You might not have noticed that the Emmy award for Lifetime Achievement in Technology & Engineering was given in January to Ivan G. Seidenberg, chairman and CEO of Verizon Communications. Maybe there's a method to that madness—something TV broadcasters, regulators and legislators might want to take note of.
It's madness on account of Emmy awards traditionally having something to do with TV. Verizon, unless my last remaining neuron, Nellie, is very much mistaken, is a phone company. "But, Mario, hasn't Verizon also been providing multichannel TV service?"
You've got a point there, a point being a zero-dimensional infinitesimal dot. At the end of October, Verizon reported it was serving a whopping 1.6 million TV customers, having added 233,000 in the ending quarter. If they've done even better since then, they might have been up to a full two million by the time the Emmy was awarded. That would put them well below Bright House Networks, a cable-TV company you might never have heard of, which had more than 2.3 million subscribers as of June.
NO OFFENSE
Now then, I ain't scoffing at Verizon's achievement. Getting even 1.5 million subscribers in just three years ain't bad. Near as Nellie knows from nosing through Verizon's online press releases, the company's FiOS TV service started in late September of 2005.
That's how come it's madness. Seidenberg's a nice, diligent guy. It looks like he started out as a cable-splicing assistant for New York Telephone, right out of high school. With a little time out for Vietnam and college, he stayed in the telco biz until he became the big cheese at Verizon. If there's a telco equivalent of a lifetime-achievement Emmy (the Alex?), he probably deserves one.
Heck, go ahead and give him some kind of visionary Emmy, too, for dreaming up FiOS TV way, way back in 2004, and maybe even a charitable executive Emmy for sitting on the board of the Museum of Television and Radio. But, although three years is apparently the lifetime of an ant queen, it ain't very much of the average human life. Lifetime Achievement Emmy award for television technology and engineering? It is to laugh! But then there are disasters.
I ain't talking here about TV shows that don't even register on Nielsen's charts. I'm talking about real disasters: weather disasters, earthquakes, wars—stuff like that there. Some of them last longer than the lifespan of an ant queen. Most of them last longer than the lifespan of a mayfly, which, Nellie tells me, is a night or two.
LOCAL NEWS IS STILL HOT
How do you get your news? Fewer and fewer folks get it from newspapers. More and more are getting it from the Internet. But that's big news like the size of the Madonna-Ritchie divorce settlement. When it comes to local news, survey after survey says most Americans get it primarily from TV stations.
It's on account of lots of reasons. For one thing, Nielsen says TV viewing increases every year. We're up to eight hours and 18 minutes per day per household as of the third quarter of 2008. That's the highest ever.
Then you've got your viewing habits. You catch the news and then primetime, primetime and then the news, or news and then primetime and then news again before bed. Late-shift workers fit it in, too, or go for a morning news show.
For another reason, those crawls and marginal notices can provide news to part of a viewing area while letting those in other parts keep enjoying that autopsy footage. Try adding news to a radio station's music programming without interrupting it.
Then you've got your on-camera news people, the ones getting soaked in the hurricane or singeing their eyebrows near the forest fire or diving under the anchor desk during the earthquake tremors. They're us. When they say, "Let's get out of here," it's time to go.
Anyhow, whatever the reasons, TV is still the number one source of local news. That's fact one. Fact two is that disasters often cause power to go away. Fact three is that analog TV (at least the U.S. full-power broadcast flavor) is supposed to go bye-bye this year.
I wish I could mention a fact four of many inexpensive, reliable, battery-powered digital TVs being available in stores. But I can't. Nellie won't let me lie like that.
MADNESS IN THE MAKING
So, let me try on a post-transition disaster scenario for you. There's a disaster—fire, earthquake, hurricane—you pick it. Said disaster knocks out power. Along with lost power goes lost high-speed Internet access, even if your cable-TV cable is intact. Don't believe me? Kill your main circuit breaker and see how long your broadband modem continues to function.
Your cell phone will keep working—if the towers are still up. But I wonder how much data rate the wireless phone company will devote to Web surfing when everyone's trying to make phone calls. And I wonder what happens when your battery runs out.
Now then, your main TV went dark, too. But, if you live in a disaster-prone zone, chances were pretty good that you had one of those $5 Wal-Mart or Walgreens battery-powered black-and-white jobbies and a stash of batteries. Or maybe you had one of those portable radios with a TV-audio band.
Yes, I know you're supposed to turn on the old portable radio, but what do you tune it to—one of those stations programmed from a thousand miles away with no newsroom in your area? I don't think so.
So maybe the Emmy for lifetime achievement is meant to cover a lifetime spent providing wired communications service that works even when the power goes out. Maybe it's meant to instruct us that the phone company still has more concern for service reliability than the developers of digital TV ever had. Maybe picking someone who started splicing cables is meant to indicate that wireless ain't necessarily the be all and end all.
Yes, maybe so. Otherwise, it's all madness.
Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.
