Yesterday’s television, today!

This New York Times op-ed piece, by Edouardo Porter, appeared today:

Television Is Not Free and Does Not Want to Be

I certainly agree with this op-ed writer, but his article amused me for a different reason. It’s an excellent example of the way many privileged members of the middle class are so comfortably enmeshed in their assumptions that they’re completely oblivious of how many people have already found the alternatives that they’re invoking. I’m afraid that Mr. Porter defines “clueless.” Apparently, he doesn’t spend much time on the Internet.

“Imagine a world in which information isn’t free. Your TV set is fitted with a coin slot — or a PayPal account. Wouldn’t you rather pay 79 cents for an hourlong show to get rid of the ads?” he lyrically fantasizes. “Technology might move us inevitably in this direction…If we’re lucky, we’ll get a world in which TV is not free, but we will only pay for it when we want to watch it.”

Um…hello? Imagine, might, if, will get? Welcome to planet Earth, Mr. Porter–or Teh Interwebz. What he seems to feel is a radical and hypothetical future (did he write this in 1963?) is what I’m doing right now, along with thousands (at least) of others.

I turned off my cable years ago, and digital TV reception in my location is so poor, the confluence of a signal and something I actually want to watch is like winning the lottery. (It does happen, notably the Superbowl and one vampire-themed episode of a crime drama, but it’s pretty rare). When I want to watch a TV show, I download it, and I’m happy to pay per episode. I’d even use PayPal if iTunes accepted it.

The only radical element of Mr. Porter’s picture is the notion that all forms of TV will be “opt-in” and pay-as-you-go. Cable companies resist this mightily, pay-per-view notwithstanding, because they make more money charging hugely inflated flat fees for packaged services that for the most part don’t get used. Of course, if all TV is opt-in, viewership will doubtless fall drastically. It won’t be so easy to spend every evening vegetating in front of the boob tube (or flat panel) when you’re paying for each program you watch. I, for one, don’t think this is a bad thing. If Americans watch 153 hours of TV a month, as Mr. Porter cites Nielsen saying, that works out to an appalling average of slightly more than 5 hours per day. If people used half of that time to cook healthy food and exercise each day, the obesity epidemic would be history.

(I fear that Mr. Porter shows an additional level of naivete when he imagines that just because television is fee-based, it will be ad-free. We are so enslaved to the coercive juggernaut of marketing and advertising, we can hardly escape it anywhere we go. As long as we’re insane enough to base our entire economy on “consumer spending,” that will only get worse. Eventually advertising will probably be beamed directly into our brains.)

I couldn’t find a way to comment (although I’m registered on the NYT website), or I would have done so. Back to the future, Mr. Porter! TV programming may not be free of charge, but it’s been free of venue for a long time!