Why Conventional TV is Dead

We’ll be back… maybe…

Don’t get me wrong, I like Charlie Rose.

I think he does a good job and puts on a good show.

He even had me as a guest once, so how can I say anything negative?

However….

Taking the Amtrak down to DC on Wednesday night, I read this months’ issue of FORTUNE, which did a big article on Charlie Rose. It was entitled “Why Business Loves Charlie Rose”.  

Well, it is a business magazine, and in light of Lehmann Bros. and other debacles, maybe the title is appropriate.

The piece is a real puff piece, which again is fine, but the sentence that really hit me was the one that said:

With rent and technical support covered, Charlie Rose only had to pay for salaries, satellite support and occasional travel - a meager budget of $3.5 million a year..”

Woah…. Wait a minute!  $3.5 million a year after all the studio and tech costs are covered!!! 

And they call this meagre???

This is a studio show where two people sit around a wood table in front of a black curtain. And this costs $3.5 million a year!  For what, exactly?

All the major costs are already covered.

Bloomberg gives them the studio, the set, the camera people, the sound people, the techs, the edits. Everything. 

I don’t get it.

Where does the money go?

Let’s say that they produce original shows 40 weeks out of the year (which is pretty good for PBS), that comes to $87,500 a week. For what? Salaries? Travel? They shoot the whole thing in Bloomberg’s studios for free!

By way of comparison, we produce a daily half hour  except we send out cameras and make pieces in the field.  Our total cost is just south of $10,000 a week, and that includes salary, technical, travel - everything. No one gives us anything.

The more disturbing thing here is that Charlie Rose considers this to be a bargain price!  Tavis Smiley’s talk show on PBS costs $6.8 million a year to produce!!!

It also consist of a bunch of people sitting around in a studio yakking for a half hour.

I don’t get it.

Again, where does the money go?

I mean, OK. You do get a TV show. You get a half hour of blather going out and evaporating into the atmosphere. It’s not like you are manufacturing cars or something.  

And if you did manufacture an automobile with the same level of cost efficiency that Charlie Rose manufactures his shows, a chevy would cost you about $250,000.

Which could explain why TV networks are about to go the same way as GM and Chrysler. So don’t be surprised.

Now, the worse part is that Charlie Rose is in fact cheap by TV standards.

So if this is the cheap TV, I shudder to imagine what the Today Show costs.

Don’t be surprised when the next industry to go down is television.