20. TELIVISION BUSINESS

For a normal viewer it is almost impossible to understand Television though they live in it's surreal world day in and day out. Its impossible because for us professionals also Television creates a great challenge to understand it - because it ultimately depends upon the viewer's choice. When you have 1 channel in your country you grow up with that and you take in and learn whatever we tell you, then with time as more comes in we all try to retain you so that you will keep on watching us - because television is our way of sustenance. But in the process how much do you gain as a individual and how much do we gain as part of the Television Industry will always be debated upon. "Understanding the Business of Television" is just a small effort to understand the business of Television. Articles written by eminent Industry Professionals from the UK and US television Industry have been featured here who are in turn are trying to understand the business of Television.

Television these days is an industry that is always seeking your attention. They want you to watch their programmes and remember their channel. They want you to identify with their channel brand, just like you identify with other brands. TV channels are always looking to promote their brand and keep you on their channel.But the methods they use to promote the brand and to try and keep you on the channel vary in effectiveness, dependent on many factors. Some are very effective and serve a channel very well, such as the small menus on the Channel 4 idents. Others are less effective, and some even backfire on TV channels, creating an image the channel is not seeking to portray.

This is one item of branding that has caused a lot of heated debate over the years. I have never known anything in the arena of presentation and channel branding generate so much friction. Yet, the roots of the logo in the corner are believed to be far less controversial than the subject itself has become.It is believed that in the late 1970's in Italy, pirate stations were re-transmitting programmes from various legal broadcasters in the country and claiming them as their own. To combat this situation, the legal broadcasters, such as RAI, started putting their channel name in one of the corners.In those early days, digital graphics were very primitive, blocky and looked digital. The only thing branding related about those original graphics was the channel name. There was no real design element to those graphics, and certainly very little branding related.

With there being more and more channels launching on a regular basis, mistakes in branding could prove to be more and more disastrous, as around 300 channels fight for a maximum of 60 million viewers. That is an unsustainable high number of channels. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that an average of 200,000 viewers per channel is not sustainable or profitable.
It would seem that maybe 100 channels might be a sustainable number, giving an average of 600,000 per channel. Certainly 60 channels seems sustainable. The lowest number of channels we could see in the future is around 12, while the highest sustainable number definitely won't to exceed 100. With the odds stacked against the broadcasters when it comes to survival, branding mistakes are never an option.