Lost Remote emeritus Steve Safran and the rest of the team at AR&D have published a new book that encapsulates the tremendous challenges facing the local TV industry. “Live. Local. BROKEN News. The Re-engineering of Local TV” advocates fresh, strategic approaches to reinvent the industry that is shaping up to be in a lot of trouble. I have yet to read the book, but knowing the authors, it’s a very similar message to what I’ve been writing on Lost Remote for 10 years now.
Of course, the first stage is admitting the industry is in trouble, beyond the current economic woes. Like Safran and company, I harbor a deep fear that local television is headed down a very dangerous path. For me, it hinges on these points, of which I’ll elaborate on later (and I imagine many of them are discussed in AR&D’s new book):
1. Networks and studios increasingly taking their video content directly to users. It’s only a matter of time before the network-affiliate model evaporates.
2. An increasing number of people — soon to be a majority — are getting their news from the web and mobile devices, not TV. And local TV’s cash cow is TV news, not online news, not mobile news. TV-sized dollars aren’t translating to the web. Sound familiar?
3. The high cost of producing video due to legacy cost structures is inhibiting innovative video creation, leaving local TV stations with cookie-cutter news broadcasts that typically don’t perform well in an on-demand environment. Stations need to produce highly original, exclusive, unique video content on multiple platforms at a low enough cost to drive a profit.
4. As video consumption becomes primarily on-demand, local TV loses control over distribution. (Start screens and home pages matter more than channel position. Lead-ins become irrelevant.)
5. The growing ability of cable TV to target ads down to individual households, capturing the long-tail of video advertising. Broadcast can’t target.
6. People don’t think of local TV sites when they’re looking for information for local businesses, which puts stations at a disadvantage when competing for small-and-medium business dollars. Google and other pure plays’ increasing dominance in online advertising for SMBs is quickly extending to video.
7. Local TV’s eroding dominance in key content areas on the web: weather, traffic, sports and entertainment, to name a few. National sites are out-performing local sites on local content. (See ESPNChicago.com for the latest example). And local TV has no community — Facebook and Twitter connect more local people than local TV websites.
Of course, this won’t happen overnight. Local TV is still a tremendous reach vehicle. But if history is a guide, the industry is in for a very rude awakening that extends well beyond our current economic woes IF it doesn’t aggressively work to reinvent itself.
