The Impending death of TV

But wait, you say, TV is doing fine.  There are a zillion cable channels and streaming is a big thing and getting bigger.  And you would be correct to say so.  But the title is a bit of a cheat.  By "TV" I first mean traditional "over the air" broadcast TV.  But I think that cable TV's days are also numbered.  It will just take a little longer.  And if broadcast TV no longer exists and cable TV no longer exists I contend that "TV" is dead.  Whatever is still around would be something else.  So, as is my wont, let's dive into a little history.  The first public demonstration of a complete TV system (cameras, TV sets, control rooms, etc.) took place at the 1939 New York World's Fair.  That makes TV 75 years old.  I confidently predict that it will be dead before it turns 100.  I actually expect broadcast TV to be gone within about 10 years and cable TV to disappear less than 10 years later.  How and why?

TV, like a great many things, is a prisoner of its technology.  In 1939 the technology of the day was barely capable of doing TV.  The equipment was complex, expensive, finicky, and inflexible.  Pictures were captured at a few locations on the fairgrounds and delivered to TV sets located at a few other locations on the fairgrounds.  But it got a lot of publicity, it was successful as a proof of concept, and it provided a foundation on which improvements could be built.

Then things pretty much stopped because of the outbreak of World War II.  That is, work stopped on TV itself.  But considerable progress was made in improving the technological foundations of TV.  So when the war ended people were very excited about the future of TV.  And some of what had been hard in 1939 was now much easier and some of what had been impossible in 1939 was now possible.  So what was possible?

TV cameras and studios were possible.  TV sets were possible.  But it was all pretty expensive.  And there was the "chicken or egg" problem.  To sell TV sets you need TV shows.  But to justify the cost of building TV studios and doing production you need an audience who would view the commercials that would pay for all of it.  But people took the leap of faith and built the studios praying that once they were on the air people would buy sets.  And they did.

But cameras were expensive and finicky.  They also needed a lot of power and light to work.  So they were only practical in a studio situation.  And the only way to get the shows to the viewers was to broadcast it over the air like radio stations were doing.  So that's what people did.  And in the beginning it was nearly impossible and also very expensive to send a signal more than about 50 miles.  The solution, was also one taken from radio.  Special cables were built to connect one city to another.  They had to have extremely high performance for the time so they were very expensive to build and maintain.  So at first only a few cities in the northeast were hooked together.  Then the cable was extended down the east coast.  Then it was further extended across to the west coast, but initially only to California.  Over the decades the system of TV cables for shipping signals from city to city was extended to more and more of the country until finally, pretty much every city of any size was "on the cable".

So these early TV stations were pretty isolated.  That meant that there were few or no opportunities to get a live feed from elsewhere in the country.  So these stations did a lot of local production.  At one time pretty much every TV station in the country had their own local host for a children's show that they ran in the "after school" slot in the early evening.  And pretty soon someone figured how to hook a movie projector to a TV camera.  This made it easy for TV stations to broadcast old movies.  Hollywood had lots of old movies around that they would rent cheaply to the TV stations.  So soon pretty much every TV station ran movies at various times of the day.

Then someone said "hey, let's hook up a movie camera to a TV set".  That made it easy but fairly expensive to get TV shows from "on the cable" TV stations to "off the cable" TV stations.  The TV stations in Seattle, the area I live in was an "off the cable" station for a long time.  Much of the surviving material from the early era of TV comes from Seattle.  East coast shows would be put on the cable to San Francisco.  The San Francisco station would "Kinescope" (the name of the TV to film process) the show and put the film on a plane to Seattle.  After a delay of less than a day (light speed in those days) the show could be aired in Seattle.  Once the show aired no one wanted the film any more.  So a lot of it ended up in the garages of station employees where it was discovered years later.  Why use this clunky method?  Because at that time Kinescopes worked better than anything else.

Seattle, had a different problem that turned out to be important to the evolution of TV, lots of geography.  Seattle is a hilly town.  And for technical reasons broadcast TV signals go in a straight line and do not go through hills.  So one of the local stations came up with an idea.  Why not put an antenna on the top of the hill and run feeds to all the houses on the shadow side of the hill?  It was called Community Antenna TV or CATV for short.  This morphed into cable TV and grew to the behemoth that the cable industry is now.

Anyhow, Seattle eventually got hooked on to the cable (old style usage) and the CATV idea pioneered in Seattle spread to the rest of the country and blossomed into cable TV, or cable (new style) for short.  We'll get back to cable in a minute.  But first, some questions.

Why use kinescopes, the film based technology, as a recording technology?  The answer, of course, is that originally that was the only functional technology.  Kinescopes were replaced by video tape when videotape technology became available.  Similarly, why was TV originally black and white?  The answer here is similar.  Technology initially could not do color.  Color TV sets had to be developed.  Color TV cameras had to be developed.  Then color studio technology and broadcast technology and cable (old style usage of the word) had to be developed.  CBS was the first group to develop a usable color system.  But the broadcast signal was not compatible with black and white.  TV stations would have had to broadcast two different signals on two different channels, one for the black and white system and one for the color one.  Although complex, this might have happened.  But before a decision could  be made RCA, then a giant electronics company that happened to own NBC, developed a "compatible" system.  One signal would be broadcast.  Black and white sets would effectively not see the color components so they would do their black and white thing without needing any modification.  Color sets would know how to process the additional information to put a color picture on their screens.  It took a lot of technological advance to allow the market share of color to overtake that of black and white.  But the technology advanced, costs declined, and after a while, black and white sets disappeared completely.

The changes from kinescopes to video tape and from black and white to color were evolutionary.  They required technology to advance and for money to be found to develop and deploy the new technology.  They also required manufacturing methods to advance so that the cost of the new more complex equipment could be brought down to the point where people figured the additional cost of color was a good deal.  All this happened so TV moved on smoothly.

And there was another area where things moved on smoothly as new technology replaced old technology and that's on the CATV/cable front.  (We're back!)  CATV started out as an effort of one TV station in Seattle to get their signal to the back side of some hills.  When the original CATV system was built there was only one TV station.  But soon there were several.  The CATV technology was upgraded to handle multiple channels.  Then it was upgraded some more to pull in stations that were further away but still in the general area, stations that could be pulled in using sophisticated antennas and the like.  But it was still impractical to pull in stations that were far away.  A cable (old style) could be built but it was just too expensive to pay for itself.  But the technology rapidly improved in terms of the number of channels that could be handled.  There just weren't enough channels to fill all the slots.

And there was another problem.  People quickly noticed that the picture on their TV was a lot better when their TV was hooked up to the CATV system than it was when they used their own antenna.  And many people used inexpensive antennas nick named rabbit ears.  The good news was that the rabbit ears were easy manipulated when you needed to change their orientation, something you often had to do when switching from one station to another as each station's transmission antenna was in a different direction.  The bad news was that rabbit ears seemed to require constant fiddling even if you weren't changing the channel.  None of this fiddling was necessary if you were getting your signals from the CATV system. So people who technically didn't need to hook up to the CATV system did so anyhow.  The fees were low so it was a cheap price to pay to avoid all the fiddling.  So, in spite of the fact that they only gave you access to a few channels, CATV systems became quite popular.

And these two facts, the fact that CATV systems were popular and the fact that CATV systems often had extra unused channel slots was noticed by Ted Turner.  Along with everything else there was another technological advance.  Since things were working pretty well people were putting up lots of TV stations.  The original 12 channel setup called VHF (which actually enabled only about 6 channels in a particular market for technical reasons) was extended to include something called UHF, which added about 60 additional channels (30 or more useful channels).  People were lazy so they mostly stuck with the original VHF channels and, for technical reasons the UHF channels didn't work as well, but a UHF channel could be run profitably if you were careful.  And Turner owned channel 17 in Atlanta.  Turner changed the call letters to WTCG (for Turner Communications Group) and later to WTBS (for Turner Broadcasting System).  It was initially a modest business making a modest profit.

Remember kinescopes.  They were replaced by video tape systems.  Remember the cable systems that were used to send signals between cities.  They worked pretty well but they were very expensive to build and to maintain.  Then along came communications satellites.  Satellites are very expensive.  But with relatively small and relatively inexpensive antennas two TV stations could share programming by relaying it through the satellite.  Soon it became less expensive to do this than to use the cable.  And then it became a lot less expensive.  Turner was the first to notice this and marry it up with the two CATV facts that Turner had noticed.

Turner leased a satellite channel and purchased a satellite antenna for channel 17.  Then he offered to give his WTBS signal away to CATV systems.  (He made his money on the advertising.)  All they had to do was buy the downlink satellite antenna.  And he helped them with that too.  (The more CATV systems that signed up the higher advertising rate he could charge.)  The combination was wildly successful.  WTBS soon started calling itself a superstation and other superstations quickly followed.  It didn't matter that the WTBS feed was not that different from the feed of local stations that were already on the CATV system.  It was a novelty.  Then Turner got broadcast rights to all the Atlanta Braves baseball games.  It didn't matter that the Braves were not very good.  There were lots of CATV systems in markets that had no major league baseball team.  We now know how popular broadcast sports are but it was a surprise when Turner pioneered it with the Braves.  There were a lot of legal problems to be worked out to make superstations successful.  But Turner worked them all out.  And he proved that all the technological problems could also be solved.

WTBS started out as just another local UHF TV station.  But Turner turned it into the first superstation.  He then pioneered CNN, a 24 hour news channel, another idea no one else had thought of.  Here too others quickly got in the game and found other formulas.  We how have ESPN for Sports, various shopping channels, various religion channels, various channels that provide their own TV shows, etc.  In this latter category HBO pioneered the idea of high end shows for a "small" extra fee.  But we also now have any number of channels like A&E or USA that provide fodder that is indistinguishable from TV shows found on the old line networks.  A typical cable package now includes hundreds of offerings catering to pretty much any taste out there.  And CATV is now just "cable" and "cable" is so ubiquitous that most people are unaware of the old usage of "cable" to refer to the method networks like ABC, NBC, and CBS used to deliver their shows to their local "affiliate" stations around the country.

And a lot of this evolution of CATV to cable was enabled by technological improvements.  And a lot of this was evolutionary rather than revolutionary.  Using satellites instead of the city to city cable system was a matter of changing the technology while leaving the functionality alone.  And CATV systems went from one channel to several channels to a couple of dozen channels to about a hundred channels to about a thousand channels as they evolved into cable systems.  But the change was solely in the number of channels that could practically be accommodated.  The functionality was left unchanged.

And before I leave this subject let me ask a question.  Do you like your cable system?  For upwards of 90% of cable customers the answer is "NO".  Cable companies have added features over the years, principally more channels.  But the fees they charge have gone up too.  Most customers believe the "value proposition", how valuable the service is as compared to the cost, has deteriorated.  In the old days people would happily sign up with a CATV system to get essentially what was available to them for free because the small fee the CATV system charged seemed like a good deal.  You got less hassle (no more fiddling with the rabbit ears) and a better picture.  Now the cable fees seem sky high, you are roped into getting a bunch of channels you don't want in order to get the few you do want, and customer service sucks.  Does this sound like an opportunity?

And, while all this technological evolution has been going on in the TV business there are whole other industries that use the same technology base as TV but have heretofore had no connection to the TV business.  The key industry for the purposes of our discussion is the computer business.  The computer business bumped along for years with only the most marginal connection to TV.  The studios that make the TV shows figured out early that they could sex up their shows by putting a bunch of computers in them.  That was pretty much as much of a connection as there was for a long time.  Then the computer business started churning out small inexpensive machines that used a GUI, a Graphical User Interface.  The display used as a computer screen is a CRT, essentially a souped up TV set.  And at some point it became apparent that the process used to generate the "Graphical" on a computer could be used to produce images for purely entertainment purposes.  And this observation is the foundation of the now massive computer games industry.  Computers became adept at creating and manipulating images and, for that matter, sound.  So computers could be used in the production stages of making TV shows.  Interesting but not revolutionary.

But the computer industry also spent decades getting better and better at hooking computers together in networks.  The original "long haul" computer networks (akin to the old city to city cable system used behind the scenes by TV networks) were pathetically slow.  But they kept getting faster.  And over decades the technology for linking literally billions of computers together, what we now know as the Internet, was developed and implemented.  And then there was a technological breakthrough.  Long haul fiber optic cables were developed.  These cables had vastly more capacity than the old long haul computer network equipment.  They were also simpler and cheaper to operate.  Soon they had more capacity than the city to city cable system TV was using.  They even had more capacity than satellite TV links.  It was now possible to send vast amounts of data from one computer to another anywhere in the world.  Sending a live TV signal from one place to the other went from being expensive and requiring a bunch of specialized equipment and expertise to being no big deal.

In the early days TV sets were manufactured in far greater numbers than computer displays so most CRTs were manufactured to meet TV specifications not computer specifications.  But in the '80s that changed.  And the computer CRTs were better.  You could slot in a computer grade CRT in to replace a TV screen but you couldn't slot a TV grade CRT in to replace a computer screen.  So manufacturers started making all computer grade CRTs and using the crappy ones to support the TV market.  And the computer grade CRTs kept getting better and better as computer users demanded higher and higher resolution.  So the performance gulf between a computer grade CRT and a TV grade one continued to grow.  And the market for computer grade CRTs grew at a faster rate than the market for TV grade ones.  At some point all TV grade CRT manufacturing shut down.

Then the "flat screen" revolution happened.  Technology was developed to create a flat thin computer display.  This was a massive improvement over the old CRT, a bulky device that had to extend quite a distance behind the screen.  And the inside of this big device had to be kept in a continuous vacuum.  So the whole thing had to be strong enough so it wouldn't implode.  And that meant it had to be heavy.  As soon as flat screens of sufficiently high quality and sufficiently low price became available the CRT market collapsed.  And remember, all this flat screen technology, even in the early days, had all the capabilities necessary to be used as a screen for a TV.

In fact, remember the whole "compatible" color discussion above.  Compatibility has always been very important in TV.  None of the new stuff can obsolete the old stuff to the point where the old stuff stops working.  So the quality of the TV experience was frozen at the level attainable in the early '70s.  This was definitely not true in the computer business.  Ways were found to introduce bigger, better, faster, displays that did not obsolete the old ones to the point that the old ones would stop working.  So computers kept getting better and better while, for the most part, TVs stayed the same.

This impasse on the TV side was finally broken by the "high definition TV" war.  The Japanese had pretty much taken over the manufacture of CRTS both for TVs and for computers.  At some point they became impatient with the fact that TVs were frozen while computer displays were moving ahead.  And they saw an opportunity to squeeze the modest amount of non-Japanese CRT manufacturing left completely out of business.  So they came up with a new specification for a high definition TV.  They said they would roll it out in Japan and work to roll it out in the rest of the world.  And at this time there were several competing TV standards.  While a computer screen could be sold anywhere in the world because there was only one standard, several different TV models had to be made, each set up to work within the standards of each market.  So a single world wide high definition TV standard had a lot going for it from the Japanese perspective.

This initiative scared the bejesus out of the U.S. electronics industry.  U.S. manufacturers had once dominated the market the way the Japanese now did.  If the Japanese succeeded then it looked like it was over forever for U.S. manufacturers.  So they went to work.  Some of them noticed that the Japanese standard was essentially a souped up version of the old TV standard.  In short hand it was an "analog" standard.  But the computer business, still dominated by U.S. players like Microsoft, used what was short handed as "digital" standards.  And remember these digital standards had permitted the flexibility necessary for allowing new computer displays to get better while allowing the old ones to keep working.  So coming up with a "digital" high definition specification was proposed.  The immediate question was "could it be made to work at a reasonable price"?  With the computer display business as a foundation the answer was "yes".  The next question was "could it be made to fit broadly within the current system"?  Here there were problems.

Originally the amount of bandwidth necessary to get things to fit seemed excessive.  Then someone suggested compression.  This is a mathematical technique for shrinking the amount of data it takes to represent an image.  There are lots of blobs in a typical TV picture where every "pixel" is the same.  Why not send the pixel value along once then add instructions for where to put it.  Compression was quickly found to solve the bandwidth problem.  It was easily shown that TV pictures could be compressed enough so that the new digital high definition transmission would take up the same amount of bandwidth as the old analog TV channels.  This meant that some old "analog" channels could be flipped into new "digital" channels without having to change anything else.  Then it came down to cost and feasibility.  Could this new much more complex equipment be built and could it be built for a reasonable price.  As we now know, the answers to these questions turned out to be "yes". We have completed the transition of broadcast TV from "analog" to "digital" and from "standard definition" to "High definition".  But it was done in such a way as to leave the old "TV" system pretty much in place.

And that's the end of the history lesson.  To recapitulate, we have a "TV" system that looks pretty much like it has for many decades.  Oh, we now have lots more channels and we have high definition but it is pretty much the same system.  This  is ridiculous.  We could do a much better job of it.  But we are locked into the current system.  Or are we?  Powerful forces like things as they are.  The networks like it.  The local TV stations like it.  The cable companies like it.  And it turns out a lot of cable channels like ESPN like it.  But there are some cracks starting to appear in the system.  The most obvious is You Tube.  You can download vast quantities of video from You Tube.  And, from a technical point of view, You Tube videos are the equal of anything you can get on TV.  So You Tube could completely replace TV if all we have to worry about are technical issues.  More original content is uploaded to You Tube in a day than any single person could watch in a lifetime.  But most of it is crap.  So, while You Tube shows that there is another way, in its current form it does not represent a threat to the "TV" system.  The "TV" system consistently delivers higher quality content.  So, by itself, You Tube is not enough to do TV in.  Fortunately, there is more out there than just You Tube.

Remember HBO?  Their business model is "deliver premium content at an affordable price premium".  The most obvious company to follow this model but in a non-TV way is Netflix.  They are using the same business model.  They just replace the "TV" delivery system with the "Internet download" delivery system.  In the same way that HBO made a splash with shows like "Sex and the City" and "The Sopranos", Netflix has made a splash with "House of Cards" and "Orange is the New Black".  They have been successful enough with this model to attract competition.  Amazon is trying to do the same thing with there  "Prime" service.  They have rolled out "Alpha House" and other shows.  And guess who is also joining the "streaming" set?  HBO!  HBO has announced that they are going to make all their content (current and historical) available as a web based streaming service called "HBO Go".

The success of Netflix shows that an alternative to the current "TV" delivery system can be successful from a business perspective.  But can we go "all the way" to completely replacing the "TV" system?  If it could be pulled off it would be another "disruptive technology" success.  Disruptive technology succeeds by meeting an old need in a new way that is very damaging to the "old way" companies.  For this to be possible there must be weaknesses and inadequacies in how the "old way" companies do business.  It turned out that there were certainly weaknesses and inadequacies in the music business.  Is the same true for the "TV" business?  Well let's take a high level look at the pieces.

TV shows are made by studios, networks and other content providers.  The digital revolution has already swept over the production operations of these organizations and left them largely unchanged.  The tricks and tools are cooler but the process is pretty much the same.  The process at its best is driven by creative people and there is no technological replacement for creative people.  Content providers want to be paid for their work but they pretty much don't care who pays as long as the check is big enough.  They are just as happy to cash a Netflix check as they are to cash an NBC check.  And that's a problem for the down stream players.

The next step is the aggregators, the people who purchase the shows, collect them together, and send them along.  Currently these are people like the aforementioned NBC and its old line network brethren like ABC.  But they are also, intermediate aged players like A&E or USA.  And the list extends right down to the newest cable channel on the block.  These aggregators then do deals with the cable companies like Comcast.  Then (if you have bought the right cable package) the show is available to you the viewer on your TV set.  But in some cases there is another level that still exists but we have largely forgotten about, the local "broadcast" TV stations.  Fare provided by the old line networks like NBC doesn't go straight to Comcast.  Instead the local station pretends to broadcast it and Comcast pretends to pick it up "off the air" and send it along to your home over its local cable system.

Most people have forgotten but local TV stations still actually broadcast their signal.  You can buy the digital equivalent of the old rabbit ear antenna for about $50 and pick their signal up for free, at least theoretically.  In principal you can sever your connection to the likes of Comcast (or whoever your local cable provider is). And, other than the $50 up front cost, it's free.  But just as in the old CATV days it is sometimes hard to pick up a good signal and you are limited to the local TV stations that are nearby and not on the other side of a hill or other obstruction.  And this is a problem for the old line "TV" system.  If local TV stations stopped broadcasting they would save a lot of money.  Transmitters soak up a lot of electricity and keeping a TV tower in good repair is not cheap either.  And, as long as they maintained their connection to the cable company, most people would not notice if they stopped broadcasting because very few people actually view local station content by picking it out of the air.  So why not just stop broadcasting?

Because, due to the traditional "broadcast" nature of their business a local station is granted an exclusive license on network content for their broadcast area.  What this means in practical terms is that the cable company pays a fee, a rather hefty fee, for the right to use the signal of the local TV station.  And there is a federal "must carry" law that requires cable operators to make a deal with all the local broadcast TV stations.  This rather tenuous legal foundation for all this nonsense is what guarantees a large chunk of the local station's revenue.  And that revenue stream can easily be the difference between a profitable operation and one that runs at a loss.  So for local stations it is imperative that the current system remain in place.  It would be easier and cheaper for Comcast to pick the NBC feed off the satellite just like they do with A&E but current law requires them to jump through these unnecessary hoops that benefit the local stations.  Nobody cares that we the viewer don't see any benefit.

And remember how the local stations used to provide a lot of local content.  Well, since then most of that local content has disappeared.  There are no local kids shows. And if you want to see old movies you'll have to go to one of the cable channels that specialize in that sort of thing.  Most of what they broadcast today is network content or syndicated shows provided by one or another of the usual cast of content providers.  There are two areas where local stations are still very active.  That is news and sports.  College and professional teams used to do deals with local stations to carry non-network games.  And most games fell into this category.  But now pretty much every pro game is broadcast by one network or another.  So if the game shows up on a local station's broadcast then it's because the station has the rights through one network affiliation or another.  And the same thing is rapidly overtaking college sports.  The big football conferences are all forming "sports channels" that specialize in the games of the schools that are members of the conference.  The era when a local TV station could do a stand alone deal with a local college to broadcast some or all of its games is rapidly coming to a close.

That leaves news.  Local stations broadcast a lot of news.  But much of it is repetitive.  It is common to have a 90 minute block of local news in the evening.  But this mostly consists of the same thirty minutes of content repeated three times to accommodate the varied schedules of viewers.  And regional "all news channels" are emerging.  There is one in my area that covers my state (Washington) and a couple of adjacent states.  There is a lot of repetition here but they seem to have plenty of time to cover all the news for the entire region at least as thoroughly and often more thoroughly that the local stations do.  This is already a cable channel.  It is not broadcast over the air.  I see these kinds of operations as a viable replacement for the news operations of local stations.

So local stations seem completely unnecessary.  But cable operators are safe, right?  Well, you remember how everybody hates their cable operator?  And remember the part about cable operators having to compensate local broadcast channels.  Well, this whole "compensate" thing is true up and down the cable lineup.  It is most obvious with premium channels like HBO.  But, with the exception of the religion channels and the shopping channels the cable companies pay for everything.  That's why bundling is so important to them.  Do you like sports?  How about hunting and fishing stuff, or science stuff, or history stuff, or geography stuff, or nature stuff, or reality shows, or game shows?  Somewhere in that list is at least one thing you don't like and probably several things you would just as soon do without.  But you are subsidizing it, all of it.  Cable operators bundle things together so that you will be forced to get a lot of things you don't like or don't care about in order to get a few things you like.  You end up subsidizing everything in the bundle whether you like it or not.

You don't pay a lot to subsidize any one channel.  But you subsidize a lot of channels and it adds up.  And, since the cable companies get money for carrying them, pretty much everyone gets the religion channels and the shopping channels, even though most viewers would rather do without one or both of those categories.  I doubt a typical viewer watches content from even 10% of the channels offered.  They would much rather get a much smaller list of channels consisting of only the ones they are actually interested in.  But they are not given this "a la carte" option.  Neither the cable companies nor the studios want to take the chance that "a la carte" will translate to "less money for me".  So here you have a situation where the general public wants a la carte by a vast margin but the cable industry for their own reasons does not want to offer it to them.  So, if Internet streaming could offer viewers an a la carte experience especially if it turned out to be cheaper than the current cable model then, assuming it worked well, people would flock to it.

And, as I said, we are moving toward it.  We are seeing high quality original content being offered by Netflix, Amazon, HBO (soon) and others.  That's the good news.  But it is not currently possible to duplicate the cable experience with Internet streaming.  You can 't get old line network content (NBC, etc.) first run on the web because web access to this content has been blocked so far.  A company called Aereo thought they had figured out pull this off.  Technologically, it's a piece of cake.  The problems are legal.  They lost their case in the U.S. Supreme Court recently and just filed for bankruptcy.  It may be possible to get around the legal obstacles that brought Aereo down but no one has figured out how yet.

I think I have convinced you that there are no technical problems left stopping the creation of an alternative to the current "TV" system.  So the problems lie elsewhere.  And you may have already figured out one of the big ones.  I have listed Netflix, Amazon, and HBO as content sources.  I haven't talked about others like Hulu that offer access to TV content from the old line networks.  But it is available on delay and not everything is available.  (And CBS does not make its shows available to Hulu.  You have to go somewhere else to find them.)  Hulu is only the most well known site providing streaming access to "TV" content.  There are others.  And that's a problem.  For all that we dislike cable companies, they are a "one stop shopping" provider.

I can get my local stations, my cable stations (like A&E, USA, etc.) my "free" sports channels like ESPN, my premium channels like HBO, and on and on and on, all from the same cable company.  I may have to pay a lot of money to get them all.  But once I hand a chunk of change over to the cable company once a month I am all set.  To try to do this on the web I have to pay a fee to Hulu (to get premium content).  I then have to pay another fee to Nerflix, and another fee to Amazon, and another fee to HBOGo, etc.  Its a lot of money.  It's also the opposite of "one stop shopping".  Trying to put together a cable-like package right now may end up costing more than cable.  And I can't just change the channel.  I have to switch from this application (or web site) to that application to the other web site.  That's the opposite of what made the original CATV experience so popular.  So we're not there yet.

But I think we will eventually get there.  The first thing I expect to go is the "broadcast" operations of local TV stations.  The FCC is about to auction a big chunk of radio spectrum.  Everybody expects it to go for fantastic amounts of money.  The spectrum will go to open up things up for smart phones and other mobile devices.  And people definitely want to be able to "watch TV" on their smart phone or tablet while they are out and about.  If we shut down the broadcast part of local TV stations then this will free up another big chunk of radio spectrum.  No one thinks we are at the end of the growth curve for mobile devices so someone will be willing to pay fantastic amounts of additional money for this additional spectrum if and when it becomes available.  Frankly, the only thing that is keeping the local stations broadcasting is their concern that this would fatally weaken their negotiating position with the cable companies.  Maybe they can be bought off with a big limp sum payment.

But I think that local TV stations are already in trouble even if they can keep things as they now are.  I think the business climate has turned against them.  Advertisers have plenty of options and I think it is harder and harder for the local stations to deliver eyeballs efficiently.  If networks could dump them and deal directly with the cable companies it would save them a lot of money and hassle so they would be willing to throw their local "partners" overboard if they thought it would help their bottom line enough.  So on one side you have local TV stations.  They are heavily wired into the political system at the local and state level but depend on their network partners to handle things at the national level.  If that support at the national level dries up they are in big trouble.  And the critical decisions in all this are made at the national level.  On the other side you have the cable companies.  Getting rid of the local stations eliminates a bunch of headaches and, assuming they can get a better deal directly from the networks, it saves them money.  And the mobile types really want the spectrum.  They are not currently making a push because they are busy dickering for the spectrum now coming on the market, spectrum that was freed up by the transition for analog to digital TV.  They also believe that if they got in a fight they would lose.  It is bad idea to make powerful people mad at you and then not get what you are fighting for.  But they will have digested the new spectrum within a couple of years.  And if the political position of the local stations continues to weaken they may decide they can win the fight.  At that point it will be "go in with all guns blazing".

So I see local TV stations first losing the over the air part of their business then just losing.  And local TV stations are a key component of the "TV" system.  The other, and currently bigger component, is the cable operators.  They are still very powerful because they are very profitable and they have leveraged their money and the favors they can do for politicians.  Remember, Comcast, for instance, owns both NBC and MSNBC.  They can be very nasty or very nice to politicians who are out of favor or in favor.  I think they are mostly not that blatant.  Instead they have a giant lobbying operation and contribute generously to political campaigns.  But there is no doubt that they are heavyweight players in D.C.

They will fiercely defend their turf.  But ultimately they can be done in in the same way the music industry was done in.  There is a large pool of potential customers who are dying to get out from under their thumbs.  And there is lots of money that could be stripped out of their operation.  A "lean mean" Internet operation has lots of ways to undercut them on price and beat them on service, all at the same time.  No one has figured it out yet.  The Hulu people tried to be the single source for all things television, as long as it was second run.  They were done in by squabbling among the executives that run the various companies involved.  This opened the door to people like Netflix and Amazon.  But none of these new players look like they have cracked the riddle of how to provide a cable-like "one stop shopping" experience.  But this is not a technology problem.  It's a political problem.  Theoretically, it is also a legal problem.  But, with the right politics, the law can be changed.  I believe this problem too will be solved.  And I think it will be solved in less than 25 years.

The Republican party is Anti-American

I'm sure your first response to the title is "but they just won big in the midterm elections".  But those same midterm elections featured campaign spending of roughly $4 billion and featured a turnout of less than half of the eligible citizenry.  And, although the ratings of the very institutions the politicians were running for jobs in have popularity ratings of under 10%, more than 90% of incumbents were re-elected.  I don't think you can draw any conclusions from the Republican victory.

There is also a strong case for my thesis based on GOP domestic policies.  But, in order to constrain the discussion to a manageable scope, I am going to restrict myself to foreign affairs.  And my starting point is an article by Richard Haass in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs.  In "The Unraveling", Mr. Haass takes a broad look at U.S. foreign policy and prescribes what he thinks should be done.  For those of you not familiar with him, Mr. Haass is a long time figure in foreign policy circles.  He is currently president of The Council on Foreign Relations.  Before that he held positions in both the George H. W. Bush administration and that of his son.  He is neither a right wing bomb thrower nor a left wing ideolog.  He is a right leaning member of the establishment and, therefore, no friend of President Obama.  In fact, he would characterize his piece as a critique of Obama's foreign policy.  So let's see what he says and how this lines up with the pronouncements and actions of Republican politicians.

Mr. Haass sees the fundamental foreign policy issue as "a perennial tension in the world between the forces of order and the forces of disorder".  Not surprisingly, he is in favor of order.  He titles one section of his piece "The post-Cold War order is unraveling, and while not perfect, will be missed."  He goes on to say "[t]hese days, the balance between order and disorder is shifting toward the latter.  Some of the reasons are structural, but some are the result of bad choices made by important players -- and at least some of those can and should be corrected."  My thesis in a nutshell is that Republicans are actively supporting these bad choices.  So let's take a tour of the places Mr. Haass discusses and what he says should be done.  Then let's see what Republicans are saying and doing.

He starts with the middle east.  "In the Middle East, for example, order has been undermined by a tradition of top heavy, often corrupt, and illegitimate governments".  He then lists their sins.  So what's the U.S. contribution?  "With more than a decade of hindsight, the decision to oust Saddam and remake Iraq looks even more mistaken than it did at the time."  These actions were undertaken by a Republican administration with strong support up and down the party.  And President Obama opposed it.  So Obamas is on the right side of the argument and Republicans are on the wrong side.  And remember, it is Haass who is providing the definition of what is right and what is wrong.

He then chastises the President for supporting the ousters in Libya and Egypt.  Yet the governments of both countries fit Haass' definition of governments that have made things worse.  So what, according to Haass, was the U.S. supposed to do?  Were we to continue to support the old bad governments that were, according to the Haass definition, wrong governments?  Yes!  Apparently in both cases we should make an exception.  So was their a strong argument for continued support of these old regimes by Republican politicians?  No.  Senator McCain and others were vigorously arguing for intervention, and earlier, and more of it.  Elsewhere, Haass criticizes the U.S. "lack of effective follow-up".  But it is at this point, when the Obama Administration was trying to impellent effective follow-up, that Republican support for intervention in these countries turned to opposition.  The switch effectively sabotaged any chance for success.

Haass has something to say on Syria.  He apparently approves of "support for the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad" but faults Obama for doing "little to bring it about".  Here Republicans were loudly supportive of arming and supporting the "moderate opposition".  We now know that the largest component of that opposition was what we now call ISIS/ISIL.  Neither Haass nor the Republicans have given Obama any credit for pulling off the extremely tricky and difficult task of extracting large stockpiles of chemical weapons from an active war zone.  Nor have they provided any useful help in identifying the "moderate" opposition or encouraging the Turks, Saudis, or other "moderate" Arab nations to participate in Syria in active and helpful ways.  Instead, their contribution has consisted primarily of "whatever Obama is doing is wrong".

There was a time when the rule that said "politics stops at the water's edge".  (The quotation is attributed to Republican Senator Vanderbilt in 1947.)  There was a sound reason for this.  As Haass says "[t]he world can see this", namely divisiveness around our foreign policy.  This encourages the thinking in our opponents that "if we don't like what the current guys are offering we can just wait until the other guys get in and see if we can get a better deal from them".  It also undermines the current administration's ability to make promises in order to secure a deal on some contentious issue.  But the Republican party no longer feels bound by this rule.  The Republicans may well block the implementation of the promise merely to score domestic political points.  With this in mind, it is all the more impressive that Obama was able to bring the chemical weapons deal in Syria to a successful conclusion. No one should be in favor of a regime like Assad's having access to any chemical weapons, let alone the large stockpiles Assad had.  Returning to Haass' piece, . . .

Haass makes note of and apparently approves of Obama's tilt toward Asia.  His criticism here is "one of omission", that Obama hasn't sufficiently tilted.  Have Republicans made a coherent argument, or for that matter any argument at all, that the tilt is a bad idea?  No.  But they have, as part of their general policy of "whatever Obama's for, we're against" policy, thrown roadblocks in the way where they could.  They have tried to reduce the administration's ability to negotiate agreements or do deals.  They also yammer incessantly about phony Benghazi conspiracies, block confirmation of cabinet officials, ambassadors, and generally do what they can to make sure Obama lacks the time and energy to pursue Asian initiatives.

On Russia Haass notes that "U.S. and Western policy has not always encouraged more constructive choices on [Putin's] part".  Republican Senator McCain is famous for suggesting that the U.S. get involved in a war between Georgia (the country, not the state) and Russia.  This is typical of Republican opposition to "more constructive choices" that do not involve arming Russia's enemies.

More generally Haass laments that "attempts to construct new global arrangements to foster trade and frustrate climate change have foundered".  The Republican party is home of (a) the "black helicopter" theory of the United Nations, (b) a legal theory that treaties signed by the President of the United States and ratified by the U.S. Senate do not have the force of law, (c) climate change denialism, (d) trilateral commission conspiracies, etc.

Then there is the list of Haass don'ts.  "The gap between U.S. ambitions and U.S. actions needs to be narrowed."  The home of the theory that U.S. power was unlimited as long as we were willing to put enough boots on the ground was the George W. Bush administration. President Obama strongly believes we can't do everything and is loudly and consistently criticized by Republicans for saying so.  "Democratic transformations of other societies are often beyond the means of outsiders to achieve."  Again, this is a lesson the Bush Administration never quite learned.  They were the people that tried nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time.  The war hawk wing of the Republican party seems to be impervious to this information.  Haass criticizes Obama for his failure to achieve "a residual force" in Iraq.  The deal that resulted in the withdrawal of forces from Iraq was a Bush deal.  All Obama did was implement it.  You can blame Obama for no residual forces in Afghanistan.  But the primary reason seems to parallel Iraq, the locals want us out.  And Obama has snuck 1,500 (with an additional 1,500 or more to likely follow) "advisors" back into Iraq, all with no congressional approval so far.  If you like troops all over the place then Obama has done a much better job than the Republicans.

Generally speaking, Haass recommends that the goal of the U.S. should be "integration, trying to bring others into arrangements to manage global challenges such as climate change, terrorism, proliferation, trade, public health, and maintaining a secure and open commons".  That sounds like a pretty good summary of the Obama foreign policy.  I have highlighted Republican opposition to pretty much every item on this list above.  Haass then moves on to a domestic perspective.

"The U.S. needs to put its domestic house in order".  Specifically, "U.S. energy security has improved dramatically" and most of this improvement has happened on Obama's watch.  On the other hand, oil imports grew under president Reagan and both presidents Bush.  And now for the bad news, "the same cannot be said about other problems, such as the country's aging public infrastructure, its inadequate immigration policy, and its long term public finances".  The Obama administration has proposed or implemented initiatives in all these areas.  The Republicans do what they can to block or reduce them.  They demonized the "stimulus", which contained substantial infrastructure spending.  They have held up the highway bill and blocked or forced cutbacks other types of infrastructure spending.  The Republicans in the House have blocked an Immigration Reform bill that had substantial Republican Senate support.  Republicans have manufactured multiple crises around debt ceiling legislation and the budget.  For several years now it has not been possible to proceed in the regular order on budget bills.  Instead after a lot of grandstanding we end up with omnibus spending bills.  This has been a long term embarrassment and has weakened the U.S. position in the world markedly.

Haass summarizes thusly:  "In fact, sensible foreign and domestic policies are mutually reinforcing:  a stable world is good for the home front, and a successful home front provides the resources needed for American global leadership."  If we did this "[t]he good news is that the United States can afford both guns and butter".  Unfortunately, Republicans seem hell bent on making sure we can afford neither.  What can be more Anti-American than that.