From radio to virtual reality, the way we receive our news and entertainment has changed and will continue to change.
Referenced in this video:
What percentage of the market does YouTube TV currently have?
Now according to a recent survey of 2,000 Cord Cutters News readers, YouTube TV is the clear winner, with 30.7% of readers saying they use YouTube TV. Philo had 10.5% of subscribers, and 9.6% said they used Sling TV. Fubo TV came in with 0.6% saying they used the service. ~ Cord Cutters
Automatic transcript by TinyWow.com
Hey folks, welcome back to the Mac and Mike show, he’s Mike, I’m Mac.
We’re going to break with traditions a little bit today, and normally we take political
issues and we take issues today.
And what Mike and I decide we’re going to talk about today is something that’s near
and dear to our hearts.
And I think maybe some of our viewers, some of the people who watch this regularly will
remember and understand what we’re talking about.
But I think there’s a segment of our society who won’t have a clue.
And what Mike and I were talking about recently and we agreed to talk about on this particular
podcast is the changes in media, you know, both Mike and I are in our sixties.
We’ve lived through a lot of changes in the media world.
There was a time when, you know, a lot of information was delivered on the radio and
then of course early in our lives we had the television that kind of took over.
But I think media in the form of television and even cable is pretty much dead.
I think it’s lived its life, the life cycle is done and people made a lot of money creating
cable companies, you know, and I just think that those days are gone.
There are some rural areas perhaps and there are some areas of the of the nation where,
you know, if you live in a very high density metropolitan area, maybe maybe over the air
broadcasting still makes sense.
But for most of the people, the new wave of media is streaming.
And I think you can see that in so many different ways and so many different companies, all
of which, you know, some of which are traditional media companies that are that are branching
out into streaming in various fashions, really to save their bacon, to save their market share,
to save their livelihoods.
But I think the new media companies, the ones that are creating streaming content, the ones
that are only doing streaming, I think those are going to be the big winners of the next
generation of media.
Yeah, and I don’t even know about that because my kids were talking about getting rid of
the television completely, and they had streaming services on it like Disney Plus and Netflix.
And of course they have Amazon accounts, Amazon Prime.
But you know, today a lot of the kids are just catching their news on social media or watching
videos on YouTube, you know, whether it’s just for fun or education, it seems to be there
like even I switched to YouTube TV sometime back, then I tried the YouTube premium free
90 day trial.
And I just said for 12 bucks a month, I’m just going to keep the YouTube premium.
And really, I could probably watch everything on YouTube premium and just get rid of YouTube
TV myself, because they have everything there.
They have the news channels, they have movies, they have everything out.
It’s not just a short video thing anymore.
You have to remember where we were and how we got here.
You know, I mean, there was a time when most of the information came into the American
home through the radio, and most of that was AM radio.
And there wasn’t a lot of differentiation between AM and FM.
I can remember must have been in the 70s where the FM really started to grow and really
started to build and AM was kind of an afterthought.
But in the, it was a late 40s, early 50s, we started with the television and television
network.
My TV, first TV that we had in our house was black and white.
Yeah.
Of course, it didn’t matter.
All the television programs were broadcast to black and white.
It wasn’t, it wasn’t any color.
And you know, you had three stations typically to over the air broadcast stations, an ABC
affiliate, an NBC affiliate, a CBS affiliate, and maybe in some communities, if you’re
lucky, you had the local, you know, educational channel, the PBS of the local variety.
And you know, you got to, got to expose the programs that nobody really wanted to watch.
They were all documentaries about, you know, the TCC fly in Africa and people were, you
know, but for the most part, people watched the three networks.
And, you know, at midnight, they played the national anthem and they put a test pattern
on the broadcast.
So there wasn’t anything to watch at one o’clock in the morning, you know, and then they re,
I guess they picked up at, you know, six or seven in the morning.
I don’t really remember what time they started again, but they started it or, you know, started
their re-broadcast.
And that’s the way it was through the early part of the 50s and 60s.
I mean, occasionally you would get an independent broadcast station that wasn’t part of one of
the three major networks.
But it was much harder for them to survive because the networks provided so much of the
advertising dollars that paid for, you know, so much of the production and the operations
of those radio stations.
You know, if you’re, if you’re a CBS and CBS has, you know, 5,000, you know, local television
stations and you’re doing an advertisement, a commercial, a television commercial with
one of the big automobile companies, you know, and they paid for based on a number
of people that saw the commercial, you know, the local television station got a portion
of that ad revenue and that helped them keep in business.
And then of course from the over the year broadcast companies came, these cable companies and
the cable companies would literally go door to door fixing a coax cable to your house and
they would string up coaxial cables all through all the streets using all of the telephone
poles used by the other utilities.
And it would all go back to that big, big, huge satellite dish that sat in the backyard
of the cable company.
And they would download the satellite broadcast from wherever on these huge, huge, very expensive
satellite dishes and then they would distribute it through the cable network and you paid for
cable in the same way you paid for other utilities like your electric or your, you know, different
than the broadcast stations who made their money through ad revenue through television commercials,
the cable companies charged you a subscription fee for being connected to their cable service.
So, and that was the next big thing, right, and, you know, the big cable companies, you
know, the Comcast of the world, the Adelphias of the world, I mean, these people made money
handover fast.
You know, they would invest in other properties, other businesses, they would own sports franchises,
you know.
I remember the big thing was the Turner broadcast system when cables started getting really big.
You know, Ted Turner, who was in Atlanta and his father was in a billboard business.
Well, Ted Turner had this local television station, TBS, WTBS, and he figured out that
he could broadcast that on the satellite.
And for years and years, Ted Turner would broadcast, you know, call himself the Super
Station, and WTBS was on the satellite system available to all the cable companies, all over
the country.
And he was making a lot of money through subscription who would add, you know, he would
convince the cable companies to add WTBS to.
And then in order to make his channel worthwhile or make his channel valuable to the local
cable companies, he bought the local Atlanta Braves baseball network, so baseball teams.
So that would give them content to put on his.
And in those days, all of the local, all the baseball teams had a local television station
who had the contract to broadcast it.
Television, this is true of all the sports, you know.
You’d have the big, you know, ABC or NBC affiliate in New York City would broadcast the
jets or the nets or the, or the nicks or the Yankees or the, or the, or the Mets.
And that’s how that would help them generate revenue because the people lived in the area
and wanted to see the live sporting events.
Well, when, when Turner was able to broadcast his Atlanta Braves into homes all over the
world, literally all over the world through broadcast satellite, that’s when he started
calling the Braves America’s team, you know, so, but that’s how they grew, you know, they,
and then even, even more so, you know, I don’t know how many people know this, but
Ted Turner, one, one or two of the big old, um, movie companies was going out of business
like MGM or somebody, right?
And the value really was in the, in the reels and reels and reels and reels and reels and
reels and reels of, of movies that they had, right?
The MGM company made a ton of, ton of movies.
And so what Ted Turner did, I don’t know, is the 70s or the 80s, he bought up all the
old movies for MGM and Paramount and those kind of companies, and he used that as content
on his, on his cable TV channel, WTVS, and, you know, from there, Turner Broadcasting
Service, that’s what TBS did for.
He branched out.
He wanted to create a CNN cable news network.
He was the first one to do headline news and every half hour he had another news program
and eventually he sold all of those properties to other people who, who used that because
content became king.
It wasn’t a matter of, interestingly enough, back in the 50s, this is an odd story.
I love Lucy.
Lots of people watched the old, I love Lucy stories.
Well, in the early days of television, all of television was centered in New York City.
Well Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, Lucille Arnaz, they were married, they did the I Love Lucy
Show, but they wanted to do it out of California.
Well, the logistics of doing a television program in California, because New York was three hours
earlier.
It was very difficult to accomplish.
When they first started, most television really was live television.
That is, if you were seeing it at seven o’clock, there was somebody at the studio somewhere
at seven o’clock broadcasting it.
What Desi Arnaz, and that’s why you see on the I Love Lucy Show at the end of it, it
always says Desi Lou Studios, what Desi Arnaz figured out was, they would literally record
the program, I think it was on 16 millimeter film tape, and they would ship it to New York.
We didn’t have overnight express then.
They would literally put the reels on the train, and the train would bring it to New York, or
an airplane, and the airplane would bring it to New York.
And then when you saw the television program being broadcast from New York, it was from
that film, and that’s why the Desi Lou Studios, they still get residuals for all of the old
I Love Lucy programs, because that’s the way they were recorded and originally made.
They were the first people to do that, because most television of the day was live.
Well, what you have now is, you’ve got a complete change, Mike.
People don’t want to be tied down to where your cable is located, right?
Yeah, I mean, I often watch things on my phone, everything’s portable, you have a tablet,
you have a phone or a laptop, and when I go on vacation, I just take a laptop with me and
I don’t have to worry about television, I can just have everything that’s on my online DVR,
and watch programs anytime I want, anywhere I want, it’s great, it’s been very freeing.
And I think that kind of freedom, that kind of, I can watch what I want, where I want,
when I want is what’s going to make the streaming media the absolute way people get their media
in the future.
In the future, you won’t have cable companies, or if you do have cable companies, they will
have to enhance their service in some way to separate them from the media companies
who deliver via streaming, you know, because you’re going to have to give more, if you’re
going to expect people to sit in their living room or their bedroom and only do that to
watch their programs or watch the information that you’re interested in.
Yeah, I don’t know how cable works anymore, I think I’ve been on YouTube TV since the early
days of the pandemic, so you’re talking 2020, and you have what Verizon has.
I have Verizon Fios, and they deliver television programs through their fiber optic cable.
You can watch programs on your phone too, right?
That’s true, but the ones I watch on my phone, probably a way I can get subscriber service
from Verizon Fios through my phone, because oftentimes I’ve tried to get online content
and it says, who’s your TV provider, I say Verizon Fios, and they say, please log in.
So I think there’s a way I can use my Verizon official Verizon account to get streaming services.
The same streaming services that I can get from Verizon at my house, but I also have a
subscription to Netflix, I also have a subscription to Paramount, I also have a subscription to,
it’s not Paramount, but what’s the one that’s a sister to Prime?
Prime, it’s not Paramount, but it does begin with a P. But again, you have these multiple
streaming servers, I have a separate subscription to MLB TV, right?
I mean, I want to watch the New York Yankees when they play it.
Well seldom were New York Yankees, the team that’s being shown on my television set in
my area, because we’re deemed as being a Pittsburgh or a Philadelphia broadcast area.
So if I want to watch the Yankees, I have to do it through their online service, MLB TV,
which I do do.
That’s my choice, that’s what I want to watch.
And I think that too will drive people to the streaming services rather than the broadcast
and the cable services, because at some point in time there’s somebody making decisions
for you.
And the one thing most people don’t like is people making decisions for you, they want
to make their own decisions.
I think the winner and the whole thing is going to be the first person that comes out
with consolidating all the streaming services.
So that you only have to pay one person instead of paying Paramount, YouTube, Amazon, Netflix.
You just pay one fee and you can pick your things all apart.
Because as I stop and think about it, I mean I have what 100 and some things on YouTube TV.
I might watch.
Half a dozen.
Half a dozen.
Yeah.
You know, I got some sitcoms I like, I got some comedies I like and sci-fi and that’s
pretty much it.
Well, you turned me on to recently News Nation and News Nation is a recent addition to the
streaming services.
It’s not that very old.
It’s on, I have it on YouTube TV, you don’t need to subscribe or download a different
afternoon.
I understand.
But you can get that too if you don’t have it available.
What my point is, is that it’s not all that old.
No.
In a way, it’s a recycling of an old idea.
Back in the day when Walter Cronkite was on CBS and everybody watched CBS News at six
o’clock to see Walter Cronkite and that’s the way it is, you know, which was his tagline
that he ended his news program with.
People watched, they were religiously watched the news program of the, you know, the Huntley
Brinkler Reporter or Walter Cronkite or whatever and that’s where they got their news and information.
And it was different than news and information that you find on the cable channels today because
almost universally on cable, it’s not really news you’re getting.
It’s a version of news wrapped with opinion and slanted in the political or cultural side
that they’re taking in that particular argument, you know.
I mean, there’s all kinds of ways people can present information to you and if they’re
presenting it in a way that they’re using it to try to persuade you to their opinion,
be that, you know, social or political or environmental or something, you know, that’s what they
do.
And this news program you told me about really is the old news like Walter Cronkite, you
use the facts, ma’am.
Yep.
Here’s the facts you make up your own mind about it.
And they go into more detail about more things around the world too because they’re
not trying to fill it with the, I call it the dopamine hit, you know, there’s all these
techniques that they use in social media and media to get you to watch and, you know,
increasing the dopamine levels and slanting things in a way that you agree with increases
the dopamine levels in your bloodstream makes you want to watch.
If you get away from that, you start to come back to sort of a sanity.
I mean, I think Tucker Carlson, who was taking off a fox, did a brief video that I sent you
this morning from Twitter and, you know, he said, we’re not talking about the real issues.
It’s all the side issues that keep us like this.
We’re never going to solve any of the big issues if we keep talking about these small
things.
Yeah.
And many of the problems of the day, you know, you mentioned Tucker Carlson.
I don’t care if you’re watching MSNBC or you’re watching NBC or CBS or Fox News, you
know, the women of the view, they talk about topical stories, but they’re also always slanted
with their perspective, you know, just like if you watch Rachel Maddow, she’s telling
you, she’s giving you facts, but she’s sprinkling with her personal opinion.
And she’s on the same time as Sean Hannity is on Fox News, and oftentimes he’s talking
about the same issue, he’s telling you from a different political perspective.
And those people that are of that particular political persuasion, they’re probably, as
you noted, watching the one that gives them the dopamine hit that agrees with their biased,
with their confirmation bias already developed pre-identified positions.
So, you know, they get that little boost to their ego, to their system, says, okay,
I’m right, because these people are agreeing with me.
And I’m not real sure that that benefits anybody, you know, in the olden days back when I was
a kid and we had to broadcast news, you know, broadcast news really was meant to be factual
reporting of events as clear as they could make them to the facts that pertain to the
story, not opinions, not, you know, trying to sell you on some other idea.
And from what you’re telling me, this news program that you’re watching now does the
same thing.
Yeah, it does.
And I remember when I was a kid, my grandmother was a liberal and, or democrat at least, and
my grandfather was a conservative and they were happily married.
See, because back then, they would watch the political news stuff on a Sunday morning
show.
And they called, it’s probably still on, like face the nation or something.
And you know, they used to, what they did is the story, the actual news was the primary
thing and the opinion was tertiary, not even secondary.
So that’s what I think news nation is for the most part, except they do have their exceptions,
like Cuomo went over there from CNN, he’s still somewhat of a liberal, but their general
news stories are about the facts.
And then you can make up your mind, which you think, you know, nobody’s sitting there telling
you what to think about it on either side.
And if you go to a website called allsides.com and you look up news nation, they have individuals
like us, the whole populace, rates, where something is, and news nation, if there’s a center point
starts at zero, and then it goes, percentage left or right, it’s 0.03% left.
So that means one person out of a thousand or something like that said, it’s a little
bit left to center.
It’s about as close to dead on as you can get.
That’s interesting.
Yeah.
And I’m sure that you can get news nation through all the streaming services, right?
You can get it in half.
I think it’s, I didn’t look at their website, but I’m sure they have a website.
And they’ve hired Leland Vitter out of Fox News and other people.
They pulled some people out of, what’s the other conservative news organization that’s
on American news, besides them, Newsmax Newsmax, yeah, there was a guy that left Newsmax because
they said they were constraining him and stuff like that.
And they’re supposed to be able to say whatever they wanted, but you know, yeah, it’s very freeing
to be able to just hear the news and not hear the opinion.
So we’re really talking about two different ideas, two different concepts.
Now one is, you know, just the news without the opinion piece of it.
But what we really wanted to talk about, what we intended to talk about is was the moving
away from old broadcast television that kind of morphed into the cable system.
And now we’re moving away from the cable system to a much more available freer streaming
system.
And I think one of the determining factors to streaming media versus cable and broadcast
is that one, you can get the streaming service on a multitude of platforms.
You can get streaming service on your television and your living or your bedroom.
You can also get it on your computer, whether that’s a laptop computer or a stationary computer
or a desktop computer at your home office, your home or your office office traveling.
And any number of devices who has an iPad or, you know, one of the portable tablet computers
that they have today, all of those connected to the internet, therefore they can download
the streaming services, your cell phone.
You can watch a television program on your cell phone.
It’s not the greatest media, especially for a guy with old eyes, but you can do it.
And oftentimes the sound, that is the words that come out of there are much more important
than the pictures anyways.
You know, that’s the one thing about radio versus television.
It’s like reading a book in order to get a picture to the words that you’re either reading
or hearing on the radio.
Your mind has to provide that picture for you, which, which I, in my personal opinion,
I have no special training in this area.
But our minds being required to deliver the picture to go along with the story oftentimes
is a more impressionable contact than something that comes from somebody else’s mind, you know,
because it’s ours.
It’s unique to us and it fits into our knowledge base and our expectations and our understanding.
So when we, so when we provide the picture ourselves, you know, it’s personal and maybe
different very honestly than somebody else’s picture, but it’s also something you can remember
longer, you know, because it was self-generated.
I think that has an impact as well.
You know, but the days, I guess where I’m at, my prediction is in 10 years, we won’t have
cable companies.
We won’t have over the year broadcast.
When they’re broadcasting over the air, they will become media companies like content providers,
you know what I mean?
Again, I don’t mean in New York City, you know, it’s very, very effective to do broadcast
television in New York City because there’s millions of people stacked on top of one another
and all they need is this simple little piece of metal that they hang out the window that
they can grab hold of the signal.
They don’t need an internet, they don’t need a connection, they don’t need anything.
But for a lot of people that are more remotely located, you know, the idea of grabbing a
signal out of the air is not as easy to accomplish as it would be in some of these major metropolitan
areas.
Right?
The other thing is that cable systems are very expensive to maintain.
You know, trucks and vehicles and guys that go out and climb up poles and make sure connections
are made, et cetera, you know, almost everyone at this point in time has some sort of ability
to connect to the world wide web.
You know, it can be, literally can be as simple as having a mobile phone, a cell phone, that
grabs that 5G signal out of the air and is able to use streaming services right there.
And you can use that phone oftentimes as a, you know, as a hub, if you will, or as a what
do they call them now?
They don’t, not a hub.
Hot spot?
Hot spot, you know, they call them a hot spot where you can provide that link to the internet
to five different people in your car driving down the road to Florida, everyone watching
a different program.
Yeah.
Well, even the telephone, cell phone companies are coming out with providing internet in
your home with a little box.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I had one of those years ago through Verizon.
That’s what it’s going to be.
So again, you know, from the days of the 20s where everything, the 1920s where everything
came through a box in your home known as an AM radio and you would have everything from
drama to news to comedies coming to your home through voice only, up through the broadcast
television.
And then of course the networking of all those broadcast television stations into one kind
of group, whether that be the national broadcasting system, the, you know, NBC or America broadcasting
system, the ABC or CBS, you know, these were all kind of local television stations that were
wrapped together through a, through a loose connection by contract known as a, as, as
a TV network.
Then we moved beyond that to where the cable system took all, not only all of the network
programming, but also all these independent networks like WTVS and provided that in a package.
We’re now running, do you know what’s funny that again, people don’t remember this.
Do you remember Blockbuster?
When Netflix first came out, Netflix did a presentation to the guy that owned Blockbuster
and I can’t remember his name off the top of my head, but they wanted an investment to
be able to grow their business and they were willing to sell to, to Blockbuster a certain
percent of their business for an investment in their business so they could grow.
And the guy that owned Blockbuster said, why would I do that?
I own, I own people’s television now, people want to watch a movie, they come to me and
run a tape, run a VHS tape, I’ve got all the, I’ve got all the marbles.
You’re trying to summon something, what do I, that’s never going to work.
Well of course now we know Blockbuster doesn’t exist anymore and Netflix is one of the largest
media providers in the nation on a streaming basis.
It’s funny how that happens, huh?
Yeah.
We’re not driving horse and buggies, there aren’t, there aren’t, there’s not a big call
for the, for buggy whip manufacturing anymore.
Everything in technology has a life cycle.
Yeah.
Well what’s your prediction Mike?
How long before we’re all streaming media and no longer use cable and over the air broadcast?
Well the cable will connect us for the internet for a long time because of rural conditions
and 5G can only travel so far and so for people in the remote areas it’ll be a long time but
you can still download most things on 4G.
You know, you can get, I think a hundred megabits a second down if you’re close enough
to a tower so it’s almost to the point where we’re there now in a sense.
Is YouTube TV a streaming service or is it a cable?
Well you need, you need the internet but it’s basically a streaming service that carries
all the major networks so it’s here.
But like I said I think the where, what’s their market share Mike do you know?
I don’t and I’ll look that up and put it in the text.
But my point is that you know when you’re in a certain geographic area like we have cop
casts available to us.
We also have Verizon Fios.
Verizon Fios and Comcast cable are basically the same thing being delivered to your home
on a slightly different technology but basically the same concept.
We’ve got a big storage building where we bring all stuff together and we’ll send it
over to you over the lines that we connect to your building.
But media doesn’t need wires anymore.
Does it need connected to your building?
No.
Streaming I’m talking.
Here’s the evolution I see and I said it before.
The first person who learns to combine all these things under one house and then give it
to people on an ala carte basis so that it’s reasonably priced.
Yeah.
So you know some people pay the two hundred dollars a month and have HBO and all the different
hoop laws you can get.
Other people pay twenty bucks, fifty bucks a month and get just their ala carte few things
that they like to watch.
Yeah.
I think you know when I subscribe to be able to watch baseball games through MLB TV I
think it’s a hundred and thirty or a hundred forty dollars for the season which isn’t a
full year.
Yeah.
That’s not too bad.
You know it’s like March or April until September or October so it’s a long time but
it’s not necessarily the entire year.
But the, the, the football thing I just got a solicitation YouTube now is offering the
same thing that dishes offer.
NFL ticket.
Yeah.
A hundred dollars less still two hundred and seventy bucks and I’m not getting it you
know.
Well I guess it really depends on your level of fandom you know when you’re on the level
how important you know I’m at the age and stage of my life where I have more money and
less responsibilities than I had whenever I was forty or fifty.
And free time.
And free time.
So you know to me because I’ve been a Yankee fan since I’m a young kid to be able to watch
the Yankee baseball games provides me with pleasure that I will willingly separate dollars
for the, for the pleasure of watching the game.
So ask the audience what do you guys think you know leave us a note or send us an email
let us know what you think where’s the future of of of information or the future of entertainment
is it rest with the cable companies for example or maybe in some rural areas that’s a fact.
But I truly believe that eventually you know it’s not only the lower cost of media streaming
streaming media but also the flexibility of being able to watch it on so many different
platforms.
Now I know there are some cable companies you can watch on your laptop right I mean you can
sign in and they’ll let you do that through but that’s basically a streaming service too
although it’s a cable subscription that you have so.
But eventually again eventually everything’s going to be streaming you know it just it makes
too much sense it’s too flexible and it’s cost effective.
And it’ll probably end up as oculus or virtual reality so there you go that’s the next stage
right.
Yeah.
Tell us what you think folks.
Michael write it up and put it in the some of the things we talked about in the notes
and you can tell us what you think about the future media.
Till then I guess it’s Mac and Mike out.
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