There is a Bradburian quality to the DirecTV-Viacom standoff
that has left twenty percent of the pay-television public without
MTV, Comedy Central, BET, and Nickelodeon.
In the late Ray Bradbury’s “Almost the End of the World,” two
miners emerge from the underneath to find the world above to be
without television. They gaze upon “the soft snow falling down and
that humming screen in an eternal winter” in the local barbershop.
Instead of watching, people bowl, play bandstand concerts, eat
homemade ice cream, and socialize at keg parties. They literally
(and metaphorically) paint the town. The 1957 short story
ironically dubs life without television the Great Oblivion.
“DirecTV-Viacom Dispute Turns into Blackout Reality,” reads a
New York Times
headline. Like the sunspots that whited-out television
transmission in “Almost the End of the World,” today’s real-life
Great Oblivion shows that we didn’t know what we weren’t
missing.
This isn’t the reaction that DirecTV and Viacom desire or
expect. The ostensible adversaries want you to want your MTV — to
paraphrase a marketing slogan from cable’s golden age. But after
Snooki, Big Ang, The Situation, and Kurt Angle leave your living
room, you don’t clamor for them to come back. In fact, viewers
might now venture out of the living room and become doers.
When watchers attempt to click on any of the missing Viacom
channels, DirecTV directs TV watchers to E!, Style, Bravo, and a
host of other options that might have filled the void — if they
weren’t so empty in substance, too. Viacom’s idea of winning the
public over is an advertisement featuring the angry and obnoxious
star of Mob Wives lamenting the injustice of DirecTV
keeping her off the air.
Doing their best impersonation of African-orphan pitchwoman
Sally Struthers, Viacom argues that their desired hike amounts to
just a few pennies a day per subscriber. But Viacom collected $15
billion last year. All they want is another measly $1 billion from
DirecTV.
DirecTV, collecting $27 billion in revenues last year, is no
fly-encircled swollen-bellied charity case, either. DirecTV
counterpropaganda blames Viacom for undermining them by offering
their programs for free on the net, calling for higher fees amidst
lower ratings, and ultimately pulling their networks from the
satellite service.
Both corporations hope the denial of channels will cause the
other side to wilt through a denial of income. But an unforeseen
outcome is that viewers might find the glut of disposable
programming — built for interludes of click-and-go watching and
endless repeats — utterly disposable. Sometimes you don’t realize
how much you don’t need something until it’s taken away.
Pay television, which reportedly lost seven million subscribers
last year, might free itself from these internecine battles by
embracing freedom. So much of what is wrong with America, from
schools to medicine, involves the lack of choice. Subscription
television, though dominated by big corporations rather than big
government, is no different.
Viacom forcing an-all-or-nothing collection of networks onto
DirecTV restricts viewer choice. So, too, does DirecTV’s
one-size-fits all channel packages. The cable companies that
initially seized local monopoly rights really haven’t transcended
their anti-market origins.
To beat the competition — free fare on the Internet and the
broadcast networks — pay television must first embrace
competition. The ability of television providers to block or permit
access to scores of premium channels suggests that doing the same
for garden-variety cable television networks isn’t out of their
technological reach.
Why not allow networks to compete for viewer dollars through an
à la carte system rather than force-feeding weak channels
owned by strong companies onto subscribers?
The sound DirecTV and Viacom executives hopefully soon hear is
Americans switching off televisions and wandering into the Great
Oblivion of books, parks, beaches, and barbeques. As one of
Bradbury’s miners asks, “What have we ever seen on TV?”
The other miner responds that he saw a woman wrestle a bear two
falls out of three.
Has the idiot box improved much in the 55 years since Bradbury
published that story?
On Tuesday, DirecTV customers could watch Logo’s 1 Girl 5
Gays, Spike’s 1000 Ways to Die, and BET’s
Brothers to Brutha. Today, they cannot.
Are you better off than you were four days ago?
