An Unsteady Future for Broadcast

Oprah Winfrey is fleeing broadcast television for cable. NBC, once arguably the biggest cultural tastemaker in the United States, is being shopped to Comcast, the country's largest cable company. Have we finally reached a tipping point that suggests a remarkable decline in the fortunes of broadcast television in America? Most analysts and many executives agree that the economic model of broadcast television — which relies much more heavily on advertising than cable — is severely fractured. What they are wondering now is if it is irreparably broken. The business model of the big three networks — which became four when Fox began prime-time programming in 1987 — has for decades relied on a simple formula: spend millions on original programming that will attract advertiser dollars and later live on as lucrative reruns in syndication. But ratings are going down. In the 1952-53 television season, more than 30 percent of American households that owned televisions tuned in to NBC during prime time, according to Nielsen. In the 2007-8 season, that figure was just 5.2 percent.