(NewsNation) — Bruce Springsteen summed up the TV landscape in 1992 with his hit song “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On).” These days, you can easily add one or two zeros to that number just for television.
Audio, in the form of terrestrial radio, satellite radio, music streaming and podcasting, is well into the millions of channels and programs. But at what cost? Most homes spend around $200 a month for cable, internet and any number of streaming services. Now, sports junkies may be writing yet another check.
Fox, ESPN and Warner Bros. Discovery hope you’ll be willing to pay another $42.99 every month for its news and sports streaming service, Venu Sports. It will feature 14 live channels and a nearly infinite library of events, studio shows, pre- and postgame programs and documentaries like ESPN’s “30 for 30” series.
“Venu will bring the most sought-after live sports from the top league and teams together in one place,” promises the Venu website.
Venu is the latest change to a media landscape that experienced a sea change in the early 1980s when cable TV became ubiquitous, again in the 2000s with the arrival of high-speed internet and again in the 2010s when high-speed wireless devices became the dominant communications hardware.
“Thirty years ago, folks were accessing the Internet with dial-up modems,” said Seth Schachner, managing director of the Los Angeles public relations firm Strat Americas. “Now, with incredibly fast data speeds … and infrastructure that supports it … technology has a huge, if unstated, factor in driving a lot of these entertainment forward.”
TV is not the only mass medium that has experienced a massive increase in content. While 80% of Americans still listen to local AM and FM radio, satellite radio and streaming music have taken their slices of the listener and advertiser pies.
And then there is podcasting.
“I think that’s a very, very exciting new business that is, in my view, very, very legitimate,” said Schachner. The numbers confirm his view. There are more than 5,000,000 podcasts worldwide that have produced more than 70,000,000 episodes.
And moving forward in both video and audio, there is the specter, or opportunity, of artificial intelligence.
“AI is on everyone’s mind. I think there will be a lot of avenues for creators to produce and develop and distribute things on their own, whether they’re podcasts or books or music or whatever the content might be,” said Schachner.