I read an article in an old issue of The New Yorker

[Lydia Leftcoast]

in which it told how Amazon, iTunes, Rhapsody, Netflix, and other online retailers with huge selections had discovered that nearly every item they had carried to somebody. The amount of titles that no one had ever bought/rented was exceedingly small.

That was the original premise of cable TV, too, niche marketing. Have a channel for the sports fans, a channel for the pop music fans, a channel for fans of edgy animation, a channel for science documentaries, a channel to serve as the comemrcial equivalent of PBS, and a channel for foreign films, to name a few. Something for every taste.

That concept has fallen by the wayside because advertisers don't want to advertise on niche channels. They want to advertise on mass-market channels, and the programmers, who obviously don't have enough brains for a whole person between them, think that the way to capture audiences is to 1) dumb down programming and b) try to look like every other channel.

Now all the channels are trying to capture the same small Generation Y audience, when there's a whole Boomer and Generation X audience that complains that "there's nothing on."

No wonder TV viewership is falling.

I used to volunteer for a non-commercial classical radio station (non NPR) that had a terrible time getting underwriters until it hired a marketing director who surveyed the actual listeners. He found that contrary to the stereotype of the listeners being impoverished seniors, the average listener was 37 years old, had an above-average income, ate out a lot, traveled a lot, and bought above-average amounts of books and CDs. There's been no trouble getting underwriters since then.