New York magazine on the new patronage: television, paid for entirely by a subscription-based model and inspired in part by Apple and ABC’s collaboration selling TV episodes via iTunes. I’ve remarked on this before, but not in any great detail. Adam Sternbergh does a much more thorough job, even including some numbers to back up his claims. The numbers could be disputed (and have been, in fact; even Firefly fans dispute the assertion that there are a million fans online who would pony up $40 for a new season). Aside from that, however, there’s a major point Sternbergh hasn’t addressed: shows like Lost sell well on iTunes because of their immense popularity, and even Family Guy and Firefly got network airings; how else would the shows have acquired their cult audiences? And therein lies the problem.
How do you get people to pony up for a product they’ve never seen? Not just a new season of Firefly—at least you have an idea of what you’re getting there. Say you had to sell the idea of Firefly to an audience who’d never seen the adventures of Serenity and its crew. Or Arrested Development, a show that’s recently been put on hiatus and will likely never leave it. Catching the first show on a series you’ve never heard of is one thing, when all it costs is an hour of your time; paying $40 for the privilege is another thing entirely, even more of an investment than movies—something Sternbergh admits isn’t exactly a hot property these days, either. This is a huge problem that never gets mentioned; sure, the subscription patronage model would work now, when television is still a powerful force and you can catch shows on basic cable without paying a per-episode cost. That’s the beauty of broadcasting. What happens when that disappears? Do the Losts of the future survive without broadcasting, or will a suitable replacement pop up? Could you, say, subscribe to an RSS feed that would deliver you untested pilot episodes of candidate series, and people could vote with their wallets? And if you could do this, would you end up with a television universe that’s better or worse than the one we have today? Here’s an interesting point to consider: television news is a loss leader, primarily designed to lend a network status and authority. But it doesn’t pay the bills, and the audience for network news is declining. Would it survive in this brave new world?
And then Sternbergh has to go and mention magazines:
And suddenly it’s not so hard to envision a future (by which I mean two years, not twenty) in which you buy most of your TV shows the way you do, say, magazines—subscribing to some, picking and choosing others. At which point there’s no more need to stick to the half-hour/hour-long model on TV than there is for magazines to publish each issue at precisely 100 or 200 pages.
Magazines, in case Sternbergh hasn’t noticed, is another problem industry as of late. Have you looked at a magazine rack lately? Now have you looked at one without your sunglasses on? Covers on the newsstand are uniformly awful. The magazines themselves are also largely the same; women’s magazines, though stratified into several microcategories catering to all ages and social classes, offer much the same sorts of articles and advice, not to mention cover treatments. And men’s magazines are even worse; I dare you to tell me the difference between Maxim and FHM. If a new magazine pioneers a successful category, you can bet that within months a slate of new mags will be chasing after its market; look at the number of Wallpaper* copycats out there today. Or the rise of the shopping mag, the consumer-training Price Is Right of the magazine world. And as every year goes by, these trends only get worse. Why? Because magazines are hard business, it costs a lot to put a magazine out, and readers don’t like the unfamiliar. Thus a new magazine is inherently risky, even if it does find an audience; if people don’t know what the magazine is supposed to be about, or the first couple of issues don’t meet their expectations, they cancel subscriptions and stop buying it off the newsstand. Then that magazine dies. And lots of magazines do.
Does any of this sound familiar, television fans? Trend saturation? Hello, Invasion and Surface and Threshold. Spinoffs of successful products? CSI Miami, CSI New York, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, The Apprentice: Martha Stewart, The Amazing Race Family Edition, etc. Failure of risky niche products? Isn’t that how we got into this discussion in the first place?
I’m not trying to say the subscription model will fail, because I desperately hope it will do exactly what the proponents say it will: allow me to watch the next Firefly in peace, without worrying about it being cancelled. But if the above problems aren’t solved, we won’t have banished cancellation to the dark ages; we’ll just say “production’s been shut down” instead. And that’s not nearly as catchy.
