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The Internet will kill cable TV as we know it -- and that can't happen a moment too soon

by Dan Kennedy

For the past few weeks, the cable industry has seemed as exciting as a WWF steel-cage match. Comcast offers $53 billion for MediaOne! AT&T counters with $58 billion! And -- just like when Stone Cold Steve Austin puts the hammer on The Rock -- it turns out that the fix was in all along: AT&T won by paying off Comcast to go away.

Back to you, Vince!

All this made for pretty dramatic headlines in the business press. But none of it does a thing to alter a deep, inescapable truth: cable sucks.

Certainly cable TV has done a good job of accomplishing its basic mission, which is to drain $30 to $100 from you every month for something that used to be free. Yes, I would rather have CNN, VH1, New England Cable News (NECN), and Nickelodeon than not have them. But the diversity and intelligence that we were all promised when we got 50 to 100 channels instead of just five or 10? Please.

Take one typical customer, a/k/a me: a fortysomething news junkie who lives in the suburbs and whose cable company, Cablevision, refuses to carry either MSNBC or the Fox News Channel. Other than look into some ridiculously expensive satellite system, there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

Or consider the plight of Court TV, the law-and-justice channel with a tiny following that -- if the thick, testimonial-filled notebook compiled by the channel's public-relations consultants is any indication -- is nevertheless admirably loyal.

Last year MediaOne dumped Court TV from more than a million homes, citing its minuscule audience. Court TV was replaced with TV Land, a noxious new channel dedicated to dragging Petticoat Junction across that bridge to the 21st century. Since then, Court TV has boosted its audience four- or five-fold, says affiliate-relations director Geoff Figgis, mainly by dumbing down (my phrase, not his): Homicide reruns have replaced prime-time legal analysis, and several snappy half-hour shows have been added. (In what surely must count as good news, Johnnie Cochran's face-time has been cut back as well.) Even with this slight lowering of Court TV's on-air IQ, it's still more substantive than 90 percent of what's out there. But will MediaOne restore Court TV? Stay tuned.

Such channel wars can reach the depths of absurdity. Brock Meeks, chief Washington correspondent for MSNBC.com, notes that TCI, the cable behemoth that serves Redmond, Washington, where Microsoft's headquarters are located, does not carry MSNBC. "Bill Gates can't even watch his own cable network unless he has a special hook-up," Meeks observes. In New York City, Mayor Rudy Giuliani had to issue public threats to get Time Warner's cable system to carry the Fox News Channel. You see, Time Warner bigfoot Ted Turner, who founded CNN, loathes Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Indeed, CNN still has a huge lead in the number of households that are connected: 76 million, compared to 49 million for MSNBC and 39 million for Fox News. It's one thing if people don't watch; it's quite another when they have no choice.

There are technological limitations to current cable systems, and industry executives make a reasonable case that they're doing the best they can.

For instance, when I asked Cablevision spokesman John Urban about my limited choices, he responded that the company is currently pouring $300 million in improvements into its Massachusetts systems. The result will be about 20 new channels.

At MediaOne, spokesman Rick Jenkinson took time out from trying to learn whose corporate butt he'll soon be protecting in order to defend the decision to dump Court TV. His basic point -- that there are a lot more people who would watch Leave It to Beaver and I Dream of Jeannie than there are Court TV addicts -- is probably indisputable. I mean, look who gets elected.

But deciding which channels live and which die would be utterly unnecessary if the 500-channel universe we were promised a few years ago had come into being. Which is why I'll be dubious about the various technosolutions that are talked about now until I actually see them.

Yes, it's nice that RCN is providing competition in Somerville, and is moving into several other communities as well. But that only means you've got two companies chasing the lowest common denominator rather than just one.

The US House recently passed a bill allowing satellite broadcasters to carry local channels, which -- if it becomes law -- will eliminate a huge disadvantage in their battle with cable. That's fine, but I don't want to deal with a satellite company any more than I want to deal with my cable company.

The cable industry talks about a coming digital era in which several hundred channels will be available; but in its next breath, it talks about using those channels for new services such as telephony and video-on-demand. In other words, your local cable provider will still be in control.

Ironically, the cable industry's monopoly on programming may ultimately be broken not by competition, but rather by the industry's latest obsession: the Internet. AT&T's acquisition of MediaOne and Cablevision's upgrade have little to do with television programming and everything to do with broadband, the industry's favorite buzzword for wicked-fast Internet connections. Move enough data through the pipes at a fast enough rate, and it becomes possible to transmit good-quality video over the Web. In five or 10 years, many of us may be sitting down in front of hybrid PC-TVs, receiving programming from an infinite number of channels, navigated via a cable box running Windows CE (Microsoft, you see, invested $5 billion in AT&T last week).

Free Speech TV, a politically progressive programming service in Denver, Colorado, is an instructive example. Several years ago, TCI more or less dumped FSTV's cable outlet, the 90's Channel, from seven cable systems in Colorado. Today the organization, which survives on foundation money, gets its programming out to seven million households by sending tapes to community-access channels, including seven in Massachusetts: Cambridge, Malden, Fitchburg, South Yarmouth, Shrewsbury, Northampton, and Amherst.

FSTV's future, though, is on the Web. Already it offers vast amounts of lefty programming on its Web site (www.freespeech.org). All you need to watch and listen is a reasonably quick Internet connection -- even a 56K modem will do -- and free RealPlayer software.

Though Jon Stout, Free Speech TV's programming director, is naturally hoping his company can find room among the hundreds of new digital channels, he concedes that the Web offers a particularly attractive model because it is "unmediated." That is, it completely removes the cable-company middleman and allows broadcasters to reach viewers directly. Starting a television station will be only slightly more difficult than setting up a Web site.

"It's happening a lot faster than I would have predicted just 12 months ago," says MSNBC.com's Brock Meeks. "And I think that's going to give the cable monopolies all kinds of fits."

The Internet will guarantee the diversity that the cable companies promised but failed to deliver. The fix won't be in any longer. And -- with luck -- it won't suck.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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