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In praise of television
电视礼赞
The great survivor
伟大的幸存者---电视
TV has coped well with technological change. Other media can learn from it
广大的媒体界应该向善于应对科技变化的电视行业学习
Apr 29th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
NEWSPAPERS are dying; the music industry is still yelping about iTunes; book publishers think they are next. Yet one bit of old media seems to be doing rather well. In the final quarter of 2009 the average American spent almost 37 hours a week watching television. Earlier this year 116m of them saw the Super Bowl―a record for a single programme. Far from being cowed by new media, TV is colonising it. Shows like “American Idol” and “Britain's Got Talent” draw huge audiences partly because people are constantly messaging and tweeting about them, and discussing them on Facebook.
面对兴新媒体的挑战，报刊界正在垂死挣扎；唱片界也好不到哪里去；而出版商则盘算着自己将是下一个倒霉鬼。但传统媒体中有一位似乎混得也还游刃有余：据统计，在2009年的第四季度，美国的普通老百姓每星期有将近37小时是花在看电视上的。今年早些时候，1亿1千6百万美国人收看了supper bowl（译者注1），这创造了单项电视节目的最高收视率。面对兴新媒体的威胁，电视业非但没有退缩，反而在利用它们扩充自己的地盘：像“美国偶像”或“英国有才人”之所以吸引了大批观众，部分得益于人们持续不断的通过短信、tweeter支持自己的偶像以及用facebook交流这些节目的热情。
Advertising wobbled during the recession, shaking the free-to-air broadcasters that depend on it. But cable and satellite TV breezed through. Pay-television subscriptions grew by more than 2m in America last year. The explosive growth of cable and satellite TV in India explains how that country has gone from two channels in the early 1990s to more than 600 today. Pay-TV bosses scarcely acknowledge the existence of viewers who do not subscribe to multichannel TV, talking only of people who have “yet to choose” a provider. This is not merely bluster. As our special report this week explains, once people start paying for greater television choice, they rarely stop.
在不久前的经济衰退期，广告业的波动使得依靠其生存的免费广播公司受到了巨大的影响。但有限电视和卫星广播公司在这段时间内却如沐春风：过去的一年时间里美国付费电视的用户增加了200万人；而印度有限和卫星电视的激增向我们展示了该国从1999年的两个频道发展到现如今超过600个台的历程。付费公司老板们认为没有不订阅电视节目的消费者，只有“尚未”订阅的消费者。这可不是吹牛，就如本星期的专业报道所表述的，人们一旦为了更优质的节目付费，他们也就甭想逃脱付费电视的魔掌了。
The advantages of indolence
惰性的好处
It helps that TV is an inherently lazy form of entertainment. The much-repeated prediction that people will cancel their pay-TV subscriptions and piece together an evening's worth of entertainment from free broadcasts and the internet “assumes that people are willing to work three times harder to get the same thing”, observes Mike Fries of Liberty Global, a cable giant. Laziness also mitigates the threat from piracy. Although many programmes are no more than three or four mouse clicks away, that still sounds too much like work for most of us. And television-watching is a more sociable activity than it may appear. People like to watch programmes when everybody else is watching them. Give them devices that allow them to record and play back programmes easily, and they will still watch live TV at least four-fifths of the time.
由于电视节目傻瓜式的简单操作，使得它能够在激烈的竞争中得以生存。我们常常能够听到这样的预言：人们将会取消付费电视的订阅，选择从网络和免费电视中拼凑出一整晚的娱乐活动。而来自有限电视业巨头liberty global公司的mike fries却发现，“这种预言是以人们愿意花费3倍的力气来获取同样的事物的假定为前提的”这显然低估了人们的惰性 hair wigs。而人类的这一“优点”也缓解了**对电视业的威胁：尽管很多节目只要轻敲几下鼠标就能看到，可我们当中的很多人也懒得去做。而且，与你想象的不同，看电视更是一项社交活动：在这件事请上，人们喜欢跟风。而且即便录制产品使得人们能够轻易的录制和重播电视节目，他们看直播的时间仍占了4／5。
Yet these natural advantages alone are not enough to ensure television's survival. The internet threatens TV just as much as it does other media businesses, and for similar reasons. It competes for advertising, offering firms a more measurable and precise way of reaching consumers. Technology also threatens to fracture television into individual programmes, just as it has ruinously broken music albums into individual tracks. TV has endured because it has responded better to such threats than other media businesses.
但人类懒惰的天性还不足以保证电视业在激烈竞争中生存。像其他传统媒体一样，网络也对电视业构成了同样的威胁：它瓜分着广告市场，为企业提供比电视广告更精确的顾客统计数据；科技的进步也使电视业面临节目个人化的威胁，就像它毁灭性地使得唱片变成个人任意组合的音轨。相比其他媒体，电视界之所以能够幸存下来，源于他们能更好的应对上述威胁。
One of the lessons from TV is to accept change and get ahead of it. Broadcasters' initial response to the appearance of programmes online was similar to the music industry's reaction to file-sharing: call in the lawyers. But television firms soon banded together to develop alternatives to piracy. WeBSItes like Hulu, a joint venture of the American broadcasters ABC, Fox and NBC, have drawn eyeballs away from illicit sources. Gradually it has become clear that these websites pose a threat to the TV business in themselves, and that they are not bringing in as much advertising money as might be expected (which is similar to the problem faced by the newspaper business). So television is changing tack again.
电视业给我们的启示之一是：接受由技术进步带来的市场变化并积极的应对。其实一开始，电视广播公司对待网络电视节目的出现，也与唱片界对网络共享文件的反映一样：诉诸法律。但电视业者很快改变了策略，他们联合起来开发了一些应对**的节目模式----ABC、FOX和NBC的合营网站Hulu（译者注2）就吸引**用户的眼球。但是，随着其的发展，Hulu之类的网站也会对电视业本身产生不利影响。并且它们的广告收入也少于预期（报刊业也存在相同的问题）。所以，电视界又在改变它的策略以应对市场的变化。
With impressive speed, TV firms are now building online subscription-video services. The trendiest model is authentication: prove that you subscribe to pay-television and you can watch all the channels that you have paid for on any device. Such “TV Everywhere” services are beginning to appear in America and Canada. It is likely that Hulu will become a “freemium” service―mostly free, but with some shows hidden behind a paywall. The move from an ad-supported model to a mixture of subscriptions and advertising is tricky, but logical. It shows that it is not enough to embrace technological change. Businesses must also work out how to build digital offerings that do not cause their analogue ones to collapse.
目前，电视行业正以惊人的速度建立网上视频收费服务 Fashion Synthetic Wigs。这其中最流行的是一种身份认证的模式：只要你是付费电视客户，你就能通过认证在任何可能的设备上观看你掏了腰包的付费节目。例如，一种叫"TV everywhere"的模式（译者注3）已经在美国和加拿大出现。从目前的情况来看，免费的Hulu很有可能在将来发展成一种"付免费加收费"的运营机制：网站大部分视频是免费的，但其中嵌入了一些收费节目。这一发展趋势将会使其原有的依靠广告收入盈利的模式，过渡到通过付费视频和广告收入实现混合盈利的运营机制――这听起来有点悬，但却具有可行性。当然，仅仅跟随科技变化的潮流是远远不够的，电视业者必须学会使其网络兴新产业同自己的老本行和谐相处，不能捡了芝麻丢了西瓜。
Television has domesticated other disruptive technologies. Ten years ago digital video recorders like TiVo promised to transform the way people watched TV. The devices made it easy to record programmes and play them back, zooming through ads. The TV networks responded by running advertisements that work at high speed. Cable and satellite companies built cheap digital video recorders into set-top boxes and charged viewers extra for them. In effect, money flowed back to the television business. In Britain those boxes will soon be deployed to deliver targeted advertising, enabling the living-room television to compete with the internet.
关于这一点，电视业者做得很好，它们已经成功使一些颠覆性科技与传统的电视行业相协调：十年前，新出现的数字电视录像设备Tivo声称要改变人们收看电视节目的方式――它帮助人们便捷地录制电视节目以便重播，并且可以跳过广告。面对tivo的挑战，电视网络运营商是这样应对的：通过提高广告的播放速度以缩短其播出时间。并且当时的有限和卫星电视还借助数字电视机顶盒向用户出售价格低廉的节目录像，这样，新技术所带来的利润又流回了电视公司的腰包。在英国，这类型的电视将很快用于投放针对性广告，使得家用电视能与网络相抗衡。
Other outfits are learning from TV. Record labels sound terribly innovative when they talk about bundling music together with broadband subscriptions. Yet this model comes from television. For the past few years ESPN, a sports giant, has been showing games on its website. The cost is buried in monthly broadband bills. Hulu-style joint ventures are all the rage in media, too. Magazine publishers have set up Next Issue Media, which is trying to shape the evolution of digital devices to suit their needs. The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem aims to do the same for films.
其他传统媒体也在向电视传媒学习：对于唱片业提出的通过宽带捆绑销售音乐的理念，乍听之下太具有创新意识了，但其实是向电视行业偷的师；近几年来世界著名的体育电视运营商EPSN也开始在网络上放映体育赛事。而这一系列由电视产业带动的革新所须投资的成本，不过是每月的一点宽带费用罢了。目前，广大媒体界都争相效仿hulu式的合营模式：杂志出版商们已经联合成立了Next Issue Media，希望它能使得新兴电子媒体与传统杂志业相得益彰；而电影界也寄同样的希望于Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem。
That box might appear to be sitting in the corner of the living room, not doing much. In fact, it is constantly evolving. If there is one media business with a chance of completing the perilous journey to the digital future looking as healthy as it did when it set off, it is television.
传统的电视似乎坐在客厅的角落里游手好闲，但其实，它在持续不段的创新。在媒体界危险遍布的数字化未来，如有有谁能够一帆风顺的话，那就数电视行业了。
译者注：
1：超级碗（Super Bowl）是国家美式足球联盟(也成为国家橄榄球联盟)的年度冠军赛，胜者被称为“世界冠军”。超级碗一般在每年1月最后一个或2月第一个星期天举行，那一天称为超级碗星期天（Super Bowl Sunday）。超级碗是比赛的名称，其奖杯名称为文斯?隆巴迪杯（Vince Lombardi Trophy）。参与球队为该球季的美国美式足球联会冠军以及国家美式足球联会冠军。超级碗多年来都是全美收视率最高的电视节目，并逐渐成为一个非官方的全国性节日。另外，超级碗星期天是美国单日食品消耗量第二高的日子，仅次于感恩节。
2.hulu是一家美国的视频网站。该网站由美国国家广播环球公司（NBC Universal）和新闻集团（News Corp）在2007年3月共同成立。该网站在洛杉矶、纽约、北京均设有办事处。并于2007年十月获得了私人股权投资公司普罗维登斯股本合伙人一亿美元的风险投资基金。
3.TV Everywhere是由美国有线电视公司Comcast和时代华纳合作推出的增强付费电视模式
P.S中午搞完数学就利用下午的一大节课把剩下的一般翻译了，手机打字的速度简直让我喷血 Lace Wigs，更让人郁闷的是，刚才来发表剩下的内容的时候，发现又有前辈翻译了这篇文章???所以哈，我多舛的命运呐~~~~~，，都怪我把文章看走眼了，以为没人翻，下回千万要挑没人翻的！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！
P。S我一直以为这篇文章是专题报道里面的，所以就导致没发现这篇文章已经由前辈jusonzx翻了，于是昨晚在床上用手机翻了一半，等我今天准备用电脑发表的时候，才发现在此文章已经被前辈们翻译了?。。。但是又不忍心睡前的俩小时被糟蹋，所以还是决定发表出来了 hair wigs，剩下的一半会在明天前补齐。。。同样是裸翻，没用经过仔细的推敲，欢迎砸砖。。。 |
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发表于 2010-12-20 09:28
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