True Lies: It's Time To Light The Lights

Working in media is glamorous

This is part of an occasional series of reminiscences that may or may not have actually happened. N.B. The most unreliable narrators are the ones who claim only the truth.

I spent a few years working at a TV station. “How glamorous!”, you exclaim.

Not so fast.

For most of recent history, owning a TV station combined a license to print with an opportunity to influence public opinion that made them catnip for billionaires. “Owning a TV station” was up there with “Buying a sports team” or “Buying a political party” or “Being on your 7th marriage” or “Suing everyone” in the billionaire hobby stakes.

What made TV stations so profitable? Well, there were significant barriers to entry to owning a TV station. There was a lot of infrastructure to build to produce and broadcast TV. And you wanted the most popular, and therefore the most expensive, on-screen talent working for you. Not to mention the regulatory hurdles.

But when you got all that together, the mass audiences you could reach and the hefty amount of time those audiences spent watching TV meant that you could sell that attention for a juicy premium to all kinds of advertisers. Provided people kept on watching TV, you could mint it without really trying.

What could possibly go wrong in this Cretaceous paradise?

"Lately I've been getting the feeling, that I came in at the end, the best is over" - Marshall McLuhan

The TV sector was hit with not one but three meteorites: Netflix, Google (including YouTube), and Facebook. Netflix globalized the delivery of TV shows via streaming, challenging the localized model of TV stations. Google and Facebook started hoovering up ad spend like a futures trader in a nightclub toilet. They offered a reach that was both super global (the online world outside the Great Firewall) and super local (name your postcode, name your demographics, want to reach a 27 year old woman who works in retail in Bondi, we gotcha). And metrics galore (please do not look too closely at the metrics).

TV fell back on news, sport, and reality shows. “Event TV” that people couldn’t time shift but wanted to watch in the moment. Despite these rear guarding actions, revenue naturally slumped. And these issues were exacerbated as the executives leading these businesses had only known plenty, never famine. So they slashed everything. And kept on slashing in what was absolutely, categorically, definitely not a death spiral.

Don’t get me wrong. TV is not going to disappear over night. You will not be denied the opportunity to see people being willingly humiliated on a nightly basis in your fave reality shows. But it will shrink like an ice cream in the sun. Or the smile on the face of a reality show contestant as they slowly realize that they are not making it to next week’s caper.

“Matty's in the basement. Mixing up the server architecture”

So what was I doing in all of this? Well, I worked in a technology team in the basement. The IT infrastructure had been underfunded for decades (Windows NT anyone) and things kept on breaking (always costing more to fix than to prevent). I did get to hang out with the billionaire owner’s driver though. Nice bloke. Always cleaned the sandwich press after using it. Although I suspect he may have been ex-military and killed a lot of people.

If that sounds like Muppets Tonight, it absolutely was not. I mostly worked there during the day.

It was the first time that I had worked somewhere so obviously in decline. And it kinda sucked. Perhaps the most telling thing: There was the opportunity to buy the company stock from your salary before tax (i.e. at something like a 30% discount). Most places I would have jumped on that. But here, it felt way too risky. The direction of travel was clear and it wasn’t “up”.

There’s lots of other things I could talk about: the very public sexual harassment case involving the CEO that was emblematic of the C-Suite Bloke Culture, the amusing attempts at strategy, the “foibles” of the staff, some of my own bad technology decisions, the efforts of the Chairman who coincidentally happened to be the owner’s son, etc.

But that would mean lingering further in place that I fondly call “Rock Bottom”. Onwards. And up out of the basement.

Me, back in the day…