k-punk

Interesting response from Cold Calling to the Precarity and Paternalism post ….

I have some experience of the world of cable/satellite broadcasting through my day job. TV companies are constantly jittery, fiddling and fussing with schedules to improve the ratings (and therefore retain/increase advertising revenue) while mostly just shifting the same old effluent around the schedules, or exchanging it amongst themselves (“You’ve seen every episode of ‘Friends’ over a hundred times – but have you seen it on our channel?”); re-branding channels without making any significant changes to the actual content, coming up with diminishing-returns format ideas that are always X (a series that rated well) meets Y (another series that rated well) or X with a twist; wasting money and energy in months of work for half-baked celebreality series that might be canned after two episodes if they don’t rate well. Ask people involved what their idea of good TV is, though, the paragon, and they’ll say ‘Mad Men’ or something along those lines. (But they’ll respect the makers of awful programmes that get high ratings). It’s not that they don’t know what good TV is (as opposed to ‘good TV’ –ie populist, gets the ratings), it’s just that “bless them, it’s what the Freeview viewers (or whoever) go for.” And all of this useless activity is largely colluded with by TV journalists and celeb mags.

More here…