"Mr. Ye, now the cable and satellite TV network are developing so rapidly. Is it necessary for us to acquire local TV stations?" John Foster, general manager of Fox TV, asked Ye Jin for advice.

Today, in the Asian-Merica television industry, the most powerful development is cable TV and satellite TV.

For example, Turner Media, n TV station, broadcasts news 24 hours a day. Originally, this model was not accepted, and the questioners said that [no viewers are willing to watch news 24 hours a day].

But when it was founded, it immediately gained a foothold with a series of explosive news, such as the assassination case of Lihe.

Because major news like this is very attractive to the public.

But public TV stations do not like to broadcast news. Because the ratings of news are not high, but the production costs are very high.

For example, in order to get news, TV stations must set up press stations in popular cities. Each press station also needs to hire reporters, editors, videographers, purchase shooting equipment, live broadcast equipment, etc., which costs a lot of money.

News programs have always been dry and are not attractive to the audience. Compared to watching TV news, they prefer to read newspapers and listen to radio. So at that time, news programs were just embellishments for public TV stations.

The reason why they are willing to report news is the mandatory provisions of the Federal Communications Commission. Therefore, public TV stations usually have few news programs, including morning news, midday news, evening news, etc., which accumulates two hours in length.

Two hours a day is definitely enough for ordinary news. However, hundreds of millions of people are worried about big news like the assassination of the president, and two hours are not enough to read.

nThis kind of 24-hour uninterrupted news is very popular among the public.

Because it broadcasts news 24 hours a day, any new news can be reported as soon as possible. Unlike public TV stations, they have to wait until the news program time to report, so they naturally attract more attention from the audience.

Moreover, it has plenty of time to deeply interpret the news and dig out the stories behind the news, which is more attractive to the audience. After all, everyone has the heart of gossip.

The program arrangements of public TV stations are basically fixed, and it is difficult to adjust the program in depth, n.

After the launch of n, it has developed extremely rapidly. To this day, the subscribers absorbed through cable and satellite TV channels have reached more than 4 million households, covering tens of millions of people.

Moreover, its subscribers are still increasing at a rate of 80% per year. This is why major consortiums are optimistic about Ted Turner and are willing to give him $800 million to acquire Columbia Pictures.

...

In addition to n, there are many TV companies such as Viacom, MTV TV Network, Nickelodeon and Children's Channel. They are also developing rapidly, with the accumulated subscription users exceeding 50 million.

While these cable TV and satellite TV companies have developed rapidly, they have also taken away many viewership users of public TV stations.

Because people only have one pair of eyes and one brain, they can only watch one TV station at the same time, and it is impossible to watch two channels at the same time. If they watch satellite TV and cable TV, they cannot watch public TV. If they watch public TV, they cannot watch satellite TV and cable TV.

Therefore, for every additional user of satellite TV and cable TV, the public TV station will lose one audience. In the long run, the public TV station will have fewer and fewer viewers, and the advertising revenue will be smaller and smaller every year, so the future will naturally be worrying.

Therefore, John Foster suggested stop acquiring local TV stations and instead develop cable TV and satellite TV businesses. This will not only catch the fast lane of the development of the TV industry, but also greatly save costs.

For example, CNN cooperates with satellite companies and only needs to pay 120 million US dollars a year to transmit signals to North America through satellites, even Canada and Mexico can receive them.

In comparison, Fox TV has spent $3.5 billion to cover America. It will cost about $1 billion in the future, dozens of times more.

...

"You can consider developing cable and satellite TV, but don't stop working on recruiting local TV stations." Ye Jin immediately suggested when he heard what he said.

It is not to be denied that the development of cable and satellite TV is indeed rapid, and it has taken away many markets of public TV stations. However, compared with cable TV, satellite TV still has huge advantages and will not be replaced for a long time.

The first is that it is cheap. Public TV stations only need to erect the antenna to receive TV signals for free. In comparison, even the cheapest cable TV package costs for $40.

Forty dollars are of course nothing to the middle class, but they are simply unbearable to the lower class.

Due to the impact of the oil crisis in recent years, the economy of Asiatica has been sluggish for a long time, and the unemployment rate remains high, and nearly 60 million people are below the poverty line. Forty dollars for them is equivalent to a monthly meal fee for one person, and they can save as much as possible.

The second is that the coverage is wide. Public TV stations can mostly cover 90% of the area in Asiatica. Even rising stars like Fox TV have a coverage rate of more than 80%.

Even if cable TV and satellite TV are popularized quickly, it will not be able to cover the whole of the United States in a short period of time. Especially cable TV is even more impossible.

According to statistics, if a cable covering the whole of the United States is laid, it will cost 350 billion US dollars. No operator can afford such a high cost.

Although the cost of promoting satellite TV is much cheaper, it is still not as wide as that of public TV because of the high subscription fee.

Third, public TV stations can provide differentiated programs for audiences in different regions. Local TV stations under public TV stations can not only broadcast programs, but also broadcast self-produced programs.

Many homemade programs are produced locally and reported local news, which is naturally more attractive and intimate to local audiences. This is something that satellite TV and cable TV cannot do.

So there are three points above: satellite TV and cable TV want to replace public TV, which is impossible in the short term, and almost impossible in the long term.

Just like in the mainland, although the mainland Internet construction ranks among the best in the world, even remote villages can have 3g, 4g, and 5g signals, and hundreds of megabytes of optical fiber in the countryside... However, there are still more TV viewers than online video viewers, and there are a lot more.
Chapter completed!