Television may become obsolete
CBC TV FINDS ITSELF in the same sinking boat of fragmented audience and decline in television viewing as other broadcasters
Everyone agrees the CBC can’t go on like this. The CBC agrees it can’t go on like this. Announcing the latest round of layoffs and budget cuts, the corporation’s president, Hubert Lacroix, talked of “making choices and doing fewer things better,” of “accelerating the process of reinventing” itself in the face of a “media landscape (that) is transforming at an astounding speed.”
This is mildly encouraging. The loss of NHL rights may have brought things to a head, after years of declining advertising revenues and cuts in its annual subsidy, but the CBC’s dilemma (English television, that is, for whom it is most acute, and to which I refer throughout) is not about money: it is existential. It is not just that there is no longer any role for a public broadcaster. It is unclear what role remains for broadcasters, period.
The first sort of dilemma has been with us for some years. Early television suffered from a number of technological limitations. The relative scarcity of spectrum meant few channels were available. Signals could not be confined to those who had paid for them, so broadcasters financed their activities by selling advertising time. The result: a handful of networks all crowded around the middle of the road, offering the same predictable fare, aiming to attract the broadest possible audience.
In such a world, there was a need for a public broadcaster, and for public regulation of the airwaves: ironically, to mimic the sort of diversity of offerings markets usually produce on their own. It was always a rough proxy, though: if advertising insulated networks from viewers — rather than selling programs to audiences, networks sold audiences to advertisers — so, in its own way, did public funding.
For a network like the CBC that relied on both, it meant a quandary: should it aim, like the private networks, for the broadest audience in pursuit of its “national unity” mandate — and, not incidentally, advertising dollars — or should it concentrate on smaller niche audiences, of a kind private networks were not interested in? The first risked redundancy, but the second risked irrelevance. Unable to decide between the two, the CBC (on which I sometimes appear) has traditionally done not much of either: neither popular nor good.
With the advent of cable, then satellite, and finally pay television, all of this changed. There were now hundreds of channels, spectrum scarcity was no longer posing a constraint. Since broadcasters could now charge directly for their programs, every taste could be served, narrow or high. On the one hand, this meant there was no longer any case for public funding: the quality divide in television these days is not between public and private, but between pay channels and free. On the other hand, it offered the CBC a way out of its dilemma: converted to a pay channel, or perhaps a constel- lation of channels, it could concentrate on serving its audience, freed from dependence on either advertisers or politicians.
Until lately I had thought reform along these lines was the answer. The status quo was serving neither viewers, nor taxpayers, nor the CBC itself. What the corporation needed was not more money, but different money, from a different source. So: put it on pay. Problem solved. Alas, the world changed again.
Increasingly, the CBC’s dilemma is indistinguishable from that facing the private networks, themselves suffering from a fragmented audience and a decline in television viewing. Indeed, as online video proliferates, whether in the comparatively traditional form of Netflix and Hulu, or aggregators like YouTube or Vimeo, or web-TV sites like Funny or Die, it isn’t just the networks that are in trouble: so are cable and satellite operators.
All that is keeping more consum- ers from “cutting the cord” is the relative difficulty of finding and displaying web-based versus traditional television, but the gap is closing. Let Apple or Google figure out a better interface, and it’s over: in a few years, there will not be such things as networks, or cable, or even television, as a separate device. We will no longer watch programs on a defined schedule, or scroll through channels. Most likely we will pick from a screenful of icons, delivered on demand. It isn’t just the CBC, in its present form, that no longer makes sense. The whole thing doesn’t make sense: CanCon, the CRTC, the subsidies and protections for private networks, any of it.
Is anyone prepared for this? Has anyone a clue of the kind of change that is about to overtake them? The private operators at least have the threat of bankruptcy to spur them on: some may even hope to survive. But the CBC? Lacroix’s bold rhetoric aside, the tendency in any such large organization is to lag behind the curve, always fighting the last revolution. To bureaucratic inertia, add the narcotic effects of public funding: not enough to save it, but just enough to doom it. And even if the CBC were of a mind to remake itself, its government masters aren’t. Politically, it’s not worth the risk.
So the likelihood is the CBC will go on like this, drifting and declining for years to come. Like Canada Post, Via Rail and the other stranded assets that litter the public sector, it will limp on, purposelessly, through successive “action plans” and “reinventions,” for no reason other than that no one can be bothered to do anything else — and because no one expects them to. In a politics without ideas, under a government without ambition, that’s what we’ve learned to accept.