Mass Production

Going way back, I've been puzzled by the euphoria over 500 channels of cab/sat teeVee. There's a line - "57 channels (and nothin' on)". Let's see if we can find the source... Springsteen/1992, although I do have a lower brain stem memory of something similar with a hundreds number. Anyway...

Today we find the NFL still in court over its attempt to keep most of the moolah for itself. As the Eccles quote says, ya gots to move the product far and wide if the whole edifice can work.

"This is a day and age when everyone says, 'I want my things on my time, whenever I want it,'" said Phil de Picciotto, the president and founder of Octagon, a sports marketing firm. "But that's impossible for businesses to deliver," he said. "Low cost comes with mass products."

Ah, the good olde days when there were just 3 networks (4 if you count Dumont RIP, and a host of unaffilateds) to divide up the advert spend.

Now, it can legitimately be argued that doling out games isn't quite the capital intensive adventure as making EVs instead of gas guzzlers. The cab/sat infrastructure has been around for decades, almost as long as over-the-air broadcast. 1948, initially as a means to move airwave teeVee past mountains and such. As well as a boon to fly-over land where household antennas just weren't high enough or large enough to capture signal from distant cities even with flat country in between.

Then again, YouTube has to recoup its investment, too, so consumers aren't necessarily going to get supercheap subscriptions. The plan now costs $350 a year, on top of the subscription to YouTube TV.

One might wonder how much of that 'investment' is in physical capital, and how much is in soft-costs like license rights and such.

More choices means, inevitably, less TAM for each choice which means higher cost and lower profit per. There's a reason the high-brow cab/sat teeVee channels luv them there bundles.