Should broadcast TV seek salvation from radio?

While in San Francisco last week, I had a chance to talk with Steve Kotton, the associate director of the School of Multimedia Communications at Academy of Art University. The future of viable local television came up, and Steve (a veteran of the broadcast wars) told what happened at KRON-TV in S.F.

Sold for an unbelievable amount of money, the new owners of KRON soon found themselves -- as a leading NBC affiliate -- embroiled in "reverse compensation" negotiations with the Peacock network. The new owners tried stonewalling, only to find NBC pulling the station's affiliation and giving it to a much smaller station on the edge of the ratings book.

The sheep in wolf's clothing was the new management's ruthless cost-cutting measures, including a massive conversion to cheaper MMJ operations. With backpack journalists replacing reporting teams and resulting staff slicing, KRON is surviving as an independent station -- with a new news infrastructure favoring strong localism in the wide and diverse San Francisco market.

As with many other TV operations around the country, shrinking revenue from ad dollars going to the Internet, and collapsing "eyeball time" from viewers creates a difficult financial balance sheet, when your source of prime programming comes calling to renegotiate a once historically positive compensation cash flow. Today CBS, ABC, Fox and NBC now want their own cut back from the tower owners for carrying net programming. Another dip into the red ink well for local operators.

So where does radio come into play?

As another historical reference -- the situation was similar in the very late 1940s and early 1950s, when network radio was king, and the listeners and advertisers courted broadcast radio for most all electronic entertainment and information. But the upstart television medium siphoned off listeners, making them viewers instead, with loss of sponsors, and even big-name talent to "the box." Collapse of the established profit paradigm brought radio to its knees.

But radio survived, by turning to (1) formatting, and (2) localism. Gone where the national programming and major corporate advertisers, but "going local" radio found it could survive with local ad dollars and by catering to a targeted demographic.

Perhaps broadcast TV is now on the same cusp. Could local TV broadcasters survive without their network fare, through first-run syndicated shows and local origination programming? Think about it. Foregoing national net dollars for a beefed up portion of the local ad market? Offering a concentration on connected and motivated local eyeballs? Reducing cost of increased local presence through mobile device technology?

Is the coming collapse of the second golden age of network television, in reality, the second cycle for formatting and localism for broadcasters?

What do you think?


Jim Furrer