PSA: TV reality check

Alright, New York Times article. I actually agree with your general premise that we should look very carefully at a merger between NBC and COMCAST, in terms of the monopoly it might create. But you're marshaling some silly points to your cause.

First, yes, if NBC and Comcast are allowed to merge, it will mean that one company will own both distribution and programming capabilities.

On the other hand, that's happened before, like when TV first started and RCA owned this little broadcasting company called (what was it again? Oh yeah--) NBC. In fact, RCA created NBC in order to sell more televisions. Now, given, the production of programming and the distribution network of, well, networks (local affiliate stations) weren't taking place in exactly the same company. But affiliate stations and the network had a give-and-take (mostly take-and-take on the network side) relationship that can't be easily distinguished from what NBC and Comcast propose.

Second, if you're looking back to the old halcyon days of when cable companies had nothing to do with television production, cable networks and distributors (though not Comcast) have also been able to produce and control programming for years.

Third, there's no such thing as "online TV." TV is on TV, and online is on computers. If you mean "television programming distributed via the internet," then that's still not "online TV."

A television set is an item, and it is not a computer.

It's possible that in the future we'll still refer to short, episodic, scripted or edited shows as "TV shows," even if they've been produced and distributed with no reference to the television sets that we use increasingly even now for viewing stuff from our computers, from "online," or from various digital media players (or VCRs, if we're the lucky owners of a copy of Isaac Asimov's Robots VCR Mystery Game). It's true that those lines are blurring. But "TV" right now still means those devices that receive a broadcast signal, and cable.

Fourth, cable companies have ALWAYS fooled with pricing to make money off of distribution. This is mainly because they are companies designed to make money off of distribution.

Cable companies stand in contrast to the public good of broadcast stations, which were allotted distribution networks in the form of bandwidth when TV "came online" (haha) in the 1950s. The federal government regulated that distribution of distribution because the airwaves were a public asset. Cable companies are private, and therefore have always been after profits rather than public good. They own the cables; they get to say what they're charging to use them.

It's too late after the fact to make a private enterprise into a government-regulated one. This is partly why I was against the switch to whatever this digital system of distribution is. (That, and the fact that I can't get a freaking signal anymore. And also that poor people got screwed with those converter-box dealies.)

Those cats are out of the bag, and it's unhelpful to stand around wringing your hands and worrying about them as they run around peeing on things.

If "online TV," should it ever exist, actually wants to do anything, it's going to have to do what TV did originally, and innovate. There's no reason that new forms of distribution -- internet-based ones -- can't get as much traffic as TV has had, eventually. We're in the middle of transition, here, from a TV-based distribution model (in which actual TV shows are simply made available also online), to a web-based model.

It makes sense to me, given this transition, that behemoths of the old age, like NBC and Comcast, would begin banding together to fight the coming tide. They won't win, ultimately. The reason they're all starting to look the same is that we've already left them behind us, and from a distance, everything starts to blur.