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October 8th, 2008 Administrator

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Disappearing Sticks

by Andrew McCaskey
Disappearing Sticks PDF Print E-mail
Written by Andrew McCaskey
Wednesday, 08 October 2008 21:16

How long will it be before television towers disappear ? Those 1200ft sticks with transmitting antennas on top – so prevalent throughout the Midwest where broadcasters lacked convenient mountaintops – may be the antlers an endangered breed.

One news item today cites the success of the Hulu live stream of the Presidential debates. Another item points out that there is still lots and lots of backbone bandwidth – with the price still headed downward. All point towards a change in the skyline of much of the country. As more and more viewers are able to get their content from IP based television (IPTV) the over the air delivery will become a smaller and smaller piece of the business model for local affiliates. Just as the local affiliates become a smaller and smaller piece of the business model for the content creators at the network level.

Broadcast engineers have commented that their entire tower and antenna could collapse and only 20% of their viewers would notice. The rest of the audience receives their content from cable or satellite. IPTV is rapidly moving towards cutting that number even smaller.

The success of Hulu – the combined result of NBC Universal and Fox that brings more or less current television plus selected movies to the PC screen- has been a bit of a surprise. After all, the Joost launch, the series of Beta invites that were slowly doled out, and overall level of hype certainly overshadowed the late-to-the-party Hulu.

But along the way, viewers had been conditioned by Tivo to tolerate late episodes (say by a day or two) in exchange for on-demand control to fit their lifestyle and preferences. And they quickly adapted to the ability to skip commercials- viewing the “hour long” show in about forty minutes. And Hulu did a very good job with the User Interface (running in the browswer instead of a proprietary download like Joost).

It’s moving very quickly. And the live streaming capability is right on the edge of being able to cut that local affiliate out.

As far as the disappearing towers, it won’t be a David Copperfield illusion. They really will be gone, an all but extinct breed. The species will be ok, though. The 1200 ft towers just got replaced by at least six 200ft Cellular towers. Antenna manufacturers have a secure future.

Local affiliates of nationwide networks? Probably something else.

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