After two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon yesterday, we got a clinic in the weaknesses of cable news as a format for covering breaking disaster news. In the absence of new, verifiable information to report minute-by-minute, networks ended up airing the same footage repeatedly, with varying degrees of context, bringing on paid commentators from former ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee Jane Harman to disgraced former Los Angeles Police Department detective Mark Fuhrman to fill airspace with commentary whose value or lack thereof will only be discernible in retrospect, and breaking to news conferences from Boston public officials and a statement from President Obama. It’s difficult to pull together context pieces in the midst of breaking news, but certainly not impossible. These are five segments or pieces of information cable networks might have considered pushing aggressively as a means of providing historical or regional context on the story that would have informed developments when they became available:

1. Details on Boston’s hospital system and first response system: Early reports of death and injury tolls were distorted by a report, still not explained, from the New York Post, that 12 people had died in the marathon bombing. Currently, the death toll from the attack stands at three people. In the absence of verifiable information about the death and injury numbers from the attack, one useful piece of context for national audiences would have been an explanation of the size and resources of Boston’s hospital system, which is exceptional for a city of its size, and means that the city had strong resources to deal with a tragedy of this magnitude. Explaining what the city’s hospital network looks like, and that the support network for the marathon included many medical professionals and first responders, could have provided context for the area’s medical resources and helped audiences manage their expectation of the death and grievous injury toll.

2. Information on housing and people-finder efforts: It’s important for news networks to remember who their audiences are—and as marathon runners were concentrated in Boston’s downtown hotels and meetup areas to get them away from the blast site, and particularly as cell service went down in the area, the audience for cable news included them and their families. In events like these, and even in the absence of a tragedy, cable news is on heavy rotation in hotel lobbies, bars, restaurants, and other public spaces. Regularly and clearly explaining how runners and their families could check in on the people-locator set up by Google, how they could access offers of housing by people in the New England area, and how businesses and residents could unlock their wireless networks to make them accessible to runners who’d lost cell signals or who hadn’t yet retrieved their checked bags and who didn’t have access to their phones again, would have been a significant public service.

3. Historical coverage of domestic terrorist attacks like the Atlanta and Oklahoma City bombings: In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Americans have become accustomed to quick, and verifiable, claims of responsibility for terrorist attacks, which was not forthcoming in Boston. Rather than treating those attacks as the only possible context for the Boston Marathon bombing, it would be useful to air short features on attacks like the Centennial Park bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing, as a reminder that there are many motivations for acts of mass murder, and that the investigation might be extended. The Oklahoma City bombing timeline would be a useful reminder that there were multiple theories about who had committed the attacks, including international terrorists following up on the first World Trade Center bombing, a drug cartel targeting the Drug Enforcement Agency, and conspiracy theory-minded Christian fundamentalists. All of these theories turned out to be false. And the Centennial Park bombing is an important caution both of the dangers of early accusations—Richard Jewell, a security guard who discovered the Atlanta bomb, was slandered as a suspect—and of the fact that these investigations will not immediately produce culprits. Eric Rudolph, who committed the Olympics bombing, continued to carry out attacks until 1998, and wasn’t caught until 2003.
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On Friday, Happy Endings, ABC’s warm, wonderful sitcom that’s a cross between the chosen-family dynamic of Friends and the anarchic pop culture analysis of Community, debuted in a new timeslot to just 3 million viewers, and a 0.9 rating in the valuable 18-49 demographic. Two days later, The Walking Dead, AMC’s violent zombie drama, finished its third season with 12.4 million viewers, 8.4 million of them between the ages of 18 and 49. These two disparate bits of data could be evidence for a lot of different ideas: the general ascendence of cable over broadcast networks, for example, or the American viewing public’s appetite for violent media. But I want to use it to point out something different, and something that I think plays a larger role than is generally acknowledged in the failure of some broadcast shows and the success of turning many cable shows into must-see TV: unpredictable broadcast television scheduling has made it impossible to turn any single television show into a predictable viewing event.

When Happy Endings debuted in 2011, its first episode aired at 9:31 PM even though the show would normally be airing at 10PM. After the third episode, ABC began doubling up the episodes, airing one at 10PM and another at 10:30. In the second season, the show moved to 9:30 PM. In its third, Happy Endings aired first on Tuesdays at 9 PM, then on Sundays with Don’t Trust The B—- In Apt. 23, and now on the Wednesday time slot that’s done so poorly. While in the show’s first season, episodes 1-12 ran on consecutive weeks without a break in between, there was a three-month gap between the 12th episode, which aired on May 25, and the thirteenth, which aired on August 24. In the second season, the episodes ran in consecutive weeks with a break for Thanksgiving until December, when ABC aired one episode, then took the show off the air until January. And in this third season, the show went off the air for two months, between January 29 and March 29. In between the shifts of time slot and the gaps in between episodes, it makes sense that Happy Endings would get whittled down to a core group of viewers who were committed enough to follow it from day to day and from month to month: who else could possibly be expected to chase the show across the calendar for years at a time?

Scheduling changes like this are due to a number of factors, among them high rates of show failure and the excessive length of the traditional broadcast season. Happy Endings moved to Sundays to replace the cancelled 666 Park Avenue, and networks often shuffle shows around to plug holes on their schedules that emerge as new shows fail to attract audiences and are removed form the calendar. And no show on network can both be aired every week and fill out a season that’s eight months long when the standard broadcast network order is for around 22 episodes of a program. This mismatch ought to create opportunities for networks to pair up existing shows with miniseries, shorter-run series with expensive stars like The Following, for which Fox promised Kevin Bacon he’d only have to do 15 episodes a year, or launches of new shows towards the end of the year, as was the strategy for another ABC show, Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal, which has grown into a genuine hit in its second—but first full-length—season. But in reality, it frequently makes for lumpy seasons with long breaks. Parks and Recreation may be the show on network television to which I am most emotionally attached but now, if I didn’t feel a professional obligation to watch it in a timely fashion (something I do on Hulu the morning after rather than the night of), I’d let the episodes pile up on my DVR until I could have the pleasure of a long, luxuriant evening with it, rather than risk disappointment by clearing my Thursdays only to find that the show isn’t on.
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Last week, I wrote that HBO’s idea—I would not yet describe it as a plan—to let consumers buy HBO Go subscriptions from their internet service providers seemed like the most likely way to solve the problem of letting people buy stand-alone HBO Go without subscribing to HBO through a cable package: it would freak out cable companies and lead to retaliation against HBO before the streaming market was rigorous enough to support it. I was writing mostly from a consumer perspective then, but fortunately, friend of the blog Gabriel Rossman is here to write about what this adaptative mindset means for the way we conceive of our ability to freely access content that streams over the internet. He argues that it’s a short-term victory for access to certain content that’s a long-term defeat:

Suppose that your ISP isn’t happy with HBO’s offer to let it keep half the money from IP only HBO Go (which it would price at or above the price it charges tv customers) because it really wants to keep pushing you towards that “triple play” package its telemarketers keep harassing you with? Well, that ISP can just refuse to sell HBO GO to its broadband-only customers. And unlike Netflix, the ISP would actually be able to veto your purchase. It’s structurally very similar to car dealerships, where local brokers are terrified of (and can use their clout to prevent) translocal competition. This one is actually kind of scary. Imagine if you could only subscribe to the New York Times through your condo’s HOA, which would otherwise deny building access to the paperboy?

There are some ways in which this would still create problems for the cable operators, mostly in that it would undermine the two-part tariff aspect of their business model, but I think this is effectively obviated by the local veto aspect of the proposal. Moreover, cable operators are increasingly showing signs that they see the bundling aspect of their business model unraveling (mostly because carriage fees are out of control) and are willing to settle for a role of brokerage, without bundling. (Note that data caps, which don’t apply to content bought from your ISP, help enforce this brokerage role since they effectively let your ISP tax content bought on the open market).

This, of course, is all dependent on a world where high-speed internet access is something we purchase individually. If municipal wireless networks or municipal broadband ever really take off, or we move to the idea that high-speed internet access is a right rather than a commodity, then the broker role of internet service providers would be disrupted. But as long as we’re each paying to get online in the first place, even if we’re paying less money than we used to and for a higher-quality product, we’re in a position where we’ve accepted ISPs as toll-takers. That they’re going to make like Delaware and get every penny out of us for as long as they can shouldn’t come as any particular surprise.

Around this time last year, I wrote a long piece explaining why you can’t purchase a stand-alone subscription to HBO Go. The service, intended as an enhancement of the HBO experience for existing subscribers, was an attempt to enhance the cable model, not to subvert it. HBO’s entire business model is distribution through cable companies, who are in competition with streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Throwing in with the competition could lead to retaliation. And it’s not clear that there are enough people who would prefer an HBO Go subscription to cable to make it worth blowing up that business model.

But HBO has always been interested in expanding its potential reach. And HBO CEO Richard Plepler is starting to talk about ways HBO could get out of the conundrum of its business model—and one solution he’s proposing could be directly enabled by the consolidation of internet and cable companies into single businesses:

“Right now we have the right model,” Plepler told Reuters on Wednesday evening at the Season 3 premiere of HBO’s hit TV show “Game of Thrones.” “Maybe HBO GO, with our broadband partners, could evolve.”

HBO launched HBO GO in 2010 to let subscribers view its shows over the Internet on devices such as Apple Inc’s iPads. The service has about 6.5 million registered users, compared with about 29 million for HBO’s main service.

However, HBO GO is only accessible for viewers who pay for cable TV service, plus an extra fee for HBO. This means monthly bills of $100 or more typically. HBO GO is available to subscribers of several pay TV companies that provide Internet service such as Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Verizon FiOS

Plepler said late Wednesday that HBO GO could be packaged with a monthly Internet service, in partnership with broadband providers, reducing the cost.

Or, in other words, HBO would still be tied to large cable and broadband providers—it wouldn’t just let you sign up for HBO Go without verifying your subscription to a cable or internet service in the same way you sign up for streaming Netflix. But HBO would be tied to consolidated companies with the diminished expectations that it’s better to get customers to sign up for one service if the choice is between that and not having them sign up for cable and high speed internet with you at all.

I still think that the cable package will continue to have value for a lot of consumers. If a la carte cable pricing tied to internet subscription takes off, per-channel pricing is still going to be quite expensive, and many consumers will end up paying similar amounts to what they spend now for five or ten channels. But for both die-hard cord cutters, and for media companies, this is probably a reasonable detente.

Over at Variety, Andrew Wallenstein has a very smart piece about how a central piece of Netflix’s business strategy may actually work against the company. One of the things Netflix facilitates is binge viewing, which in my case means watching an entire season of 30 Rock in a single day, but for most people means watching a couple of episodes of television at a time, instead of once a week the way they’d be released in their timeslots on television networks.

But when it comes to the shows it’s creating, rather than the ones it’s licensing multiple seasons of at once, that’s a problem. Netflix is releasing every episode of its seasons of Arrested Development and House of Cards at once. And at 14 episodes for Arrested Development and 13 episodes for House of Cards, that’s few enough episodes for people who are interested in just those shows, but untempted by the rest of Netflix’s offerings, to sign up for a free trial of the service, watch everything they want, and then quit before they have to start paying. Wallenstein explains:

A relationship with a program that might otherwise drag out over months on a linear channel is telescoped into hours. And therein lies the paradox inherent in Netflix’s business model: Allowing consumers to consume at their own speed contradicts the company’s financial imperative to keep them on the service paying the seductively cheap flat monthly fee of $8 for as many months as possible. Sure, it’s possible Netflix has assembled a library so vast — over 40,000 episodes of TV and counting — that a subscriber can fill countless months hopping from one binge experience to the next.

But let’s not forget that the whole point of Netflix embarking on an original programming strategy is to bring in new subs by offering a different value proposition. These are consumers who didn’t feel compelled to sign on to binge on library programming, but they’re interested in seeing a buzzed-about new show like “Cards,” and other originals still to come….It’s not like another original series will be waiting for them as soon as they’re done with “Cards.” The next series on Netflix’s slate of originals, Eli Roth’s “Hemlock Grove,” isn’t due until April and the revival of Fox’s “Arrested Development” doesn’t begin until May. Thus, getting new subs to pay for a second consecutive month of services becomes at least a little less likely.

This strategy gets even scarier given Deadline’s reporting that Netflix isn’t financing its original content development from original revenue streams, but at least partially from debt:

About $225M of the proceeds from the $500M offering it announced today — senior notes due in 2021 paying interest at 5.375% a year — will be used to retire the company’s $200M in 8.50% senior notes that are due in 2017. But with Netflix’s first original series, House Of Cards, making its debut on February 1, some investors wonder whether the company needs the remainder to help it handle its steep content payment commitments. Some $2.3B of Netflix’s $5.6B in streaming content obligations will come due in the current fiscal year, Wedbush Securities’ Michael Pachter says. The new debt, he believes, “is necessary to solve near-term cash flow problems, and indicates the low likelihood of positive cash flow for the year.” Netflix’s debt, along with its investments to expand overseas, make it “a risky investment.” Moody’s Investors Service also considers Netflix’s new debt to be risky, giving it a Ba3 rating. The debt assessment firm believes that some of the cash will be used to pay for “investments in original programming, which require more up-front cash payments” than library titles.

It may make sense for Netflix to bring in different tranches of customers with original and licensed programming. But to do it, I’d bet that long-term, the company’s going to have to raise its prices. And to keep up with escalating costs of licensing—particularly as Amazon continues to expand its efforts in this space, Netflix will have to pay just to keep a basic content library, rather than for exclusives—and of content production, those prices will have to keep rising. Netflix, like Hulu Plus, has largely been able to keep its prices stable, rather than subjecting customers to annual price hikes or hikes at the end of contracts a la most cable providers. Negotiating that shift may cost the company customers, too. But Netflix isn’t Amazon: it can’t subsidize its purchases and creation of content with a ton of other merchandise, or with a board that accepts essentially no profits. It’s going to have to come up with the money somehow.

I missed this in the midst of election anxiety on Tuesday, but the Supreme Court just refused to take a case charging that cable bundling is in violation of federal anti-trust laws. As Deadline reports:

The U.S. Supreme Court today refused to hear the appeal of a class action lawsuit filed by cable and satellite subscribers who argued that channel bundling violated antitrust laws. The subs had asked the court to require programmers and distributors to offer single channels for purchase, rather than sell them only in prepackaged tiers. In March, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the suit filed against NBCUniversal, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and others, saying the plaintiffs had not stated a plausible claim.

In a sense, this is a reaffirmation of something we’ve discussed here quite a bit: bundling and the cable business model as currently constituted are inseparable, and many, many millions of people are willing to accept the model as is, even if they don’t love it. Getting around this without killing enormous amounts of programming (something, again, as I’ve said before, that I would be okay with!) is going to take an enormous amount of innovation, and a lot of time, and in the end, individual channels in the bundle will probably cost more than we sense they ought to. In a way, I wonder if the first goal for the cord-cutting or a la carte movements ought to be targeting the provision of internet, cable, and phone services by the same company. Those kinds of bundles are convenient from a customer service perspective. But in terms of preserving the free flow of content, unrestricted by companies who have an interest in slowing down web-based alternatives to cable, that’s a bad incentive structure for the companies themselves, and poses risks for consumers who want real content choices in the future.

The AV Club’s Todd VanDerWerff joked yesterday that he and I are the only people interested in the independent television movement and the problems surrounding finding a successful business model for it that doesn’t include distribution over established networks. But the report he filed from the New York Television Festival is indispensable for anyone who cares about connecting up genuinely fresh voices, ideas, and faces with the audience we believe is hungry for them but isn’t finding them, or isn’t paying for them. Todd explains why it’s been so much harder to find that business model in independent television than in independent film:

No one has quite figured out the independent TV business model just yet—a problem even Grey will admit exists. Attending NYTVF feels a bit like how I imagine attending Sundance in the mid-’80s must have felt: There’s a whole bunch of valuable product that could attract an audience if given a chance, but no one’s yet sure how to make money from that product. It was Sex, Lies, And Videotape that helped Sundance break through into the mainstream consciousness, and I’m not sure that independent TV has found its Steven Soderbergh yet. And even considering that factor, there’s the fact that running a TV show is a vastly different undertaking from directing a film. An independent film can be released to theaters, where it will hopefully recoup its budget. An independent TV pilot will ideally lead to a larger series, and that would mean a substantial investment of network funds to keep the show going, while an independent film is, ultimately, a much smaller investment of cash. Until a show as self-evidently good as Sex, Lies, And Videotape breaks through, independent TV may remain a curiosity too costly for networks to indulge in.

I’d note that in certain ways, independent film in recent years has also been gaining access to alternative distribution methods that audiences are already using. You have to find your way to an independent movie theater, but it isn’t a totally different experience from going to the multiplex. Same with ordering independent movies on demand: indies like Margin Call and Bachelorette have gone to VOD sometimes without even going to theaters and done fine there because audiences are so familiar with the experience of ordering movies. But indie television hasn’t broken in there, because that would mean striking details with cable carriers, which is no small task of its own for producers who, and would probably be something the networks would frown on, however little competition the indies would provide. Right now, indie television isn’t getting access either networks like PBS or even bigger distribution networks like Netflix and Hulu, which would be obvious outlets for them. However easy it is to distribute on the web or through YouTube, it still requires determined consumers who are already used to looking for content outside normal channels to find those shows.

That, of course, comes second to the issue of just producing enough material independently to actually constitute a television season, much less a television episode. Todd explains, for both reasons of creativity and resources, that most shows at the festival just aren’t coming up with even a full episode’s worth of material, though the best shows, like Husbands, are coming close. He’s right it’s going to take a big breakthrough show that becomes a massive hit despite the distributional challenges—and then it’s going to take people working out the rather more complicated business infrastructure to provide the huge, long-term support indie television makers are going to need to keep turning out product.

As Deadline notes, there’s a huge untapped potential to get more viewers watching streaming programming:

The research firm says that in September, 3.1M unique users streamed TV Everywhere programming at AT&T, Cox, Comcast (Xfinity), Verizon, Cablevision (Optimum), Time Warner Cable, and Dish Network. That comes to just 5.1% of the roughly 60M customers who could have accessed TV Everywhere videos at those companies. The data suggest “relatively weak TV Everywhere awareness among cable, DBS and telco video subs, most likely due to the lack of any serious marketing campaigns to promote the product,” analyst Tony Lenoir says. It also means the services have a long way to go to catch up to other streaming video providers. For example, Hulu had 21.3M unique users in September, while Netflix had 16.2M.

I actually think this could be a critical way to get customers to be quite loyal to cable. The streaming landscape is a deeply confusing place right now: on Hulu alone, NBC puts up everything the day after it airs, Fox delays episodes unless you’re a Hulu plus subscriber, and CBS holds everything on its own site, which has an unbelievably terrible proprietary streaming player. Then, there’s HBO GO, which is a stand-alone service to HBO subscribers, but that is slightly unreliable. And Showtime is working with cable providers to have Showtime Anytime service work through their streaming players. Netflix gets new seasons of things at uneven rates. That’s confusing even for an obsessive consumer like me. If RCN developed a streaming service that made all content available on a consistent basis, with extremely high-quality visuals and fast-loading streaming, that alone would make me affirmatively loyal to the company for the first time in my career as an adult cable consumer. And I bet it would be a real value ad for people who don’t spend ten hours a day watching television and movies.

Cable companies scored a victory yesterday at the FCC:

Federal regulators are letting cable companies scramble all their TV signals, closing a loophole that lets many households watch basic cable channels for free. The Federal Communications Commission voted Friday to lift a ban on encryption of basic cable signals, saying it will reduce the number of visits by cable technicians to disconnect service and reduce cable theft. Neither the FCC nor the National Cable & Telecommunications Association knows how many households are taking advantage of the unencrypted signals. NCTA spokesman Brian Dietz says most of the theft is by cable modem customers who also connect their line to a TV set.

Whatever the merits (or lack thereof) of the decision, I think there’s an extent to which this is an interesting test. People who would like to see the cable and media companies, which to an extent are distinct entities, innovate in the service offerings they make available to consumers tend to fall in one of two camps. First, there are those who say that piracy, whether of content or of the cable services that let them access content, are a sign that current offerings aren’t sufficient to meet the specific needs of potential consumers, and that content and cable companies could innovate their way to more business. Second, there are those who say that piracy is committed by people who would never purchase these goods and service in the first place, and who thus shouldn’t be subject to excessive regulation, which is of course a different argument than saying regulations would damage the underlying structure of the internet, etc. This second argument is a decent one against spending money and energy on regulation, but it’s ultimately an argument against innovation. If pirates are people for whom the only acceptable price point is zero dollars, no matter how much content and cable companies innovate, they’ll never be able to capture those consumers, and so it makes no sense to adjust or endanger business models to try to accommodate their needs.

What happens after cable companies start scrambling their signals will be an interesting test of these propositions. If cable subscriptions stay level, they maybe it’s true that the folks who are stealing cable service were never potential consumers. If one company cracks down and another company’s subscription base rises, maybe it’s a sign that consumers are willing to pay, but will be unwilling to sign up with companies that seem sour about enforcement. Or if all companies crack down and all subscriptions go up, then perhaps there’s some indication that there are customers out there available to be culled if the environment gives them few options other than to buy service legally. These will all be shaky correlations, of course. But it’s important to actually start testing the question of whether people who aren’t paying for media they consume now are potential customers or not if we want to push cable and content companies towards new business models.