Cringely harps on something I’ve been saying for a while, too:

The Internet television story, even as written here in columns going back as far as the late 1990s, pushed the idea of enabling the aggregation of widely-dispersed viewing audiences, allowing programming to thrive that might not be successful on any local station, much less on the national network. A good example is NerdTV, which wouldn’t attract enough viewers on most PBS stations to even generate a rating, yet when offered as an Internet download, drawing from a global population, makes some pretty good numbers. But there is no concept called “local” in this aggregation model, so stations tend to feel threatened by it; if the network can reach local viewers directly, what need is there for a local station?

But it doesn’t have to be that way, because the supposed strengths of centralization aren’t really strengths at all when viewed in terms of the much more imposing issue of bandwidth costs, where all the advantages are local. Local Heroes: Could the Key to Successful Internet Television Be…PBS? By Robert X. Cringely, PBS, June 8, 2006

What about the opposite of NerdTV? Local football! Continue reading →