before, and which ones go after TV? Example: TV screensatellite TV screen satellite channel guide
breakfast closed circuit colour digital
set station broadcast license
daytime black-and-white
Ex.6. Read and translate the article. Summarize the article. The Nature of TV in America Richard Burke Part.1 In the programming strategy, particularly of the net works, what has always been the case is this. Within the prime time, i.e. from 8 in the evening until 11- that is what we consider our prime time of the day – the net-works traditionally were fairly successful at sharing the mass audience that was out there. That is to say, NBC would have roughly 30 percent, and CBS would have 30 percent and ABC would have had 30 percent. This is in the prime time. Those numbers would be slightly lower if you took them over a day’s time, but I’m concerned only with the evening viewing time. And then other 10 percent of the audience traditionally would have watched public broadcasting or they would have watched independent stations or they might have, in the very early days of cable, been watching one of the superstations. But by and large the networks were reasonably satisfied to have 30 percent. Over the last 5 or 6 or 8 years that number has started to drop, and they are obviously very concerned about that. That number went down as low as 75 percent in the last 2 or 3 years. In a commercially based system every viewer that you lose and every rating point that you lose can be converted into dollars. And the advertisers re saying, ‘Well, now look. You used to be able to deliver to us, as they say, so many hundreds, of thousands of viewers. You don’t seem to be able to do it any more. Why should we pay the sane advertising rate?’ In trying to get this 30 percent the networks have been accused frequently of producing what some critics have called the least objectionable programming. And by ‘least objectionable’ what people mean is, it doesn’t have to be good. You don’t have to take any risks with it. You don’t have to put a lot of time into it. It just has to be less objectionable than what the other network is looking at. Because the theory is that large numbers of people don’t watch programs anyway. They watch television. They go over to the television and say, ‘What’s on?’ and keep turning through or pressing the buttons, and somebody says, ‘Oh, that’s okay. Stop there, That’s fine.’ Well, in this theory that I am explaining very superficially here, what you finally stop at is what’s least objectionable, at least for you. So the networks will take and have taken this position that you don’t have to win, you just don’t fail. You see if you take big risks, you are likely to fail. So don’t fail. That would be a primarily rule/ Don’t lose your one third, and try to produce the least objectionable programming possible.