What Do The Television Network Owners Look At? They look at three things: Fixed Point Chart Focusing on Commercial Breaks Programme Ratings and Balance Sheet They don't think beyond programme ratings and balance sheet.

1. Fixing the Fixed Point Charts
of Television Networks to Align Them With
The Demands of Globalization
By
Zahid Hussain Khalid
SUN&FZ Associates, Islamabad, Pakistan
ZHK July, 2013

2. The first presentation on print media,
―A preliminary outline of proposed overall plan
for re-inventing print media: Country Report –
Pakistan‖ is available here:
http://www.slideshare.net/19540201/reinvent
ing-print-media-management-country-model-
pakistan

3. They were asked to pay heed to
the whispering 5-Reinvention
Revolutions
Re-invent content
Re-organize newsrooms and management
Re-design formats
Re-discover revenue streams online
and
Re-think advertising and distribution models
The Above 5 Re-invention Revolutions Are Awaiting Consideration of the Television
Network Owners too

4. TV Network owners look at ONLY
three things:
1. Fixed Point Chart focusing on commercial
breaks
2. Programme Ratings
and
3. Balance Sheet
They don’t think beyond programme ratings
and the balance sheet.
So, Television Network Owners Rightly Approve A High Speed Rating Lane
Revenue Attracting Fixed Point Chart

5. NOT NECESSARILY…
Don’t forget the influence of the sponsors,
advertisers, media buying houses and the
advertising agencies.
Also…are the rating agencies flawless in their
rating processes and procedures?
Rating Systems and Procedures ARE Admittedly NOT Flawless!

6. True. The demand for contents has
increased.
So has the population of the world too!
Each individual, each household and each
family has a story of its own to tell
So have the business outlets
Add to that the riddles of the system of
governance and the crisis of leadership
and don’t forget the mysteries of the
globalization too!
And How Much of That is Seen on
Television Screens?
Now, Have a Look at the Revenue Side

7. A decline of TV Channel Owners Revenue
from 5% in 2012 to 2% in 2013 and bouncing
back to 7.9% in 2014. Why?
May be the global economic slow down, political
turmoil and proliferation of media were few of
the top reasons. What about the quality of
contents? May be. May be not!
What the corporate world including the media
has so far overlooked is the need for paying
attention to only ONE PHENOMENON:
Globalization!

8. Is globalization planned, controlled and
invisibly imposed for malicious reasons? Is it
natural, unplanned and out-of-control? If
planned, who are the planners? What was
their purpose? If not planned, how is it
happening and what will be the ultimate
consequences? Is Globalization a conspiracy
or a reality?
Barring few laudable exceptions, majority of
the satellite channels are adamant not to
accept social responsibility in an
environment of rapid overall change due to
the shocks and after shocks of globalization.
Where to look for socially responsible media
model?

9. In 60’s, 70’s and 80’s contents were tailored
to educate, motivate, and mobilize the
viewers, through entertainment as well as
news, emphasizing importance of responsible
and responsive social and economic behavior
in every walk of life.
Today Social Responsibility is NOT Part of Any Mission Statement. Even If It is,
It is NOT Seen On-Screen Without “An Accompanying Sponsor”!

10. The contents are not responsive to the demands
of present times due to their ―corporatization
for profit at any cost.‖
The news, entertainment and special interest
channels are totally oblivious of the demands of
regional and global contexts. Not even a single
channel can legitimately claim to be up to date on
that account.
TV Networks Need to Rethink Corporatization of Contents Before It’s Too Late!

11. • The programs are mostly sensationalized
and designed to play with the emotions of
the viewers exploiting the real and
imaginary situations without any serious
attempt to address the social and
psychological sensitivities behind them
suggesting possible remedies.
• On screen recreation of the realities of life
demands in depth knowledge of the dark
and bright sides of the sensitivities at the
two extremes of affluence and deprivation.
• There can be no doubt that the content
developers and producers of today have
fair idea of such sensitivities. What they
need is to become students of life. They
will be seen transformed through what
they write and produce!Life Can Not Be Studied Or Read. It Is Lived To
Understand and Explain!

12. Borrowing Shakespeare's Seven
Stages of Life from As You Like It
At each stage of life the needs and obligations
of an individual change.
The family the society and the governments
are supposed to design rights and obligations
keeping in view a human being’s needs and
ability to contribute to family, society and the
government.
Writers and producers have to see that the
balance between needs and expected
contribution in return for taking care of
those needs by family, society and the
government are maintained or not.
…And that is the Key to Content
Designing and Engineering for News,
Entertainment and Special Interest television
channels.
Any television programs analyst has to apply
the following simple rule in his analyses:
How do the families, societies and governments manage the balance between needs
and obligations of an individual? The Answer is Focus on Delivery System!
The Key To Content Engineering!

13. Instead of aligning the Social Priorities with
National Social, Economic and Political Delivery
System and National Priorities with Global
Priorities, the popular program ideas, contents
and the formats developed by world’s major
media conglomerates are either licensed or
blindly copied and pirated to create an
illusionary impression of aligning the local
contents and formats with global contents and
formats.
Interestingly, both are neither
local nor global!
Local Contents with National and Global Contextual Alignment are Need of the Time!

14. NEWS AND BUSINESS NEWS
CHANNELS:
• Globalization , in its overall perspective, is
totally neglected by almost all networks
• Emerging Markets are inappropriately
covered in bits and pieces without
appropriate natural linkages
• Total lack of serious focus on social and
economic issues in their true perspectives
• War crimes, inexcusable criminal
political and corporate conduct, with rare
without follow-up exceptions, are
sheepishly brushed under the carpet
• Managements, writers, production teams
and presenters are indisputably influenced
by visible and invisible internal and
external pressures for obviously known
reasons
TV Professional Need to Resist Internal and External Temptations and Pressures

15. ENTERTAINMENT CHANNELS*:
• Segment-focused program mix of 60’s,
70’s and early 80’s needs to be re-
visited and re-tailored
• The following social and professional
issues are not presented as they ought to:
- Socially and economically indiscriminate
equal access to uniform system of
quality education
- Role of women in family integration,
importance of interactive 3-generation
communication format
- Emphasis on balancing of responsible
and responsive professional behavior
*Some of the American Channels have continued doing that and now Indian and
Pakistani channels have also started following them. The question is: Are they doing
it rightly?

16. ENTERTAINMENT CHANNELS:
- Urgent need for very subtle treatment
of affluence and deprivation to help in
maintaining inter-segment social and
economic cohesion
- Emphasis on classless sense of social
and economic inclusion and importance
of access to affordable and speedy
system of justice
- Crash in-house and outsourced re-
orientation programs on social content
engineering for producers and writers
Inter-segment Social and Economic Cohesion Has to Be Focused

17. SPECIAL INTEREST
CHANNELS:
As name implies, the reach and impact of
these channels remains confined only to their
carefully designed viewing targets.
This well-planned scientifically designed
delivery of contents through ensured reach
has not resulted in the desired impact on
issues of global concern. Nobody bothers to
think why?
They, naturally, don’t have mass appeal. They
need to have that and they can! How they can
do that?
They Can Do That Through Time Slot Sharing with Mainstream Television Channels

18. He expects to not only see on screen what is
happening around him and why, he wants to
know well researched convincing answers to
whys, hows, whos, wheres and whats also
News!
How can he make his life at least comfortable,
secure and trouble free? Social, economic,
political, diplomatic and military dimensions
Edutainment!
Who are the people he needs to know and why?
Who are the people and which events he ought
to follow
Infotainment!
What are the latest social trends? What is in?
What is out? (Other than seeing over-
exposed, over-valued celebrities of third
world countries bragging in morning and
evening shows)
Entertainment!
Access to Information is NOT a Problem: Credibility, Relevance and Quality of
Information ARE!

19. He looks for only two things:
Honesty:
He has different sources of access to
information and it is difficult to fool him
even if he is an illiterate uneducated man
in the street!
Quality of Contents:
He wants to know more than what he
already knows!
Television Network Owners and
their employees always need to
keep that in mind!

20. They forget that because problems of today’s
viewer are:
Not access to News
He doesn’t need to go out for news anymore.
The news comes to him, if not through media
than through word of mouth
Edutainment is also not his problem
He has hundreds of options to get edutained
without paying anything
Several entertainment options are
also available to him
Entertainment of every kind is available for
peanuts on his mobile of not worth more than
$20
Mobile operators are literally begging him to
use their applications and platforms for having
fun.
So, Isn’t It The Right Time To Start Thinking And Doing Something About That?

21. The writers and producers need to become:
Students of Life
They have to keep their eyes and minds open
for which they don’t seem to have time
They don’t need to focus on individuals, no
matter who he is: a man in the street or
President of the most powerful country in
the world, but the systems that are
supposed to take care of the individuals
They must do what they are paid to and that
is to write and produce…Once their idea is
sold, they have nothing to do with the
marketing of their programs
TRPs and GRPs are for marketing staff to
watch. The writers and producers don’t need
to compromise quality of and honesty in
what they write and what they produce
Dishonesty in Doing Anything is Nothing but Full of Disgrace Self-Deception!

22. Most of the time what we think is wrong and
what we see, in reality, is not as it appears.
This is what God had practically taught and
demonstrated to Holy Prophet Moses.
Electronic media contents are nothing but a
visual presentation of how a writer observes
or understands something and a producer
presents it. It is nothing more or nothing
less. On top of that there is nothing in
between also: Not even the owner of the
television channel and the sponsor. If there
is, then the writer is not a writer and the
producer is not a producer.
What is seen on television screens is not
written and produced by writers and
producers. It is prepared by ―content
merchants‖ who are totally unfamiliar with
the sanctity of the honesty of what they
write and produce and the quality what the
viewers see missing.
That Is Why The Electronic Media Has Almost Lost Its Credibility!

23. The contents turn the screen of a TV set into
the smoke of illusion when the painful realities
of life are dramatized instead of presenting
them as they are specifically pointing out who
is or are responsible for the pain.
People see a lot of dramatized pain on screen
waiting to see the faces of the culprits
unveiled, accounted for and punished
Amazingly, the culprits are presented as ―pain
healers‖ and ―social and economic doctors‖
shamelessly discussing a number of failed
poisonous prescriptions
Unfortunately, such writers and producers
unintentionally end up encouraging wars
without reason or justification, mass killings,
displacement of millions of refugees, economic
mismanagement, perpetuation of exploitation
and social injustice,
Is Today’s Television Really a Weapon of Mass Deception?

24. Do the writers and producers ask themselves
this question?
They don’t?
They are often heard saying that they have to
write on, produce and telecast what happens in
a society, a country and the world. They have,
according to them, nothing to do with reform-
ing a society, changing a rotten dysfunctional
system of governance and the world.
…And what does Carl Bernstein has
to say about that?
If Television is really a mirror in the house then it needs to truly reflect the faces of
the members of the household as they are…Does It Do That?

25. ―…For increasingly the America rendered
today in the American media is illusionary and
delusionary—disfigured, unreal,
disconnected from the true context of our
lives. In covering actually existing American
life, the media—weekly, daily, hourly—break
new ground in getting it wrong. The coverage is
distorted by celebrity and the worship of
celebrity; by the reduction of news to gossip,
which is the lowest form of news; by
sensationalism, which is always a turning
away from a society’s real condition; and by
a political and social discourse that we—the
press, the media, the politicians, and the
people—are turning into a sewer.‖
As American media leads the world in reach
and impact, rest of the world follows what it
does turning the global media also into a
―sewer‖ as described by Carl Bernstein!
American TV is Global Content Role Model. Is It?

26. Borrowing Shakespeare's Seven
Stages of Life in As You Like It
At each stage of life the needs and obligations
of an individual change.
The family the society and the governments
are supposed to design rights and obligations
keeping in view a human being’s needs and
ability to contribute to family, society and the
government.
Writers and producers have to see that the
balance between needs and expected
contribution in return for taking care of
those needs by family, society and the
government are maintained or not.
…And that is the Key to Content
Designing and Engineering for News,
Entertainment and Special Interest television
channels.
Any television programs analyst has to apply
the following simple rule in his analyses:
How do the families, societies and governments manage the balance between needs
and obligations of an individual? The Answer is Focus on Delivery System!

27. CNN iReport:
http://ireport.cnn.com/people/zahidhkhalid
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