Cable

Jesse Brown on the Conservative government’s “pick and pay” pledge

There’s more discussion lately (See here and also here for starters) about whether cable has plateau-ed and whether its superiority over broadcast is about to end. I talked about this in an earlier post, and don’t want to repeat myself too much, but I do think that ultimately we’ll always be talking about different standards.

I’m a bit late to this discussion, but I took a slightly different meaning from this piece, where Tim Goodman argues that basic cable’s quality boom is in danger of being choked off by reality TV. The idea being that reality shows are at once the most popular and cheap fare on cable, and that the incentive for cable networks to produce high-quality scripted programming is being reduced.

When Conan O’Brien took a job on basic cable, some saw it as a step down. Now it’s looking smart.

Cable firms make a bold gamble on a new era of convergence

I agree with both sides—because they’re both wrong

This Wired blogger argues (with backup from the human quote machine, Robert J. Thompson) that the problem with the broadcast networks is that “you may hear dirty words or see an exposed buttock online or on a cable program.” This strikes me as a case of letting the story’s premise dictate the conclusions even when there’s no real evidence for those conclusions. (Which is something every blogger does sometimes, of course; the temptation to make the argument you planned to make is sometimes too much to resist.)

CBS is going to promote a cable comedy, TBS’s The Bill Engvall Show, by giving it a special one-time-only network showing in advance of the second season of the show. CBS and TBS are not part of the same corporate family, unless there was yet another merger last night while I was sleeping; the cable network just struck a deal with CBS, which serves a similar demographic, to plug its show (while giving CBS something different to broadcast during the summer doldrums, since the writers’ strike made summer programming hard to come by).