New research demonstrates that consumers are no longer very loyal to TV channels. They’re interested in the programmes, not the network they appear on. Shed a tear for network owners watching the value of what they do go down the plug-hole.

Ah, ‘to disintermediate’…one of those fancy-pants Internet Economy words that nevertheless serves a useful purpose. It means to cut out the middle man, and there’s a lot of it about. I came across a useful example while in hot pursuit of one of the last great mysteries of the broadcast age: the secret of Melvyn Bragg’s hair. His Braggness was the guest speaker at media drinks evening being run by my old college, so I dusted off a threadbare college scarf, enlisted an accomplice, and went along to check out Melvyn’s coiffure.

We were obviously mainly focusing in his hair, however, as we were standing in the same room and as Melvyn is an entertaining and engaging speaker it was almost impossible not to listen to what he was saying. His remarks turned out to be quite interesting: an impassioned speech about the virtues of ITV, with many an elegiac note that mourned its passing and much cursing at BBC for its wicked and underhand ways.

As I tried to tear my eyes away from his fringe, I was struck by the indignant way he described how people used to come up to him in America and say, “God, we love the BBC…that Brideshead Revisited was incredible!” Astute fans of 1980s television will of course know that the programme in question was an ITV production, but while this matters quite a lot to Melvyn, and I’m sure to the people who worked on the programme, it’s not of much interest to the rest of us.

Consumers don’t care about networks except when networks have monopolies or a unique market position. Once networks lose their monopoly or their unique market position, they fade into the background. Consumers care about content, not carriers. When you’re talking to your mum, you don’t stop to appreciate the Orange mobile telephony and BT’s fantastic fibre-optic switching infrastructure. You focus on the guilt and the love and the sweaters. Networks vanish if they do their job right and simply connect you to what you do care about.

This of course is exactly what Accenture’s report discovered: “While some 70 per cent of consumers watch four or more television programs a week, 71 per cent of them watch programs on four or more television channels. This channel-hopping demonstrates that consumers are more loyal to the content they want to watch rather than the branded distribution channel to which they may be accustomed.”

How things change. When I was growing up a wee lad in the gritty, working class slums of Richmond-upon-Thames, we didn’t watch ITV because it was far too vulgar. We watched the BBC because it was improving and didn’t have Benny Hill. We were loyal to the network. Now I use my remote to surf hundreds of channels with a curled lip, blithely indifferent to the branding strategies of Dave TV and Virgin One, and can enjoy Benny Hill on various networks I’m only hazily aware of. And my mother doesn’t know.

The problem for network owners is that your network is only important if you can keep a lock on some exclusive, must-see content, as a certain satellite broadcaster did so successfully with sports and The Simpsons. When MTV was the only music channel around, the network itself stood for something. Now I channel surf The Hits and TMF and could care less which channel I’m watching, as long as it features scantily clad soul singers. I mean, who cares? They’re just music channels. When HBO was the only US channel producing quality drama, the HBO brand really mattered. Now I enjoy great HBO dramas like Mad Men, which is in fact produced by AMC, whoever they hell they are. I just don’t care. It’s about the content.

Which brings us to the Internet. The Internet is the sum of all networks, and you can’t win when you bet against it. Consumers can find BitTorrents or RapidShare files of all the good HBO or BBC or AMC shows on the Net, and they are downloading them in their millions. All the network content ends up online, which means all the other distribution networks lose their exclusivity. You can beat the Internet, that is, if your network is available to everyone in the world all the time for free on any computer, phone, or handheld device forever. Otherwise, you face a challenge in maintaining value if branded but essentially commoditised distribution is what you’re really selling.

Of course, it’s going to take a while for the network owners to face this reality. They will circle the wagons, scream at governments, try vainly to appeal to consumers’ better natures, they’ll try to tax, legislate, or prosecute in defence of their right to make money they way they used to. They will change in the end. They are simply being replaced in a brutal, evolutionary conflict with a much more powerful and robust network of networks. And it will take decades.

In the end, for good or ill, all of the content will end up online, because ‘online’ simply means, ‘available free in a digital format on all devices.’ Right now, today, I am paying Virgin Media so I can watch AMC’s Mad Men on a cable network as part of its TV package. I am also paying the government so that I can watch Mad Men on a Freeview network as part of my TV licence package. I am also paying Virgin for a fast Internet connection which allows me to download all of the world’s television, including AMC’s Man Men, to watch whenever I like. Something is going to give, and I don’t think it’s the Internet.

Amid all this network turmoil, it’s good to know that some things in the broadcast world don’t change. Melvyn’s hair was everything we had expected: lustrous, finger-tousled, and absolutely and clearly not a wig. Long may his locks remain as a stern rebuke to the shaven-headed iPhone toting youth of today.

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Michael Parsons, now Editorial Director, Consumer Media, for CNET Networks UK, spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.com

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