The Business of Television
Over-the-air commercial stations and networks generate the vast majority of their revenue from advertisements. According to a 2001 survey, broadcast stations allocated 16 to 21 minutes per hour to commercials. Most cable networks also generate income from advertisements, although most basic cable networks also receive subscription fees. However, premium cable networks, such as the movie network HBO, do not air commercials. Instead, cable-TV subscribers must pay extra to receive the premium networks.
In the days of broadcast television, networks allocated a portion of commercial time for their shows to the local affiliates, which allowed the local stations to generate revenue. In the same manner, cable-TV system operators generate some of their revenue by selling local commercial time for each cable network being broadcast. The other main source of revenue for the cable-TV operators is subscription fees.
Read more about this topic: Television In The United States
Famous quotes containing the words business and/or television:
“If we decide to take this level of business creating ability nationwide, we’ll all be plucking chickens for a living.”
—H. Ross Perot (b. 1930)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)