s Dilemma”. There are ways out of the cycle but it takes the balls to challenge the status quo and set aside rules that have worked for many years.

• 15. Rob  |  February 19th, 2007 at 12:28 pm

  I used to work for Belo Interactive and before you read this, let me say that “in general” I had an extremely positive experience working with a wide variety of operators across the United States while working at BI.

  From my perspective, all decisions for the most part were made up at the corporate mothership. When they wanted input, they did make an effort to get feedback from select people at the affiliate level, but most decisions were big picture decisions that took on a for-the-most-part cookie cutter approach to all locations regardless of market composition.

  It was a bearable situation, however, because Belo backed up the top-down decision-making process with quality content shared across their entire network of sites. So, local innovation took a backseat but it was offset by local sites - including TV stations - having access to a wealth of newspaper content from across the nation.

  Then they jumped the shark and decided, in presumably a cost-cutting move, to give local sites local control. New Media was blended into the local newsroom. Six years of cooperation and content sharing between websites became a thing of the past for the most part as the focus - brought on several years ago with the mandatory registration model - became one of sales driving content and not vice versa.

  I jumped ship a year-and-a-half ago, but still have friends at Belo and found out through the grapevine that recently they got rid of their entire national-level content staff which was producing and pushing content out to their entire network.

  I know the discussion started out as video at the local level, but how do you compete in a situation where local innovation - at least in my six years of experience there - played a secondary role to the corporate mandate? The people that are chomping at the bit to shake, rattle and roll are at the local level and find themselves frustrated, burned out and ignored by the corporate groupthink which has historically burned millions on really collossally dumb ideas (See: CueCat).

  And when it comes to video on the web (or just the web in general for that matter), make no mistake, no matter the market size, there are still managers who consider it cannibalization of the legacy product (TV, radio) if a story appears on the web first. You’re not seeing more innovation on the web at the local level because of the cannibalization factor, the lack of understanding as to what should be the symbiotic relationship between legacy and new media, and the lack of training (getting people up to speed on how the web is a part of the newsroom and their role in updating the site), education (lack of new media journalism courses) and resources at the local level (people that can focus their time and attention on web updating, captial expenditures on equipment to help update websites) to grow out web properties and be successful.

• 16. thedetroitchannel  |  February 19th, 2007 at 12:42 pm

  gee, when i see a story on wxyz news at 4,5,6am,noon,5,6,7pm or again at 11pm and am told “for more information” visit our web site, wxyz.com” no wonder it’s considered cannibalous.

  there are a few sales people i’ve had the pleasure to speak with who realize the web is an entirely different product and should be SOLD AS SUCH. i’ve had the pleasure to talk with those who do not either.

  ps. great comment, rob. very insightful.

• 17. brad  |  February 19th, 2007 at 4:36 pm

  Local TV’s problem is three fold:
  1) People who know what they’re doing.
  2) money for equipment an the time to do so.
  3) Management.

  Upper management doesn’t understand that investment is needed and more importantly they don’t know what half of this stuff is. I doubt a lot of these folks know how to use there computer anyway.

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