Without affliates NBC does not have a distribution channel.
"
Without" voters, John isn't going to get re-elected as mayor. However, just because John makes
some decisions as mayor that his constituents don't like, that doesn't mean that he will be "
without" re-election support.
What you've done here is crafted a logical
fallacy, technically referred to as the
fallacy of the excluded middle. (The word "
without" was a red flag.) As such, what you were claiming, using this as the premise of your claim, had no merit.
The affliates were the ones up in arms ...
Right, I made that point earlier. That's why they had motivation to try to manipulate the public, to try to pressure the network into doing what was better for them, the affiliates, instead of the network. (I'm pretty sure my message saying that did get posted.)
If NBC decided they were just going to become a cable company, Leno at 10 was probably a great move.
Nothing is simple. The question is: What will NBC -- what will all OTA channels -- be, 10, 15, 20 years from now? That isn't an idle question. That's a very critical question being asked by all levels of interest in the industry. There have been dozens of news articles about this, and hundreds of blog entries, and probably thousands of discussion threads on various forums. The question has been raised not even just from the context of what kind of programming will broadcasters provide, but even from the standpoint of whether or not it makes sense to take
more bandwidth away from over-the-air broadcast, to be used for other types of services.
If you think that the future must be this viewers' paradise of free, high-quality, low-commercial scripted dramas and comedies, then you're smokin' somethin'. The Jay Leno Show represented one significant move towards what television will be in the future. It failed. That just means that the broadcasters have to try again, try again to change the cost structure to better match what it seems that advertisers will be willing to pay in the future (i.e., a lot less than now -- they seem to have realized that our eyes watching their commercials has been worth a lot less to them than originally thought).
This wasn't the first move, by the way. You can consider things like the decimation of original first-run programming on Saturday night to be one of the earlier moves in this migration. The ascendancy of reality programming is another of the earlier moves. And just as there were earlier moves that were not rejected (I won't say that they were "successful" because you'll probably object to that because you don't like those things), there were some other efforts made in the past that were rejected (such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire three or more times per week), and the Jay Leno Show simply gets added to that list.
However, the migration isn't over. The migration is strictly a reflection in the change in the value of our viewership, and it won't end until providing us the programming is clearly the best investment for the money being invested in providing us the programming.
That's why I wrote, "The real question is if they're essentially jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. Only time will tell." This migration is a series of efforts, each one trying to reestablish a balance that has been lost. The rejection of an attempt, or lack of rejection, is probably not as much related to the nature of the change as it is to
chance. The Jay Leno Show was rejected because the folks who opposed it (and there will always be people arrayed to object to any efforts to reestablish balance in this industry) were lucky enough to exert their preference. Perhaps next time they won't be as lucky, and my point was that perhaps the next thing that is tried is
worse.
I'm guessing that the next try will be either advertising overlays (essentially commercials presented on-screen, for a portion of the time during the program itself, on about a quarter of the screen), or the reverse commute (replacing some first-run scripted dramas and comedies with rebroadcasts of cable series from a few years ago). Maybe both.
