New Meaning to Getting What You Pay For

Submitted for your approval: A man walks into a diner and orders bacon and eggs.

“Coming up,” the waitress says, “and you also get a danish, waffle, cereal and fruit cup.”

“But I don’t want any of that,” the man replies warily.

“You don’t have to eat them,” she says. “You just have to pay for them.”

No, he hasn’t entered “The Twilight Zone,” but rather the world of cable television.

Though research shows most cable subscribers watch no more than one-fourth of the channels on their menu, part of their monthly bill still goes to compensating networks they never use. Under this scenario, a woman with no interest in sports pays for ESPN and Fox Sports West, just as a football fan who can watch three games simultaneously--never missing a play--gives up a little of his beer money to the Food Network and Home & Garden Television.

A majority of Americans have grown accustomed to TV costing them something--a far cry from a day not so long ago, when the only price exacted was sitting through the commercials. Three out of four homes are currently equipped with cable or a satellite dish, and millions pay additional fees for services such as Home Box Office and Showtime.

Yet thanks to new technologies that are rapidly becoming available, the opportunity may soon exist to more directly pick and choose not only the programs we watch but also the ones we pay for.

DirecTV, a digital satellite service with more than 7 million customers, has brought us a step closer to this reality by offering the first pay-per-view TV series: “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World,” an action-adventure that premiered two weeks ago and can be punched up weekly for $1.49.

Based on a classic literary property, and shot in Australia with a no-name cast and a production team that includes director John Landis, the program clearly appears to have been done on a limited budget, down to the schlocky dinosaurs. At its best, the show offers mindless fun for the “Hercules” and “Xena” crowd, albeit with a few glimpses of nudity (though, thus far, not $1.49 worth) that will be excised when the episodes eventually play in syndication.

The most interesting element of this particular “Lost World,” in fact, is its business model. Sure to be emulated in the years ahead, it begs the question as to what the average viewer would pay, in a world where two adults blithely shell out $17 to see a movie in a theater, to view a favorite TV show.

Besides true pay-per-view events, such as boxing matches, people constantly judge the value that channels and programs provide them. If one reason you get HBO is to watch the Emmy-nominated “The Sopranos” or “Sex and the City,” you are in essence paying for those shows. In similar fashion, there surely must be Lakers, UCLA and USC fans who ante up for cable in part to gain access to games they couldn’t see otherwise.

“People are experimenting with pay-per-view,” said Stephanie Campbell, DirecTV’s senior vice president of programming. “The idea of paying for programming is much more acceptable than it was five years ago.”

The implications of this, for both the industry and consumers, are significant. Every year, broadcasters cancel series because they don’t attract enough viewers to stay economically viable. This often occurs despite the existence of a loyal core audience, from devotees of NBC’s “Homicide: Life on the Street” to ABC’s “My So-Called Life” and “Relativity,” to the rabid contingent behind CBS’ “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.”

Low-rated action and sci-fi series regularly seem to sprout such bordering-on-obsessed followings, giving rise to “Save Our Show” campaigns on behalf of the since-defunct “Prey,” “The Magnificent Seven,” “Brimstone” and “Dark Skies.”

What would happen if any of these groups, usually too few in number to keep a show alive solely as an advertising-supported proposition, would willingly pay for each week’s episode? If 600,000 people--roughly one-tenth the audience drawn by “Prey” and “Brimstone” on their respective networks--forked over $2 each, that would nearly cover the per-episode cost. Selling the shows to international broadcasters could easily account for the rest.

While perhaps unlikely right now because the pay-per-view market remains in a nascent stage, such a formula is “definitely a possibility,” Campbell said, adding that several producers have inquired about such a pay-per-view arrangement. At this point, DirecTV--which will run eight original action movies this year--plans to proceed cautiously.

“The fact is, not every old series is worth giving a channel on a satellite to,” Campbell noted.

These steps toward a more transactional TV environment raise legitimate concerns about a two-tiered system, consisting of entertainment and information “haves” and “have-nots.” In a sense, though, it may already be too late.

For many, the concept of “free TV” has become a memory, and there doubtlessly is a sizable audience that can afford paying a few extra dollars each month for TV, especially if it means receiving programs they want and can’t get otherwise. Indeed, thousands of people actually paid for nighttime showings of the soap “Days of Our Lives” during a recent experiment in which the daytime serial was made available for a small price.

Landis, for one, sees any approach that generates new revenue as a benefit to filmmakers, citing both the arduous process of getting feature films made and a shrinking roster of buyers as the entertainment industry consolidates into a handful of vast corporations.

“I’m for anything that helps people make movies,” he said.

Granted, charging for programs would make considerably more sense if people didn’t have to pay for all the extraneous nonsense they don’t watch, which seems unlikely as long as those aforementioned corporations have a vested interest in the process--including many of those cable channels most of us land on only as we gradually flip from channel 37 to 64.

In the meantime, in case anyone in charge is listening, here’s a proposition: I will happily forgo further access to the Nashville Network, Animal Planet, Outdoor Life Network, the Golf Channel, the Weather Channel, Fox Family Channel and any channel featuring Geraldo Rivera if it means lowering my cable bill. And while we’re at it, I have $50 I would gladly part with in exchange for one more season of “My So-Called Life” and “Homicide.”

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Brian Lowry’s column appears on Tuesdays. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].