In business you have to know your customer. That's a platitude; "who is the customer?" a simple question; even so, people often get it wrong, even about businesses which are large and well-known, like show business, and the personal computer business.

Although TV and movies traffic in products which look alike, their businesses are different: the customers of U.S. television business (TV) are distinct from the customers of U.S. motion picture business (Movies).

It is the difference between wholesale and retail. A consumer of a product is not always the customer for that product. A cat consumes cat food, but the customer is the cat's keeper. This distinction is as significant as, say, the distinction between the customers of Microsoft and the customers of Apple:

• The customers of Microsoft are computer manufacturers. Wholesale. MS-DOS or Windows have been the operating systems chosen by Compaq, IBM, Gateway, Dell, and others—not the choices of the users of their computers.
• Apple doesn't sell to computer manufacturers. The customers of Apple and the consumers of its products are the same cohort (with the exception of its Education customers). Retail.

Who are the customers of Hollywood?

The customers of TV are not the consumers of its products. The customers of TV are (with a significant exception) advertisers, marketers of 'packaged goods' such as Proctor and Gamble, or consumer durables such as General Motors. Wholesale.

What about Home Box Office (HBO)—which carries no advertising—who are its customers? Cable companies are the customers of HBO and other such. HBO is used by cable companies as inducement to their customers, either to purchase service or to upgrade to more expensive services.

The customers of Movies are its consumers: the people who pay to see the movies, either in cinemas or at home. Retail.

I was moved to write this by Dave Winer's A Lightning Bolt:

In one model, developers create products and convince us to want them. In the other model, they figure out what people want and compete to sell it to them.  ¶The entertainment industry wants the first model. In fact, for much of my life, they've had their way.

I guess this statement assumes that the consumers of the «entertainment industry»'s products and its customers want the same thing. That might be true for Movies. It is not true for TV and for broadcast Radio.

In fact, the profit from TV and Radio comes from wholesale to their customers in advertising, not from the consumers. They make their products to fit their customers requirements, not the requirements of those who consume the product.

The content of broadcast radio and TV is advertising—not entertainment

The stuff that runs between advertisments—«entertainment»—is not intended to give pleasure to its audience, although it may. It is not designed to edify, although it may; or to be useful, although it may be so. It is not even designed to entertain, although it may.

The stuff that runs between advertisments—TV programs or music on the radio—is designed to do something to you (mostly, it wants to keep you from switching channels). It wants to do it to you—whether you like it or not. That's why, for example, popular programs are cancelled—popularity among audiences has nothing whatever to do with the desiderata of the customers, advertisers. And why irritating and obviously dumb programs are broadcast, if they do the job of keeping you from switching channels.

In fact this regime of short commmercial spots interleaved with «entertainment» is about to be replaced by what it replaced, fifty years ago: programming integrated with advertisement, like «The Texaco Hour with Milton Berle».

[ In future columns, I'll talk about some other inaccurate but received ideas, such as, «Movie workers make more money than TV workers» and «the Movie/TV businesses are bigger than the Music business.» ]

  Michael Jameson: Robert McChesney: «. . . the argument that these companies do market research, so they must be giving the people what they want. . . . »