Why The Death Of Pivot Is Just The Beginning

Originally published at TVREV.com on August 23, 2016

Participant Media’s great experiment in television, Pivot TV, closed down last week. It would be easy to blame it on a range of issues, everything from millennials abandoning pay TV to lack of carriage deals to the push for skinny bundles. But none of those reasons would be correct.

Pivot died because they never figured out what they were about. And, worse than that, they never had a hit show, a reason for people to tune in to Pivot. Because as AMC and other up-and-coming networks discovered, sometimes you don’t need a vision, just a hit.

Pivot claimed it was aimed at Millennials, but the programing was an odd mix of reruns (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars and Friday Night Lights), documentaries and original series. On their own, each segment was interesting and fairly well curated. It’s just that taken together, they didn’t add up to anything readily identifiable.

The trades have shot barbs at Pivot, claiming they never really thought out the best way to run a small independent network, that they did not really understand what millennials were up to. That you could only watch repeats of Buffy so many times. That they hired the wrong people.

But it’s more than that.

Smaller networks like Pivot probably don’t have a place in the TV universe as standalone networks anymore. If they don’t get snapped up by larger networks, who will take their best shows and jettison the rest, they will likely pivot (pun intended) into VOD-only networks.

This makes the most sense in today’s time-shifted world where viewers are more often looking for specific shows, not specific networks. Smaller networks rarely have more than a handful of shows that viewers want to watch, so why bother filling up all 24 hours.

By making those shows available on an On Demand-only basis, they can focus on what’s important: creating quality shows, promoting those shows to a dedicated fan base, selling advertising and sponsorships aimed at that fan base, and promoting their new shows.  They won’t have to spend money acquiring syndicated content to fill the wee hours of the morning when hardly anyone is watching. What’s more, they can build their brand, freed from the constraints of 30, 60, or 90 minute formats. They’ll still be able to take advantage of traditional monetizations schemes too, like selling long-running shows off for syndication and/or overseas rights.

The MPVDs will benefit from this transformation as well, as they’ll be able to offer skinny (or skinnier) bundles to their customers, while still providing a wide range of content, thanks to the VOD offerings. In a world where most content will be available on demand immediately after broadcast, and where program guides become recommendation based, there’s a good chance many viewers probably won’t even notice certain networks are only available on demand.

As the internet becomes more like television and television becomes more like the internet, something has got to change. Smaller networks, both independents, and those owned by larger programmers like NBC and Time Warner, are the likely targets of that change. The good news is they will likely wind up stronger and more profitable in the long run, painful as the initial changes may be.