Television
Less shine
Blogger 'missizzy' says Singapore TV's too boring to compete in a small competitive field.
Oct 14, 2006

"TV is really dead"

Richard's primary client has been scaled down. Drastically. Most of the people are gone. Except the talent, the people in front of the camera, all the producers, creatives, ad sales have been axed.

Not all, but effectively, it's about there. There's still work enough till the end of the year, (not a very long time till then) but man, it's f__ked.

It's just .. not good.

I don't really know what I want to do in the near future, but going into television is definitely not one of them. It's an industry that's so sh-t it knows no bounds.

It's sh-t everywhere, and most of the people in it are like the runners in the drug trade. The only difference is that you have marginally less chance of getting shot. Although even those chances are higher than in any other legal industry.

It's so depressing.

He's very depressed. I feel sorry for him and I wish there was some obvious way out, but the truth is, he's in TV, we're in Singapore. Two things that do not go very well together.

I think about the amount of interviews I've given for the same old sh_t on channel 5 and CNA, and you know, it's the been pretty much the same thing in different packages over the last two years.

They're still asking me the same old questions, they still have the same old boring concept they try to sell as "cool" and "edgy" and all about "speaking out". When it's as stale as day old coffee sitting in the brewer.

But that's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that there's no market in Singapore. Who are you going to advertise to? Five million people is just not enough.

And how many out of those five million are actually the coveted demographic, and how many actually have the time to watch TV? And if they do, why the hell would they watch local television?

But even cable's no spared. Every single thing to do with TV looks pretty much like a loss-making endeavour. Not all of it is, but a huge proportion of it seems to be.

You know, it survived for a long time because it was the only thing people had for entertainment. Reading is hard work, and the people you knew could only provide so many hours of interesting conversation.

There are films of course, but that's hard work too and demands long hours of attention. TV really suited people that liked a huge variety of different sorts of sh_t. (It's all the same product - sh_t, it's just packaged differently.)

The Internet started to kill TV in Singapore about eight years ago. Now you have more people to talk s_t to (MSN), more news, more byte sized moving content of utter stupidity.

Forums you can actually participate in instead of simply watching other people participating in.

I admit I'm probably not a very good judge of the state of television. I watch about 90 minutes of it every week, most of it while I'm on the treadmill at the gym. So Ugh. Depressing.

http://www.missizzy.org/2006/10/12/tv-is-really-dead/