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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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mass audience, a television network is the most economical way to do it. You can reach large parts of the audience by cable and by specialized media, but television is right at everybody's elbow, so to speak. Then you've got to get them to turn on the set, and that depends upon the nature of the program that you've got on.

No, I think we're in to a twenty-year cycle in terms of the development of what we loosely call television, because whether it's done by cable or whether it's done over the air, or whether it's done with a disc and is displayed on a monitor. Let's say that it's loosely called television. In that twenty-year cycle you're going to have enormous expansion in the number of channels that you can get on your receiver. You can't possibly look at all of them. You're going to have to come to depend on looking at some of them, and until that some of them, period, becomes the way of life, so to speak, in looking at your screen so that you know that there are maybe in your case six or twelve channels that you will look at in the course of a week. Well if everybody does the same six or twelve then an awful lot of those 500 channels are just going to drop off.

It won't come about quite that way, but there will be a shake out period in which most of the channels will disappear, or be used for the distribution of movies that start every ten minutes so that you have one movie will use six channels because you might want to look at it at 9:20 and I might want to look at it at 9:50, and that would knock out two channels. The talk about 500 channels is really a misnomer when you think of it in terms of how it's going to be used. And as people find out that there are some channels that are good for entertainment and others are pretty low quality, channels will fall by the wayside. It takes about a twenty- year cycle, I think, to have that happen. We're already in to it, so you might have fifteen years to go yet before you're going to state: “Look, I only use five channels and here they are.”





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