Last weekend I finished Lawrence Lessig’s new book Free Culture. Since he made it available free in PDF form, I just printed the whole thing off and read it while half-watching some old Universal monster films on DVD. Lessig’s book was excellent, but I do agree with Stephen Manes that Lessig glosses over a lot of important issues and spends too much of his time preaching to the choir (both in his book and in his presentations and blog entries on copyright).
The one point that made me really howl, however, was when Lessig repeats criticisms he made on his blog last year about the effects of media concentration, specifically the growing tendency for media companies to own both the content and the distribution mechanism — i.e. groups that own both cable channels and the production houses that create the content on those channels. Last April, Lessig wrote,
One important issue that the change in market structure affects is the independence of creativity. Because of the repeal of network ownership rules, there has been a dramatic change in the ownership of pilot shows on major networks. This graph shows the change. In 1990, the overall percentage was 11.3%. In 2002, that had increased seven-fold — to 70.2%.
How might this matter? Some of the most important television has been produced by independents. “All in the Family,” for example, created by Norman Lear, was created because Lear could say no to network executives who wanted to tame his creation to fit the network image.
On the one hand, Lessig doesn’t provide enough information to let the reader decide whether or not this is a real issue, and on the other, not much seems to have changed since “All in the Family.”
Is it troubling that in 12 years, the number of network-owned series has gone from 11.3% of new series to 70.2%. Maybe, but it’s hard to tell without two other sets of data: a) the absolute number of new series pilots over time during that period and b) the average cost of producing pilots over this time period. I have no idea what the answer to a is, but I suspect the reason for this trend has less to do with some general trend toward concentration and more to do with the increasingly expensive production costs for television shows. As the costs increase, of course the number of independent producers of content is going to decline (whereas on something like the web, the decreasing costs have lead to a proliferation of independent producers of content).
The other problem with Lessig’s claim is that he only tracks a handful of increasingly irrelevant broadcast networks (leaving out, apparently, the WB and UPN) and totally ignores the situation in cable. “All in the Family”, after all, was pretty tame compared to Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s brief run with “That’s My Bush.” And what led to cancellation of “That’s My Bush” after just 8 episodes despite good ratings? The $1 million/episode production costs!
Not being an expert on television production, the one thing that puzzles me is why production costs for television shows are increasing when the cost of producing pretty much any other media appears to be declining. What is going on that makes television episodes so expensive to produce?