#247 Wint-O-limpia

America isn’t watching TV. Or Cable either. Or I should say America is watching less and less of the same thing. The recent Oscars are a prime example. No blockbuster movies, lots of art films. Lots of films means less time to view any one. We are a busy people. With all of us in two wage-earner families, with many of us working 55-hour weeks, you’d think our nation was slaving in the company town. The fact that the new money look suspiciously like scrip doesn’t help. Where was I? Oh yeah, fragmentation of culture. The fact that there are so many entertainment options means that here in the age of mass communication there aren’t, paradoxically, as many mass favorites. We all have the option of sampling life a-la-carte. Buffet eating means we don’t have to share the same three dishes. The only thing we are connected to is our electronics. The image of a solo dancer wiggling down the street with nothing but his Ipod earphone cords to distinguish him from a sufferer of St Vitus is a clue to our problem. He’s not got Chorea, his electronics are from there. At least when we all listened to the Top 40 station we could boogie together. So I gotta admit, the chief reason I didn’t watch the Winter Olympics was because I didn’t have three hours to kill waiting for the luge run. Or staying tuned for that one aerobatic skier doing his hurricane. I wanted to watch what I wanted to watch now. I didn’t want to sit through an agonizing hour of figure-skating pratfalls and curling to get to the gatecrashers on the slalom. And what made it worse was since they were showing it in Primetime America, actual happening time Italy was nearly the previous day. TEVO, people would say, and it’s true. The footage was old anyhow; I might as well have TEVO’d the whole thing and skipped through to the best parts. Unfortunately, I don’t have TEVO. The less I have to pay for TV the better. But I have a better idea. There’s pay-per-view, PPV, why not pay-per-event, PPE. But make someone else pay. Here’s how it would work. The Olympics happened yesterday or an hour ago. A menu appears on my pay-per-event screen: Billy Kwan is up for his fourth heat in the unmatched pairs ice dancing event. Bodie Millertime is going downhill in a ball of flame. I elect to watch Bodie. I click the appropriate electronic box. I now render payment by sitting through a compete series of commercials featuring skis, beer, and ski-friendly chiropractors. Then I get to watch Bodie and the European winners. I benefit because I picked from an a-la-carte menu and now I can get back to the slopes myself. The advertisers benefit because they’ve absolutely pin-pointed their target demographic and don’t have to waste a lot of money showing beer commercials to ice dancers. Mark this, the future of TV is all about pepee, PPE, pay per event.
America, ya gotta love it.