Television is drifting back to its bad old days

Thailand’s digital TV industry is like a movie in production that’s gone excessively beyond its budget. The film prospectus might have looked great, with gorgeous locations and jaw-dropping computer graphics planned, but all that razzle-dazzle ends up costing too much, draining the cash reserves just as the money is needed most. And yet the studio is determined that the show must go on, no matter how snipped and shoddy the final product looks.

The digital TV channels came in with a bang, but losses piled up fast and now we’re constantly hearing about retrenchment at varying scales. There are several reasons why the majority of the channels are struggling, but the biggest is the crowded “red ocean” in which they’re attempting to swim, bloodied by fierce competition for a limited amount of advertising investment.

It used to be that only a handful of free-TV channels fought over the sponsorship spoils. Then suddenly there were dozens of newcomers joining the fray, and a lot of the channels were bound to sink, denied that life-giving financial oxygen. The most popular free-TV channels – the “status quo”, if you like – are still holding sway and commanding the biggest shares of the cake, so fledging operators are finding is much tougher than expected to make a go in the broadcasting industry. If advertising revenue falls short of outlay – for the costly licence fees, imported content and trade expertise – their balance sheets look worse with each passing week.

Further roiling the waters are consumer habits in a state of flux. In television, viewer loyalty has become a rarity as people more commonly switch freely among channels – and from the small screen to the handheld or computer screen. A typical day’s viewing might be the news on one channel, a cooking show on another and a sporting match on a third, followed by a visit to YouTube to watch five consecutive episodes of a favourite soap opera.

To a certain extent, the new digital-TV operators have themselves seeded this habit of surfing the channels because they produce interesting and often exciting content. And rivals promptly copy any type of show that becomes a hit. Meanwhile social-media users encourage this selectivity by chatting about good programmes that others might be missing. Now, depressingly, we have the spectre of the jittery newcomers turning to the same weary kinds of shows that have always been around – the soaps full of clichés and dubious morality and the celebrity game shows. These are popular, to be sure, but already a virtual monopoly for the status quo. 

Just because millions of Thais love watching such programmes, our guilty pleasure, isn’t necessarily a good reason to propagate it. But many digital TV operators are doing just that, whether or not they had nobler ambitions to begin with. They find themselves in a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t situation and failing to follow the crowd is costing them a lot of money. 

We are now staring that the very “big fish, small fish” predicament that the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission was supposed to prevent as a constitutional regulatory body. While none of the commissioners is actually claiming that the enormous revenues flowing to the state from licence fees, or that the jump in the number of channels, represent complete success, they appear to be collectively resting on their laurels with those accomplishments. 

The commission needs to halt this drift back to the bad old days of television mediocrity. Otherwise we’ll soon be living the cliché – hundreds of channels and nothing worth watching.