I do not work in traditional media, I do not have an affiliation with any Radio, TV  or other traditional media entity. I simply write it as I see it. Am I wrong? Possibly..

In the early days of radio and television, networks couldn’t wait to get people to tune in and listen or watch their content. If you purchases a TV or radio (of which most stations didn’t see a cent) you immediately had access to everything on your dial. The way these network made money was to put advertising in-between the content. So the amount of eyes on the screen or ears listening was the leverage they had to sell advertising on their network.

As a TV or radio owner you never received any bills for the installation of additional towers and  radio sub-stations. It was obviously profitable enough for the networks to build infrastructure to get more eyes and ears onto their content. (so that they can sell advertising space for more). This was a good era for media companies.

Then the Internet came along..

After media companies realized that they’re not online and that other people is posting their content they went on the defense and started with legal action (which I’m not going to get into) as well as change the business model where, as a network, you sell your network’s programming (without advertising) to 3rd party sites like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Google, who in turn, charge the end-user for the ability to watch your network’s content.

Here is why I think this is wrong. It’s way too complicated with tons of paperwork and with piracy running as rampant as always. It’s a very weak solution to a really simple problem.

I think that networks should see the Internet as just another medium. The same way that FM and AM and TV signals were a medium. So what needs to happen is as a media company/network you need to start publishing all of your own content on your own sites for free. You stream it, for free for anyone who wants to watch. If you have a terminal that connects to the Internet, you should have access to it. Imagine the amount of eyes you will have on your content, in a space you can control.

Now that you have all of the eyes back on your content, you can start doing advertising again. Please don’t give into the accountants and bankers of this world, keep your advertising classy and not overpowering with flashing shit everywhere.  (I can still sing some of the TV jingles from my childhood, that must say something about their quality..)

Once you did this, all you need to concentrate on the quality of programming, but media companies are excelling in that department lately, so I’ll just leave them to it.

This way the users get access to the content, regardless of regions and nonsense, and network companies have worldwide reach. (If this is a problem, you can always split your advertising by region.)