saulrosenbaum.com / A New Idea For the Idiot Box

I really like TV, it’s often simultaneously entertaining, informative and appalling, what’s not to love? But here we find ourselves on the precipice of 2010 - and aside from the advent of American Idolesque programming U.S. TV hasn’t changed since it’s inception - advertisers buy time to peddle their wares - how much they spend is based on viewership and demographic data of a show or block of shows - of course there is no guarantee people will but an advertisers product - but they’re playing a numbers game - casting the largest possible net by advertising on the most popular shows. It’s all very logical, and old-school.

Let’s think a bit differently, what if there was a way to guarantee ad viewership and potentially sales, while increasing the quality and availability of top notch entertainment? I enjoy ‘Project Runway’ (seriously) I’d be willing to watch a 10 minutes Tressimé infomercial and provide some type of feedback (internet, phone etc.) in realtime in exchange for commercial-free on-demand viewing of Heidi and Tim, now think about that - No more weekly shows, no more seasons, no-more reruns - unless of course you want to watch it again - a constant stream of first-run, always ready when you are entertainment at your fingers. I know what you’re saying, Saul, that’s just not possible, I’ll cut you off, it’s already is - via bit torrent.

Imagine you didn’t watch TV for a year, then you downloaded everything produced in that year, you’d have a massive catalog to view from - TV studios can do exactly the same thing, it requires big changes - but if the ‘cost’ for Project Runway was me completing a shampoo purchase, I would do it - advertisers would be happy - because their profits would be directly related to the popularity of a given show, TV studios would be happy because competition to advertise would be high, Viewers would be happy because not only would their always be something worth watching, we’d be essentially watching it commercial free.

Obviously this idea is rough, flawed, and pretty unlikely… but that doesn’t mean their isn’t a seed of a good idea in there somewhere.