Re:Local TV stations pushed the same Amazon-scripted segment
by AnthonyMouse on Wednesday May 27, 2020 @01:17AM
(#23319602)
> 100% percent of the stations listed in the article have broadcast over the air stations (their FCC callsigns are given). I couldn't speculate how many people consume these station's content via broadcast versus some other medium, though.
Even the percentage doesn't really matter because the scarcity isn't there anymore. You don't have to get on broadcast TV in order to reach an audience anymore. PewDiePie has more subscribers than Fox and NBC have viewers combined.
When broadcast TV was the only way to deliver video to millions of people, you had to care what was using that capacity because it came at the expense of carrying something else. Now it's just one more way to deliver bits.
If anything it's now YouTube in that position, because they're just about the only way for ordinary people to reach a large audience. But in that case the constraint still isn't that they're carrying something bad instead of something good, since everything is carried in addition to rather than instead of everything else, but rather that they might refuse to carry something good which then has no other reasonable alternative for distribution.
Even the percentage doesn't really matter because the scarcity isn't there anymore. You don't have to get on broadcast TV in order to reach an audience anymore. PewDiePie has more subscribers than Fox and NBC have viewers combined.
When broadcast TV was the only way to deliver video to millions of people, you had to care what was using that capacity because it came at the expense of carrying something else. Now it's just one more way to deliver bits.
If anything it's now YouTube in that position, because they're just about the only way for ordinary people to reach a large audience. But in that case the constraint still isn't that they're carrying something bad instead of something good, since everything is carried in addition to rather than instead of everything else, but rather that they might refuse to carry something good which then has no other reasonable alternative for distribution.