If nothing else, you ve got to give NBC Universal and News Corp. credit for fighting in the marketplace, not in court.
They think their approach to serving consumers, copyright holders and advertisers with the biggest video destination on the Web can potentially outdo the popularity of YouTube, BitTorrent or Internet file-sharing ventures.
And it comes when all big brands of established media are trying to figure out how to get a piece of the action on the World Wild Web.
For instance, sometime between now and the Fourth of July, videographers will begin uploading their own Blair Witch Projects and home-made slasher films to FEARnet, the online horror channel from Comcast, the nation s largest cable operator.
FEARnet in fact is already encouraging the making of films that impress even Quentin Tarantino with blood, gore and death, in conjunction with Ziddio, Comcast s own YouTube-like video site.
How much viewer-created content will make its way onto the NewTube site from NBC U and News Corp. is not clear. Mashups are planned and viewer uploads will be accepted, but content protection is a basic plank of this venture.
So in the space of 10 days, Viacom now has sued Google for $1 billion over the thousands of clips of its shows that appear on YouTube, and NBC U and News Corp. go arm-in-arm to prove that there s a better way of doing business than YouTube s.
Up for grabs in the midst of the sturm and drang is creativity.
Which model really spurs the most original thought? The bare-knuckle approach, where you take anything you can find, stitch it together or simply upload it straight up to the video site of your choice; or the protected gloves approach, where just about anything that goes on the Web should be governed by a commercial agreement?
Advocates for the free-for-all approach say the scale of the Internet has made it impossible so far to block the piracy of ideas that first occurred in music.
But it s almost a mindset issue. If you make your mind up, you set in place systems that work.
At Current TV, the cable network founded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, this has been part of the DNA from its start.
Online, it provides tutorials not just on how to tell stories, but how to respect copyrights. It even posts the forms a producer needs to get releases from people that appear in films and to get clearances to use original works of music.
Once a piece is created by a viewer, it s reviewed first by a producer, then, a lawyer.
Nothing goes on air or online unscrutinized.
Technology vets what goes on Viacom s IFILM site. Soundtracks from copyrighted content are given digital fingerprints and stored in a database.
When a user uploads a new clip, all parts of the audio track can be run past the database. Video frames will be fingerprinted, as well.
Sure, there are a few apples that will fall out of the basket.
One Web site, , last week tweaked IFILM for the apparently unauthorized posting of a massive, multiplayer brawl that occurred in a New York Knicks basketball game in December.
But bang away at IFILM. Try to find the latest Jay Leno clip.
Can t be done. Try to find the latest Jon Stewart clip. That you might find.
Viacom owns Comedy Central.
Now, established media can go too far for its own good. Click over to the Comcast site, Ziddio, and there s no way to even try to find Leno or Stewart clips.
There s no search field to type a request into.
But the basic point is this: If you build a business based on sucking content from all breathing humans and can erect the server farms that let you store it and retransmit it, you can figure out -- technically and humanly -- how to protect copyright owners.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt says technology to filter all content coming into YouTube is coming, but it takes a while to roll this stuff out.
It s funny how fast and technically smart Internet entrepreneurs can be when they re figuring out how to make money; and how artfully slow they are once they start.
Now, NBC U and News Corp. get to prove, if they can, that doing video the right way not only matters creatively and legally, but in the only language that counts in the end.
Making money flow from it.
Still, who wouldn t want to be in Judy McGrath s shoes?
Here s one of the great brand stories of the United States third century. MTV remains synonymous with youth, music and television.
She s one of the great personal stories in this industry, too, having grown into the CEO s job from being a copy writer when the music-video channel got started in 1981.
But music videos on TV are old hat. The iPod has become the synonym for digital music. YouTube has become the synonym for online video.
MTV s Urge music service has not dented the iPod s march. Neither the video-laden MTV Overdrive nor the purchases of iFilm and Atom Entertainment have dented the attention (or traffic) received by YouTube.
Interestingly, Viacom -- parent of MTV Networks -- this month turned to a new startup, Joost, to deliver videos online from Comedy Central to MTV.
Not iFilm or Atom.
The question for McGrath: How does she make her brand -- two-thirds of which spells out TV -- as synonymous with the Internet and its interactive entertainment?
If you were in her shoes, how would you get MTV to leapfrog the digital competition?
Write in to . We re prepared to publish, in a future column, the best strategies and tacts.
Faced with a different dilemma is Henry Schleiff, new chief executive of Hallmark Channel.
The family-friendly network often is placed in the nose-bleed zone of cable-system lineups, and it almost gave away its programming as it built up its distribution in the past five years.
Schleiff sees Hallmark as prime acquisition bait for the likes of CBS, which could then make hay in retransmission negotiations with big cable operators like Comcast or Time Warner Cable.
If Les Moonves picks up $1 billion in asset value by making four telephone calls, I think Sumner Redstone gives him employee of the week, he has said.
Hallmark now gets about a nickel a subscriber a month in license fees. Schleiff argues that CBS could easily get 20 or 25 cents. Each 10 cent hike is a $1 billion gain for the broadcaster.
How? 10 cents times 12 months times Hallmark s reach of 80 million households is $100 million. Multiply that cash flow by 10 -- a way to figure value -- and you get to $1 billion.
CBS can use its muscle, when operators are negotiating for CBS broadcast signals, in Schleiff s view of the world. Get 50 cents for a CBS station in a given market and another 15 cents for Hallmark. Or let operators say they didn t pay 50 cents for CBS and take 20 or 25 cents instead for Hallmark.
CBS thinks it s doing pretty well negotiating without Hallmark. Its number crunchers are well aware of Hallmark Channel, and that it is a top-10 cable network by many measures. They also know Schleiff stands to get a big payout should the channel get sold.
They know the math and haven t come calling. If you re a big broadcaster and do sense a billion-dollar score, though, don t hesitate to write (try ).
He slips into town quietly.
Within six weeks, he overhauls the management structure of Discovery Communications, easing out the only two names (Billy Campbell and Dawn McCall) who had been mentioned as potential candidates for his job.
Then, as if that wasn t enough, he makes sure Discovery is on the front pages of daily newspapers across the country two weeks later.
Of course, David Zaslav was not personally responsible for the archaeological investigation of Jesus bones in The Lost Tomb.
Nor was he the centerpiece of the press conference stirring up the notion that there actually might have been some physical leftovers of the Son of God who came back from the dead and then went to Heaven.
But you almost get the sense that the timing couldn t have been better. Let s just get on with it.
Put Discovery on everyone s lips, two months after you walk in the door. It is, after all, your watch. No need to wait for Easter Weekend.
Got an idea of how David tops this? Send an email to Oh, you get the idea.
This is a woman operating in a traditionally male world -- corporate finance -- who has performed live at a very high level on CNBC, for an extended period of time, with coolness, detail, perspective and insight.
She has, in fact, become a brand unto herself in financial news reporting. Not only is she the marquee name at CNBC, but The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek also trade on her brand, just as she plies her trade on theirs.
Now her brand is under attack for what is perceived as a lack of judgment or even a potential lapse in ethics. Getting too close to a subject is the charge.
And the incident that put her in the spotlight was reported, interestingly enough, by The Wall Street Journal itself.
Her misdemeanor? Getting too chummy with Citigroup and its wealth-management practice chieftain, Todd Thomson. Most egregious?
Flying back to the U.S. on a Citigroup corporate jet with Thomson and, in the process, bumping a group of Citigroup executives onto commercial flights instead.
The unstated implication is that Thomson and the Money Honey, as she has come to be called, had more than a business relationship. And this was de facto evidence.
Pshaw.
Maria Bartiromo knew the moment she walked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and started reporting live that she would be held to a different standard. That men would talk. That men might flirt.
That she would have to hold herself above reproach on the intersection of genders.
If Thomson had booted off Citigroup employees so he could spend the same amount of time talking with Louis Ruykeyser of Wall $treet Week, were he alive today, or Irving R. Levine of NBC News or madman Jim Cramer, or even the aspiring financial heavyweight Neil Cavuto, there wouldn t be this uproar.
But Cavuto and Cramer aren t Bartiromo. She s today s pre-eminent name brand in on-air financial journalism.
And that is what she s really got to worry about: how she protects and promotes that brand.
Other women who have become brands unto themselves have taken different paths to that lofty status -- and how they have protected those brands.
The first was Martha Stewart, now 65, who became synonymous with modern home-making during the eighties. In 1990, she signed a deal with Time Publishing Ventures to produce the magazine that solidified her as a household name.
She later bought out Martha Stewart Living Enterprises from Time and consolidated her brand in Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.
Coming along at about the same time was Oprah Winfrey, 53. Born along the dirt roads of Kosciusko, Miss.
, and raised by a mother on welfare in a ghetto, she resolved one thing early on: If she made it, she would own her own company -- her own brand -- from the get-go.She became a self-made tycoon, as the everyday woman s spiritual guide.
Bartiromo, by contrast, became a star by reporting on stars.
Stars of American business. In so doing, she became one herself.
Now that she has climbed her own ladder of success, on the CNBC, Wall Street Journal and Business Week platforms, she has produced her own conundrum.
The real revelation of the last month has been her decision to trademark the Money Honey brand. In eight filings found on the Web site of the U.S.
Patent and Trademark Office, Bartiromo is listed as the owner of the Money Honey mark for a whole host of products and services aimed at children, ranging from a TV series to electronic chat rooms to dolls and doll accessories. Stuff for the next generation of would-be financial journalists.
This is her economic right.
And she can probably manage the merchandising of the trademark; or have some outfit manage the business for her.
But what it does is blur the definition of who she is. Is she reporting on business or conducting business?
Is she separate and objective from the crowd she writes about or part of it? And is she carefully protecting herself from any insinuation that, in a case like that with Thomson, that she is using her gender instead of her skill to get scoops?
Wish that the brand she had trademarked was more businesslike.
Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey used their own names. But Money Honey ?
Bartiromo not only doesn t discourage the use.
She endorses it. She looks like she plans to trade on it.
That could make it hard for her -- and female journalists following in her footsteps -- to avoid insinuation that somehow their stature as honeys help them, on the beat, every day.
And even if well-meant, the deliberate use and marketing of Money Honey as a personally-owned mark offers no protection if another Citigroup ruckus comes along.
And walked.
In fact, I am so tired of walking at CES that I have pledged not to attend again.
Unless the Consumer Electronics Association figures out how to cut down on that walking in a meaningful way.
How does the trade group with electronics as its middle name manage that? Guess.
Here s the crux of the problem, for those of you who weren t there.
And, of course, for those thousands of you who were.
If you wanted to see Sharp s 108-inch LCD screen, Panasonic s competing 103-incher and most of the other video, computing and mobile communications exhibits that mattered, you spent the core of your days at the South and Central halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center on Paradise Road. If you wanted to attend topical panel sessions, you spent your time in the North Hall.
But if you wanted to hear keynote speakers such as chief executives Bob Iger of The Walt Disney Co., Les Moonves of CBS Corp. and Ed Zander of Motorola, you had to trudge over to the Sands Convention Center and its meet point with the Venetian Hotel, on Las Vegas Boulevard.
Sounds simple, but it isn t. If you wanted to catch either of the 4:30 p.m.
keynotes (Iger or Moonves), you had to drop what you were doing at the Las Vegas Convention Center and begin your hunt for transportation. The taxi line would be a couple of hundred people, easily. The line for the shuttle buses would be the equivalent of two Manhattan blocks long, or more.
And if you survived that waste of your time, it very well could be for naught, anyway. Streets were in gridlock. The buses and taxis moved grudgingly at that time of day.
The only thing moving with any speed was Sin City s monorail, overhead. But it didn t actually go to the Venetian or the Sands. You had to get off at Harrah s and walk.
And walk. Easily 20 minutes before you were getting your voucher on the escalators on the way up to see a keynote. Even if you only went through two hotels.
These overgrown lodging and gambling pantheons are mini-cities themselves, at this point.
I calculated that I wasted 2.5-3 hours a day merely in transit between these two locales -- hours I could have really used spending time in exhibits or talking with industry executives.
What s ultimately galling, though, is that once you get to a keynote, it doesn t really matter that you re there.
There s no question-and-answer session, no interaction with the audience. A keynote is strictly a one-way communication, with well-choreographed slices of video and repartee with guest speakers.
You don t even watch the live human being on stage. He or she is too small, even if you re sitting in the first row.
You watch the large-screen TV on one flank or the other.
Then, you get the detail you need to understand the speaker s facial and body language; or examine screen shots and demonstrations that are part of the presentation.
Hmmm. Large screen TVs.
Where have I already seen them? Back at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
You ve got 100,000 of the world s most wired people in town and you make them walk everywhere to see what s going on, on a screen?
They re already carrying screens: Treos, Blackberries, laptops. They re passing by scores of screens in your exhibits. Open up the feed.
Transmit it by cable (I bet you have a system operator there in town that would help you), to Las Vegas Convention Center. Transmit by air (bet AT T or Verizon or Sprint Nextel could assist). Use Internet protocol for a Webcast.
Go to where your audience is instead of making the audience come to you.
If nothing else, just do a simulcast. Find the biggest auditorium in the Las Vegas Convention Center complex, put up two large screens the same size as those in the Venetian and let people sit down -- without high-tailing it across town -- and watch the same pixels in the same size doing the same exact thing that is happening anyway.
I ll bet the worst case is this: You double or triple the people who hear and see Iger, Moonves, Michael Dell or Zander. And the auditorium they re in will still be full.
You talk the talk of electronics.
Now, walk the walk. So attendees don t have to.
Specifically, the NFL Network.
It s not taking the ball and going home to headquarters quietly in the night. You can be sure Steve Bornstein and compadres will be back before next football season trying to jawbone Time Warner, Cablevision and any other resistant cable operators into taking its full lineup of programming at 70 cents a month -- or more -- even if it only includes eight live games, all year.
If you re looking at this fee from the standpoint of an average cable subscriber, here s what the bill starts to look like now and in the near future.
ESPN, $3 a month. ESPN spinoff channels, 35 cents a month.
Regional sports network (a la YES Network), $2 a month. NFL Network, 70 cents a month. In the near future, the MLB Network, $1 a month.
Regional college network, 50 cents a month. Grand total: $7.55.
All other basic programming networks: Roughly the same total.
Which means it s clearly time to turn basic cable back into a really basic tier of 70 or 75 channels of news, weather, entertainment and local channels. No sports channels.
At all.
Let each sports channel charge whatever they want to charge for their live and recorded events. Let them try to be HBO, if they want.
No hidden charges. No hiding their higher ticket prices. Put them out in the open.
Of course, this would take a lot of willpower to enforce on the part of cable operators. Once they buckle on ESPN and include it again on the basic tier, it s hard to keep the door barred on other sports networks.
But the operator likely would win the popularity contest.
Making every sports network an a la carte choice or bundling them all into a separate sports-only tier, as has seemed logical for a good while, would let operators be heroes, dollar-wise, with the customer.
Pricing on basic tiers could be rolled back, as much as by half. True basic for $15 or $20 a month, not $40.
No one ever said live sports was an inalienable right of the TV viewer.
And, similarly, no one ever said sports programmers ever had inalienable access to the TV viewer.
Time for cable operators to make a bottom line stand.
And not keep hiding the increasingly high cost of buying tickets to sports events in the cost of basic subscription television.
Sure, some fans will cry rivers of tears for having to pay extra for sports. But the costs of capitalistic sports are readily available at open-air stadia: $100 seats, $7 drafts, $10 parking.
Time to start making prices just as explicit for seats at home.
For the past few months, those mortals -- call them analysts, call them journalists -- have tried to figure out what could possibly be John Malone s motivation for taking over what is roundly seen as a business in decline.
This, of course, would be the satellite-delivered pay television business. The primary knock is that it s a one-way business in a two-way world. It can deliver video, but not much else.
No Internet access. No telephone calls.
This, in a world of communications and entertainment where the triple play now rules: $100 combinations of video, phone and Internet services that may soon become quad plays with mobile telephony bundled in.
Subscribership is slowing at the two main players, DirecTV and EchoStar Communications Dish Network. And crystal-ballers often think that growth is limited for the foreseeable future, as cable companies in particular make hay of not just phone service, not just Internet access, but network-based services, such as delivering video programs of all types on demand.
But let s not forget how successful these satellite TV companies have become.
DirecTV now has 15.5 million subscribers.
In effect, if Liberty Media winds up with a controlling stake in DirecTV, Dr.
Malone once again could be the so-called Darth Vader of the video-distribution business.
The only larger distributor is Comcast, with 24.1 million subscribers.
When Malone was first considered some kind of iconic villain in video, he was head of the nation s largest cable operator, Tele-Communications Inc. Back then, he oversaw only 13 million subscribers.
And what if the next step is for Malone to sit down one-on-one, as he apparently did with Murdoch, and talk transaction with fellow Denver resident Charlie Ergen?
You have to believe Malone would love to pick up Dish Network and its 12.8 millions subs, as well, and leave the country with just one satellite service.
That would again make Malone the operator of the largest video-distribution business in the country.
He just might be able to pull it off with antitrust regulators and policymakers. Liberty is much smaller than News Corp. And in a couple of more years, there likely will be three serious video players in almost any significant market: one from the cable column, one from the telephone column and one from the satellite column.
That s a pretty good amount of choice.
Would Liberty then need to be in the Internet-access business and the phone business to compete?
Maybe not.
This is why Malone s play bears close watching. He could just decide to use all of the satellite capacity he has commandeered -- and all the transponders he has freed up from duplicate carriage of channels between Dish and DirecTV -- and compete head-to-head with cable and phone rivals on video alone. He could try to blanket the country with more high-definition channels at just the time consumers are trading up to HD sets and try to break the back of cable and phone companies that can t keep up.
And if they keep up in quantity, he can compete on cost, with a single standardized high-capacity system to operate
In 2003, when Murdoch and Malone together contemplated buying DirecTV from General Motors, satellite service was seen as the future, pushing the envelope with set-top boxes that digitally recorded shows for playback. Cable was on the defensive.
Now, the roles are reversed.
Cable s the future, with so many new revenue streams to draw on and services to deliver.
But John Malone never makes an $11 billion blind bet. It s analysts and journalists that are blind to what the end game ultimately will be.
Partly that s because with John Malone, there is no end. It took hundreds of deals to build TCI into the nation s biggest cable operator. He hasn t been inactive in the last eight years, even if he s not worked on center stage.
He s probably done more deals than anyone in the media business, save perhaps his one-time and potentially once-again friend, Mr. Murdoch.
He could just want to build Liberty in an operating business that rivals Time Warner or News Corp.
If he gets DirecTV, he will have programming channels (like Discovery), a premium TV service (Starz), a movie studio (under construction) and a distribution network -- just like Time Warner.
And if he decides that Internet access and telephony are services Liberty has to own and roll into the DirecTV business, he has WildBlue, he could buy Clearwire or Covad or even an operation like Sprint.
Or, he could sell out to a telephone company.
He did it before, with TCI. Its name was AT T.
So, curious, I headed over to the Digital Magazine Forum last Tuesday at the New York Hilton. I was afraid I was missing something.
The opening panelists were Marta Wohrle, vice president of digital media at Hachette Filipacchi Media U.
S.; David Klein, VP, publishing and editorial director of AdAge Group; and Peter Meirs, director of alternative media at Time Inc. Collectively, their companies publish a ton of pulp content, from Elle to Car and Driver to AdAge to Sports Illustrated and, of course, Time.
And, they collectively spat on the premise of the forum: That there is such a thing as a digital magazine.
Wohrle won t put another ounce of effort into producing digitized editions of her print books. Klein sees them as just a tactical tool, promoting traffic to Web sites and extending reach internationally.
But Meirs put it best.
Putting magazine pages online is doomed. You end up mounting them behind glass and then trying to figure out how make it easy to move about, using navigation bars and menus.
Then the reader still has to zoom in to actually see the text decently.
Why would a consumer want this product? I think the answer is, they don t, he said.
What does this have to do with the state of television, cable, satellite or other?
What the publishers were debating was how to perpetuate the magazine format in a new medium. It can t be done.
Digital magazines are here in abundance. We just call them Web sites.
And what Web sites have done is rip content off pages, unbundle it and serve it up in a fashion that allows the audience to read only those pieces of content that each wants to read at the time each wants to read it.
No forced march from the front to the back, or the back to the front. No flipping through pages. Just direct clicks.
The same thing is now happening with television. There is no forced march from 8 p.m.
-11 p.m. every night on a particular channel.
There is less and less reason to even flip through all the channels you pay for. Every month, every week, there is more and more reason to just direct-click on what you want to watch, when you want to watch it.
Digital technology, whether on the Web or in headend servers, is unbundling the component parts of television.
Whether you re TiVoing it, Slinging it, YouTubing it or pulling it off Optimum On Demand, you re managing the medium yourself.
Where it used to be that producers and editors and creative talent figured out what content to produce, what technology to deliver and then broadcast it, now, it s technology that comes first and the audience that figures out how to use it. Content producers are supplicants.
Which actually is producing a lot more creativity. Content, commentary and ads created by viewers will never go away; it will just keep expanding. But if you want to make a buck at it, you ve got to capture the spirit and raise the bar, in terms of usefulness or entertainment value.
Comcast just unveiled its own user-generated content service, with an almost hip name, Ziddio. In fact, it seems to be in the midst of great creative convulsions, trying to figure out what will stick as TV itself gets unbundled and programming -- Kevin Martin, are you listening? -- increasingly gets offered up a la carte.
In Maryland, the nation s biggest cable operator is working with police to deliver fugitives on demand. It s the two-minute video-clip equivalent of the Most Wanted posters in the Post Office. Only citizen crime fighters can rewind the videos as often as they want until they come up with a reason to call in a clue to police.
Comcast also was part, this past Friday, of a Singles Nite at a convention center in Pittsburgh, where speed dating, psychics and sexologists all combined to help turn mass mating dances into a party. Oh, and let the partygoers film their own personal profiles, for its Dating On Demand service on digital cable.
And for the high-minded, there s Comcast s new GalleryPlayer On Demand, which lets digital subscribers with high-definition service throw up masterpieces from 45 top-drawer museums on their home screens -- without paying market price for a wall-sized Da Vinci, Monet or Van Gogh.
For good measure, Comcast has now got ABC, CBS and NBC programming on its own On Demand service. It is trying hard to unbundle primetime for its subscribers.
Embrace the change, like Comcast.
Resistance, as the Borg said and magazine publishers found, is futile.
The forcible rape of an estranged wife.
Talking genitalia. Coupling with a dog. And, in the cartoon world, a police sniper who physically appears as an oversized ass.
It s all part of a continuing process: pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable on television.
As Linda Moss and R. Thomas Umstead have chronicled in their three-part series examining whether creative expression on cable has shattered reasonable expectations, the fundamental answer is clear.
Boundaries move. One way. Further out.
It s natural. For broadcasters, narrowcasters or even sliver-casters, the objective is always the same: Get as many eyeballs as you can to watch your program. At the minimum, get more than you got the year before.
Every year, every episode, the imperative persists to come up with scenes, story lines, dialogue and images not tried before. Not seen before. That will stand out, in viewers minds and recollections.
That unrelenting mandate is getting more difficult, day by day. Because cable is no longer just competing against broadcast for attention, but the Internet.
Sure, no one watches four hours a day of video with great production values on the World Wide Web.
But if you want to see edges pushed or totally obliterated, that s now the place to go, as Umstead s conclusion of the series will demonstrate.
You might say, the computer screen is now the Ew! -Tube.
And, through the magic of Internet protocols, that content will in the not-too-distant future be funneled onto the family-room screen, as well.
Should parents or Americans of any type be alarmed by this? Has the viewing experience become an inescapable cesspool?
Not by a long shot. The incidents that generate the most heat are relatively few, on a stage that includes roughly 450 channels of programming, running 365 days a year, around the clock.
More importantly, watching television is not forced on anyone.
It is an elective act. Plus, there are more ways to control what you see than you can shake a remote control at.
The basics are elemental.
If you absolutely don t want to be exposed, even accidentally, to potentially offensive programming, don t buy TV. Period. Don t subscribe.
But if you find that is not a viable alternative, because 99% of programming doesn t cross your personal bounds, antidotes are simple.
Avoid programs with on-the-edge premises. Turn the dial.
Or turn off the TV. It s pretty easy to do. A lot of remote controls even put the off button in red.
At its IPTV Labs in Plano, Texas, communications-gear supplier Alcatel this past week was showing off a kids portal. This takes control-your-own-TV to its logical extension. A parent chose the six channels that would be permitted to watch and only those six channels were displayed and available on the TV in the child s room.
If the parent wanted to extend that level of control to all sets throughout the house, then personal settings get created and personal identification numbers assigned. Only if a daughter knew her own four-digit PIN, would she get to watch TV elsewhere and only the approved channels.
Blocking services are available now, of course.
But these are technical fixes that skirt the main issue.
Adults have to be adults about the adult and beyond adult programming that is appearing on television. Because it s never going to go away.
If you want programmers to pay attention to what you think, vote with your eyes and pocketbooks. Don t watch programs, so the eyeball count goes down. If that s not enough, don t subscribe.
Take away the oxygen of pay television, even if it s just your one household. It is, after all, yours.
When all is said and done, someone runs the American family.
Someone is the parent or viewer in charge.
This is one issue that shouldn t even make it onto the radar anymore. Even if there s well-meaning passion behind it, there s no point in yelling fire.
Put it out. Yourself. Don t ask Kevin Martin or anyone else to intervene in your household and do what you should be doing in the first place.
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