Rumors of the Networks' Death

Jeff Jarvis pulls together the disparate forces that in sum spell death to the television networks, and includes this truism from Chris Anderson on cable’s inability to keep pace with consumer demand and the explosion of niche content:

Both the channel-centric reality of TV and its ephemeral nature are artifacts of the distribution bottleneck of cable broadcast. TV is still in the era of limited shelf space, while the lesson of the Long Tail is that more is always better. The growth of cable capacity over the past decade pales next to the growth in video creation over the same period and the size of the potential microaudiences for anything and everything.

Cory Bergman’s assessment: “. . .will the nets die? Yes, but not for a few years yet. Are the nets working hard enough to diversify and save themselves? For the most part, no.”