The Remote Revolution

            On the last day of February, 1983, CBS broadcast the final two-hour episode of M*A*S*H*.  The doleful guitar, the opening strains of “Suicide is Easy”, the Bell helicopter landing in a dusty field—we gathered around to see what would become of Hawkeye, Margaret, Radar, B.J., and the rest of a company of battlefield surgeons we’d come to know over the last decade.  And America, or at least a good portion of it, came to a stop.

            That episode, “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen”, was seen by over 125 million people—all at the same time.  Its rating was 60.2, which means that over 60% of all televisions in the country were tuned to it.  Even more astounding was its share, the percentage of televisions that were actually turned on at the time; that was 77.  For two hours that night, three-quarters of all television viewers shared the same experience.

            For years, stories had been told of streets being emptied of cars and crime rates plummeting during such program finales.  One popular report (probably an urban myth) said that water consumption in major cities spiked enormously when people rushed to the bathroom during commercials.  But this was the high-point of the phenomenon.  Huge audiences still watch certain programs—the Super Bowl for one obvious example—but television no longer has the power to hold us in thrall, to command an entire culture, or at least a major portion of it, to sit down and watch when network executives dictate.

            It’s ironic.  We viewers overthrew the corporate titans by adopting a technology that helps us be lazy:  the remote control.

            Oddly enough, M*A*S*H*, the program that eventually earned the largest audience in television history, was almost cancelled for poor ratings its first season.  It was saved by being moved in the network schedule to follow the highly-popular All In The Family and it finally took off on its own.  The strategy was common in network television at the time (and still is today):  pair a ratings success with a new or struggling program to follow it.  The tactic was rooted in a simple assumption:  most people would rather sit passively and watch whatever comes next rather than get up, walk a few steps, and manually change the channel.  It worked.

            It also worked for the economics of network television.  Blocks of commercials could precede and follow programs and, of course, interrupt them at predictable intervals.  The audience would wait patiently and absorb the commercials’ messages.  It was an efficient, tidy scheme, all based on passivity.

            The very first remote control, a wired device marketed by Zenith in 1950, was called the “Lazy Bone”.  A classic example of the Law of Unintended Consequences:  the remote was conceived as a device to enhance our passivity.  In practice, it had a startlingly different result, one whose consequences are still reverberating. 

            Look at the ad above.  One of the advertised benefits of “Flash-matic” is that it allows the viewer to mute “long, annoying commercials.”  It also, of course, allows the viewer to change the channel without getting up.  Sounds simple enough—but it was the storming of the network’s Bastille.

            If viewers don’t have to listen to commercials, then what’s the point of paying for them?  And if viewers have more choice over what to watch (disregarding the fact that they always had to choice to watch nothing at all), then what’s the point of devising elaborate schedules?  This wasn’t a major problem in the 1950s, when there were only three networks and a handful of local stations to choose from and all the networks ran commercials at the same time.  But what if … ?

            What if, instead of merely flipping channels and muting commercials, viewers could flip time itself?  What if they could decide when to watch a particular program?  What if they could alter the speed of commercials so that they could speed through them and not even have to watch silent images?  What if they could pause to go to the bathroom or make a meal or go back and watch something they’d missed?  Again, a new technology and the law of unintended consequences raised—and answered—these questions.

            Video tape was, in 1956, a powerful problem-solver for national networks; it allowed them to avoid repeating programs for different time zones and to store them much more easily than with the film they’d used before.  But the machines were complicated and expensive, far too much for home users.  And besides, who’d want to record TV programs, anyway?  That would take even more effort than standing up to change the channel.  Maybe the movie studios could sell some old movies to play on them … that appeared to be the best future use.

            Yes, a few companies, including Sony and RCA, sold a few videotape machines for home users in the 1960s.  But they had limited capacities and reel-to-reel mechanisms; only the geekiest were attracted by them. As a community organizer in the early 1970s, I used one, with a black and white camera, but it was bulky, complicated, impossible to edit, and more of an annoyance than a useful tool.

            Sony, though, struck again in 1975 with the first Betamax, using a cassette tape that was easy to insert and eject.  And  everything changed.  We at home could actually use these things, even though the “flashing 12:00” (from the user’s bafflement over how to program it to record) became iconic.  With competition and the VHS format came affordable prices.  With a reason to own one came a consumer revolution.

            We still have at home boxes full of old VHS tapes:  tapes of movies recorded off the air, complete with commercials.  Tapes of all available early episodes of “Dr. Who” (which my wife discovered on late-night TV after getting home from a night job).  Tapes of sequential episodes of favorite programs, which could have been the material for primordial binge watching.  And, yes, pre-recorded tapes of movies.  Granted, we were a bit atypical perhaps (OK, obsessive)—but we weren’t alone.  And the corporate giants finally recognized the monster they’d created and went all the way to the Supreme Court to try to kill it.  Why, recording programs was theft!  They owned television, not us!  Jack Valenti, representing the film industry, put it this way, testifying before Congress:  "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

            They lost; we won the right to watch whatever they offered, whenever and however we wanted.  And, with the growth of Cable in the 1980 (which the networks also did everything in their power to stifle), we had far more to choose from as well.

            Think of it as the Berlin Wall of broadcasting.  With the “Flash-matic” and the Betamax, the crumbling of corporate power began.