{"id":20,"date":"2007-01-22T10:53:55","date_gmt":"2007-01-22T14:53:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/fkatz\/2007\/01\/22\/youve-got-five-hundred-channels-and-a-w"},"modified":"2007-01-22T11:04:36","modified_gmt":"2007-01-22T15:04:36","slug":"youve-got-five-hundred-channels-and-a-web-site-use-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fkatz\/2007\/01\/22\/youve-got-five-hundred-channels-and-a-web-site-use-them\/","title":{"rendered":"You’ve got five hundred channels and a Web site. Use them!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a guilty secret. I watch soap operas. Well I TiVo soap operas. Well just one really. “All My Children.” And I lurk like nobody’s business on the very clever AMC message boards<\/a>. Unlike Aaron Sorkin’s paranoid fantasies of message boards filled with ignorant housewives in mu-mus and a dangerous fondness for Newport Lights, this board starts some interesting conversations include “rate a writer,” “WTF moment of the week” and suggestions for the writers and some of the characters. There are fans on the boards who’ve been watching since the 1970s (back when Susan Lucci was a teenager). This particular group of fans not only love the show, they want to make it better. And they want to keep watching. And sometimes, but not often, the writers actually appear to be listening. The give and take exchanges on these message boards are an interesting example of the new peer to peer media shift.
\nNow comes the news from both ABC and NBC that they are considering adding a third and fourth hour respectively to their morning news shows “GMA” and “Today.” NBC has already axed one of its soaps to make room for the extra hour and ABC, home of “All My Children,” “One Life to Live” and perennial favorite “General Hospital”could meet the same unpleasant and entirely unecessary fate. Message board fans admit its too soon to tell if ABC is gong ax one of its daytime shows or not. But there’s really no reason to ax anything. Here’s my reason why.<\/p>\n

Back in days of yore — perhaps as far back as 1995– if a network’s program schedule was full programs had to be cancelled. There were only so many broadcast hours in a day, what else could you do. Now the networks have choices and they can’t see the new forrest for the old growth trees.<\/p>\n

I watch catch up on several shows via my laptop. Most of the major networks including ABC will rebroadcast with very limited commercial breaks (every 15 minutes and there’s one commercial by one sponsor). This comes in quite handy when “The Office” collides with “Ugly Betty” as it does every Thursday night. Apple just announced a new platform that will let you play iTunes video download through your television.<\/a> So quite frankly, I don’t see the need to cancel anything if there are other platforms available and an audience big enough to follow them. There is also a 24 hour channel called SoapNet<\/a>. There’s no reason for ABC and NBC to consider cancellation as the only option for popular programming when there’s no question it could find a home and a revenue stream somewhere else. TV networks need to look beyond over the air broadcast. If they don’t think it can work, just ask Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a guilty secret. I watch soap operas. Well I TiVo soap operas. Well just one really. “All My Children.” And I lurk like nobody’s business on the very clever AMC message boards. Unlike Aaron Sorkin’s paranoid fantasies of message boards filled with ignorant housewives in mu-mus and a dangerous fondness for Newport Lights, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":432,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1272,891],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-500-channel-universe","category-pop-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fkatz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fkatz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fkatz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fkatz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/432"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fkatz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fkatz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fkatz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fkatz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fkatz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}