A menu. You know, for a la carte
Here’s a small item that happens to illustrate a big point, one that’s a source of frustration to some satellite viewers. According to Multichannel News, The owners of the Fine Living Network are going to change it into the Cooking Channel next year.
It doesn’t sound like much of anything, but think about it for a moment. If you or I wanted to start the Cook This channel, we’d have to go to all sorts of cable and satellite operators to try to work out deals for them to carry Cook This and maybe even pay us a little for it. FLN’s owner, Scripps, won’t have to do that for the Cooking Channel. Instead, if the original contract was flexible enough, the new channel will be automatically carried to the millions of people who have FLN on their channel guides. Probably some of the people who would never think to sample Fine Living will be interested in Cooking.
Channel refocusing goes on all the time. My First Rule of TV Networks is that no matter its niche at its launch, every channel tends to become like every other channel. The Game Show Network adds poker. TV Land adds original series. American Movie Classics runs a scripted weekly drama. You get the idea. (Turner Classic Movies is the lone exception. Thank you, TCM!)
There’s also been a fair amount of rebranding. The Nashville Network became TNN, which became Spike. The Cable Health Network became Lifetime. And soon, FLN will become Cooking.
My point is that any channel’s presence on cable and satellite is a huge opportunity. If you own one, and you think another format will work better, you’re free to try your experiment. Of course, this is intensely valuable, and this is the reason why the handful of companies that own the majority of pay-TV channels will fight to prevent them from being offered one at a time, or a la carte. If viewers could choose not to subscribe to FLN, they probably wouldn’t notice Cooking’s launch.
Remember why we have bundled channels. The first multi-channel distribution system was cable TV. Most cable systems began with simple analog technology that simply delivered every available channel, maybe as many as 36. Premium networks such as HBO required a physical filter on the line to allow or disallow reception. No one could choose to subscribe to only MTV or to block out The Weather Channel.
Flash forward to now. Satellite providers routinely add or subtract individual channels from individual receivers. There’s no technological reason for not selling each channel a la carte. But content providers understandably resist the idea. It’s not just that they won’t get the extra 2 cents per month per subscriber for their Rerun of Everything Else Channel. It’s that they might want to rebrand the Rerun channel to take advantage of the next fad. And if they do, they’ll want the built-in potential viewers that bundled programming provides.
Finally, this is another reason to enjoy FTA programming. FTA viewers are used to having everything change. We search out new and fun shows instead of stumbling onto them as we scroll past Channel 285 in our guide. We work hard to find the shows we like, and that makes them all the better to us. And of course, it’s nice that they’re all free.
Every time I visit the State Fair, I see folks selling Dish Network, and I see folks selling DirecTV. It seems to me that this would be a great opportunity for someone to sell FTA.