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Jim Barthold
One of Gary Larson's funnier Far Side cartoons showed a group of dinosaurs sucking on cancer sticks, with the explanation "Why Dinosaurs Became Extinct."
My mind, which most times travels scenic back roads to thoughts, detoured to that cartoon as I listened to Howard Stringer at the NAB convention in Las Vegas. Stringer today is chairman/CEO of Sony Corp., but many recall his broadcasting glory days at CBS. Smaller minds also recall his much shorter tenure at TeleTV.
But I digress ... or, as a boss once reminded me as I hosted a press conference, "Get to the point, Jim!"
During his keynote, Stringer told broadcasters that change is necessary, change is good, and, they must change. In Vegas, all that of change sent thousands rushing to the slot machines. Those few who remained got to hear Stringer disparage a published report that compared the broadcasters to dinosaurs.
"Dinosaurs," he said to scattered approval, "ruled the world for 60 million years."
After a quick existential side trip to question, "Who cares what happens 60 million years from now?" my mind zipped to that Larson cartoon faster than one of the Dodge Vipers they were giving away in the casinos. The dinosaurs disappeared because they smoked, I thought. Perhaps they even knew it was wrong to smoke, had the Surgeon General's report taped to their immobile necks, but did it anyway.
I know some people like that.
Maybe the dinosaurs deserved to become extinct. And maybe broadcasters do, too.
At first I thought this year's NAB was a love fest. There was Leo Hindery, poster boy of cable's bad element, being called "probably the greatest consensus maker there is in the telecommunications industry today" by NBC's Tom Rogers.
There was Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo! Inc., who represents even more of a threat to broadcasting than cable, getting hushed attention in a SRO panel session.
There was Oracle boss Larry Ellison delivering a free 60-minute infomercial about an interactive service that resembles broadcast about as closely as General Instrument resembles General Schwartzkopf. (Hint: they both have the same name.)
There was Charlie Ergen, EchoStar Communications Corp.'s co-founder tossing olive branches to broadcasters while dissing Hindery, who, in exasperation, cracked the show's best line: "If the purpose was to come here and piss on one another, this is kind of entertaining."
There was, for crying out loud, Ted Turner, shedding his demon horns and tail to snarkily proclaim, "I was a broadcaster at heart" and feign fear that the broadcasters' digital multicasting would trample cable's turf.
And there were all those broadcasters, listening to swing music promos while dreaming of the Beav and Wally, Richie Cunningham and Jerry Seinfeld and crusty-trusty Walter Cronkite. And all the while they were trying to figure how to multicast six or eight or 10 channels of this drivel for an audience that's already heading to the exits.
Surviving the Vegas infrastructure was such a chore that it wasn't until I left that realized what had been going on. This wasn't Woodstock '99. This was Barbarians at the Gate. These outsiders wanted to make love to, not with, the broadcasters - if you catch my drift.
Broadcasters are like dinosaurs. With warning signs all around them, they still light up. It won't be a comet that wipes them out, it will be the brain rot that makes them think that what they do even matters anymore; that nightly network news has the same immediacy as CNN or the Internet; or that unfunny drivel like The Family Guy will make Sunday night audiences stop counting the days until The Sopranos returns.
Those cable and Internet people weren't there for a love-in; they were there to feast on the broadcasters' content like vultures dining on road kill.
Broadcasters have followed a number of injudicious routes to get where they are. It seems that, when offered forks in the road, they choose the path less traveled, which incidentally, has less traffic because it's the wrong way to go.
The whole world has adopted QAM for digital delivery. Broadcasters embrace 8-VSB, which, at its best, is a nuisance for the cable operators who deliver broadcasts to the majority of American homes and, at the worst a potential stop sign in getting the cable guys to help use digital to "reinvent" TV.
While HBO starts its high definition age with first-rate movies, broadcasters use The Tonight Show. Not only do you have to shell out 10,000 bucks for an HD set, you have to stay up late to use it. And many broadcasters don't even see that HD, not multicasting, could do for them what color did by making their product something people want.
Give them this, broadcasters are persistent. One hundred five thousand of them - or their cousins - were all over Vegas muttering about eroding audience share; sweating lower ad revenues; and griping about how hard it is to get digital TV going, to say nothing of the no-existent cabs and shuttle buses.
In the end, though, very few, if any of them understood that their own members were heading back to their hotel rooms and getting instant news from CNN, instant weather from the Weather Channel and the NFL draft from ESPN, or even more impatiently visiting the Web sites.
Unlike Larson's cartoon, that's not funny; it's just sad.
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