View From the Phlipside - Who Gets Paid?

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside.

Once upon a time it was all so simple.  The TV Networks produced or had deals to have people produce television shows.  Then they broadcast them over their network to TV stations who had affiliate agreements or even better to TV stations that the network owned themselves.  It was all pretty simple.  Particularly since for several decades there wasn’t any competition.  It was network TV or nothing.  Independent stations, those without network affiliations, were mostly old movies and TV shows that were at least a decade old.

Then cable came along and it got more complicated.  Now someone else was taking the product of the broadcast networks, paying a fee to use it and making more money for themselves.  More complicated when satellite TV came along.  And then streaming that same product through the internet.  The folks who create TV shows realized that they were doing an awful lot of the upfront risk taking while a whole bunch of people were making money from their work.  Not surprisingly the network producers decided they wanted a piece of that action.  Equally unsurprising the other entities didn’t want to share.

The producers finally put their feet down when Time Warner Cable announced the launch of an iPad based app to stream TV.  The app allows Time Warner subscribers to watch shows on their iPad through their home wifi network.  But that’s not good enough for the content providers.  So 17 channels have been pulled from the app.  The networks involved may feel like they’ve won but the reality is that this is just the first shot in a much longer war.  Cablevision, another big cable company, is moving ahead with their similar app as well.

So what’s to be done?  The industry needs to sit down and figure out some new economic ground rules.  And that’s always a nasty, ugly conversation.  The cable and satellite and internet folk don’t want to pay a penny more than they are.  At the same time the folks who actually lay out the money to create the content have a right to be paid for the use of their material.  Somewhere along the line a compromise has to be made that allows payment to the producers whenever value is created by a service provider.  At the same time the service providers need protection of the viability of their businesses.  A solution will be found.  The question is how many bodies will be left behind in the process.  We the viewers should be urging everyone to settle the issue as quickly as possible so that they can get back to the important business of keeping us amused.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2011