Tuesday, October 18, 2016

CBS steps boldly toward commercial free pay for access model. [AdRevMdl]

Folks, the hits just keep on coming for my predictions and, if I might say, at an accelerating pace.  Today's evidence point reinforces a prediction which was laid out in good detail a year ago in this post.  The gist is that that the liberal something for nothing model supported by ad revenue has peaked IMO and now we will see it fall into great decline.   Despite the fact that it has worked for 50+ years, I think it is going the way of the Dodo and the first to react to this sea change will be the quickest to benefit from the change.

The evidence point I refer to is CBS' new commercial free paygo model.  Now, instead of having to sit through annoying ads or even fast forwarding through them with your Tivo, a small monthly charge gets you access to all of those "can't miss" TV shows in an ad free environment.  As a result of this move, ad based TV show access has been relegated to loser status.  If you live in a trailer park and barely have two nickels to rub together then you will opt for the ad based experience.  But most people will chunk in the monthly fee for probably at least two of the major networks to get their original content streamed to them ad free.  Streaming will also give a bunch of other advantages over traditional viewing (see Netflix for details).  If you combine Netflix with a couple other network show subscriptions you will pay $30-$35 per month in order to access 90% of the content costing twice or more that much right now.

Of course the smart thing to do is to watch as little of these shows as possible since many are full of attempts to control the herd through subliminal suggestions, etc.  But this is how much of America spends its spare time so I don't see that changing very quickly.

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