 Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii. I'm Nicole Horry. And I'm Helen Hayden. In our show this time, we'll give you part one of our report on the August meeting of the Harvard Club and the remarks of John Fink. John Fink is general manager of K5TV and a media maven in every way. From him, we'll learn about how the media is doing these days. In the way of background, John has been involved in media in Hawaii for more than four decades. He has been at the helm of K5TV since 1986. With all that, John is a close observer of the local and national television scene. He has been in the trenches for all these years and well qualified to report on what is happening on our currently embattled broadcast front. And at the Harvard Club meeting, he did just that. His remarks were incisive, thoughtful, candid, and hard-hitting. It was a credit to K5 and a contribution to the club. John spoke about his career in the media and how the media has changed for better and for worse over the years. He talked about the way things work, the players on the field, the competition created by the internet, the way content is made and sold these days. I've been in Hawaii in the media business now for a little over 40 years. And I've been in television for a little over 35 years here. My most recent background and where some of you may have seen me before is I've been doing editorials twice a week for 19 years and if you're wondering, I write every one of them. So if you like them, thank you. If not, change the channel. What am I going to tell them? But I do write them all and I try to keep them local as much as I can, although there are obviously worldly issues, God knows, on a daily basis that could be addressed. But there are certain things I think there's enough babble going on out there. And that's one of the things we'll talk about today as we explore the topic today, the future of broadcast media. Where do we go from here? I'm going to try to address a lot more than just broadcast media. And I don't really have a filter, so I hope you will understand this is just one person's perspective from many, many years of both inhabiting the media world and the planet earth and take it from there. My background is, grew up outside Chicago. My father had been stationed in Hawaii for a little while during the beginning of World War II. He ended up fighting in Italy where he lost 90% of his hearing. And he always told us that the best place he'd ever been on the planet earth was Hawaii. So in the late 60s when we were kids, my two sisters and I, there were three of us, we came here on vacation for two winters and we grew up in Chicago. So you can imagine coming back and going to a swimming class in January in Chicago, where I was suntanned up to about here and here and everybody else was as white as could be because that's what it was like back where I grew up. Everyone kind of knew I'd been somewhere. So in the mid 70s, I went to Wesleyan and my father picked up with my mother and my younger sister and opted to come out here. I believe he was 55 at the time. He had a connection out here. He came out here and the guy was an alcoholic and he could not work with him. So my father literally had to start all over again at age 55. He had enough mainland connections that he did some sales things out here until his mid 70s and he passed away at 88 and my sisters are still out here and we're all out here now and he was right. This is a very special place obviously. So I was at Wesleyan. All my friends were medical school and law school as was the want back in the day. And I was obviously the runt of the litter which I knew from day two when I was there. My first experience at Wesleyan was the guy next to me said he was going to Oxford in three years and the guy across the hall for me who was kind of cool to remember this is early 70s he had the long hair and stuff and so somehow SATs came up and he had 800 800 and then I went across the hall to see Peter Marcus who was a big kid with three pencils in his pocket and glasses and stuff and he had a computer which in 1973 was not often seen and I said Peter what are you doing and he said oh I'm doing math and I said that's really cool I was kind of thinking of majoring in math maybe what what are you what kind of math are you doing he said it's math in the fourth dimension at which point I went down the hall to the to the one phone that was there and I called home and said mom I don't think I'm supposed to be here I think this is the wrong place but it all worked out and I had four wonderful years at Wesleyan and it's nice seeing some Wesleyan people here today so I'm three days away from graduation it was either Wednesday or Thursday I'm gonna live at my aunt's house on East 69th in New York for the summer while she goes out to the Hamptons and works out there and I had no job I had no future I had no knowledge of what I wanted to do I am an East Asian history major I fell in love with East Asian history I really specialized in the Ming dynasty when I was back at Wesleyan which is what you do at liberal arts colleges and I it really opened up my mind very much Confucianism Taoism were like it might as well have been from another planet for me and it was fascinating and I loved it so I'm three days away from graduating I gotta get a call from my father and he says I bumped into Dennis Manga I don't know if any of you know Dennis Manga at the time Dennis Manga was the vice president of a pro soccer team in Hawaii called Team Hawaii which was in the Davies Pacific Center and it was a rather it was the old Amfak Center and Dennis Manga was the vice president of this team in the North American Soccer League the North American Soccer League which is the precursor to the current Major League Soccer MLS was back in the day when America was floundering in soccer it just wasn't a sport that Americans were very good at were still not good enough but Pele was playing in New York for the New York Cosmos then and he was and still is the greatest of all time and they were drawing 75,000 people and Seattle was drawing 20,000 and Dallas was drawing 20,000 and Fort Lauderdale was drawing 15,000 and Hawaii was drawing about 4500 at Aloha Stadium so you can imagine how empty that looked much like the old Hawaii Islanders baseball games so I had come home at Christmas time interviewed with Dennis Manga because I loved writing I love sports I loved media and that was the end of it I thought and my father went into the Amfak Tower and went up to the Team Hawaii office to buy a t-shirt for a cousin and while he was there he bumped into Dennis Manga who had met my father before and said hey Art isn't John coming home soon and my father the consummate salesman of course said yes he is why do you ask he said tell him to call me I might have a job for him so my father calls me on the phone says call Dennis Manga I call him on the phone he offers me the job as the PR director of Team Hawaii in the North American Soccer League at age 21 for $750 a month which it was a million dollars it didn't matter I knew I could live at home and whatever so I took the job it was a little bit like jumping on the Titanic mid voyage cruise cruise ship sounds cool okay so I get to Hawaii and the owner of Team Hawaii was a guy named Ward Lay Ward Lay is famous for nothing other than the fact that he was the son of the founder of Frito Lay president of Pepsi and Braniff Airlines that was all part of his consortium so he had this son and said why don't you go do this thing out in Hawaii and whatever so the team was drawing 4,500 which frankly for a first-year team in a fledgling league is not bad but we could see the writing on the wall we didn't make the playoffs and between August and December they basically did what you should never do in Hawaii which is they basically threatened the community and said if we don't get some money put into the team we're gonna have to leave and as we know in Hawaii restaurants never fail in Hawaii because they suck it's just because no one goes there anymore we don't say anything so what happened to Team Hawaii very quietly is no one offered any money and in December after four months of doing nothing in my office because I had nothing to promote we were told the team was moving to Tulsa and they offered me the opportunity to go to Tulsa and I said thank you but no well I'd made radio connections through my PR work and I got into radio with KIKI back in the heyday with Kameshami Kong and Ron Wiley and Frank B. Shainer some of you who are old enough to remember those guys and I did that for four years then I got a TV at KGMB with my counterpart and friend Rick Blanjardi and then he went over to KHNL and he hired me KHNL and then he left for about 20 years and now we're back together again because he runs KHNL and KGMB and I run K5 so the point of that story is to kill time no the point of that story the point of that story is that whenever I talk to younger people or people in general about why things happen life is about serendipity and I use the analogy if my father walks up to that office to buy a t-shirt for a cousin he never saw and Dennis Manga is in the bathroom eating lunch or in his office with the door closed I would not be in Hawaii I mean I may have ended up here but I would not have had that moment of opportunity so how you meet people how things evolve in your life how you meet a significant other serendipity plays a large part in that a large part in that so that's how I got to Hawaii and I'm really happy I've been here so what I'm gonna do is just give you some basic explanation of the world of media and what I see for it going forward not just from a television standpoint but with this little thing called the Internet and everything else that we're all dealing with these days and I know it gets very confusing and trust me for those of us in the industry it is just as confusing because every day when you think you have something figured out there's a new method of receiving stuff there's a new survey that comes out that says nobody under the age of 30 will ever own a television I mean ever own a cable subscription God knows they'll never own a newspaper and most of them will never even watch TV for the most part on a regular basis like we did well most of most of us when a lot of us were kids you watch to show Tuesday night at 7 o'clock you watch to Tuesday night at 7 o'clock then when it got really cool we could tape it and watch it later and that's only about 10 or 15 20 years ago this is not like in the you know antebellum era or something like that nowadays it's what I want when I want how I want it and where I want it and the question at the end of the day is what will that do for the whole business model because it's completely blown up if it keeps going in that direction but at the end of the day no matter what else to tell you today if I if you if you learn one thing from today the bottom line is always going to be content is king content is king crap delivered anywhere is still crap something that I want something that I'm interested in something that I find compelling something my friends talk about that I want to check out for myself at the end of the day that's what happens okay anybody remember a movie about 10 15 years ago called my big fat Greek wedding a bunch of nobodies produced by a nobody and it did over 300 million dollars all buzz and word of mouth it wasn't the big movie from Warner Brothers or Disney or anybody else it was the content and that's how things happen so sometimes in the world of Hollywood and television and media people are always trying to find the next big thing and we miss far more often than we hit the average network show up until recently 80% 80% of new shows were canceled after the first year that's worse than restaurants restaurants usually last about three years but that's the nature of the beast so I'll give you a story when I was with Cajunel and K-5 before we split off we were a Fox affiliate back in the day before we flipped over and now Cajunel's NBC but this was about 1987 or 88 we had a show on the air called the Tracy Olman show Tracy Olman's a very funny and clever British comedian who's kind of a chameleon she can play various characters and the show like everything on Fox was not doing well in that show they had a one minute vignette every week of this bizarrely bizarre looking comedy family yellow face kid and a sister and stuff and we came to the convention the next year and they said to us so this is 1987 baby 88 they said we're going to put the first cartoon back on TV since the Flintstones in 1968 you could have heard a pin drop in the room all these kind of Wildcat Fox general managers and independent guys going are you kidding me and sure enough they show a clip and it's Bart Simpson on a skateboard going down the street and we all looked at each other said this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life it is now without a doubt the most successful show in the history of television with well over a billion dollars earned in just residuals and it's still going strong and of course the beauty of animation is they never grow up so you don't have to worry about your stars pricing themselves out of the market the only thing you have to worry about is when they start getting really popular the people who do the voices are going to ask for more money and that's what the arguments have been over the years but as long as the writing is there and as long as the the audience is there so that was one where I think we all missed the boat but that's my point you just never know what's going to work and what's not going to work so the way it works is the ABCs of broadcasting is very simple most stations in most markets are broadcast affiliates they are affiliated with a network ABC CBS NBC Fox Telemundo Univision those are broadcast stations and keep in mind we are regulated by the FCC the FCC in its infinite wisdom ranks up there with the NCAA which stands for no clue at all in terms of the rules of the FCC in the year 2017 are some of the same rules that were in place in 1964 so in 1964 there was ABC CBS NBC and usually one independent station and maybe a PBS in each market that was it okay we now live in an era of what three four hundred channels and does the average viewer know the difference between TNT ESPN KHNL K5 and you know if they don't and are some of the same shows on one on the other of course they are so the whole rules have changed but the FCC has not changed its rules so when you hear stuff going on with the FCC you'll know why it's because there are some archaic rules oh and there have been some other things that have come along alongside from 300 channels something called the internet had a little bit of an influence on the way people receive information and entertainment so most big stations throughout America are tied in with their network affiliates the interesting thing in terms of the fear of many of us in the industry is as soon as ABC CBS NBC and Fox can figure out how to make their money without using the local affiliates they can bypass them the problem with that is they'd have to provide 24 hours of programming a day and they wouldn't do the thing that we do best by far and that is local local news local information and from my standpoint since I don't have an affiliation local programming the Mary Monarch Festival the Hoku Awards Keiki Hula and all kinds of local shows cooking shows comedy shows with Andy Bometa you can go right down the list we try to provide more local programming than anybody else at the end of the day it might be a really smart thing because if the networks pull back not my Koleon I don't have a problem with that because I don't live and die by American Idol and dancing with the stars and all those other shows that people do but what's interesting is all of the network affiliates own stations in major markets so W ABC in New York and K ABC in LA are owned by ABC that's where they make all their money so when you hear that NBC paid a billion dollars for the Olympics in Korea next year which we hope there will still be I mean the Olympics not Korea I don't mean Korea I mean the Olympics and then they say that they're they're paid a billion dollars and they have a couple a hundred million dollars in production costs it sounds like well that's foolish because they can't make money on that they will not make money on the network level running ads nationally but WNBC and WMAQ in Chicago and K NBC in Los Angeles they'll make money locally which goes back into the NBC coffers so that's how they make upward plus in a world where our whole goal is to aggregate eyeballs you have great promotional opportunities whenever you run major events Super Bowl World Series Academy Awards it's a great opportunity for those networks to push other things to hopefully drive you to that which is still the name of the game is aggregating eyeballs the cable companies the cable stations rather are an interesting lot in the fact that some of them were spawned or have now become part of the same broadcast networks ESPN is part of the same Disney ABC family and yet for years you're probably not aware of this for years because we were too stupid as broadcasters to demand this 80% of cable viewing was done on the broadcast stations 80% of the viewing people did because they all still watch 60 minutes and local news and everything else and yeah they watched ESPN and they watched CNN for 15 minutes and they watch TBS and then they watch one show on the history channel and things like that but as a whole 80% of viewing up until the last 15-20 years was done on the broadcasters we got paid nothing for that but you as consumers who were paying $40 a month and then $43 a month and then $47 a month and now $100 a month you were paying for all those cable channels you never watched but next to the NRA and maybe AARP the cable lobbyists were the strongest lobbyists in Washington DC and every time somebody brought up this incredibly American idea of why don't we ask people all a cart to pay for what they want to pay for and not take everything else it got shot down and the argument was small cable channels would go out of business my feeling about that is I think we call that America nobody has a right to a shoe store that nobody shops at and my analogy on what you've done and we've done as consumers over the years is imagine you went into Safeway and you talked to your shopping cart and you walked in and somebody threw 20 items in your cart and you said I don't want any of those they said well if you shop here you have to buy those so for me I'm an ESPN fan I get it but everybody in this room pays $8 a month for ESPN so you're paying $100 a year now if you enjoy sports and you care for ESPN that's great but since ESPN does about a one rating every day which means 99% of people are not watching except when they have their major events on 99% of people have decided ESPN on a daily basis is not important for them should they be paying $100 a month for that for that privilege so what is happening now and you're starting to hear terms like OTT and skinny bundles you have all these other services coming along offering somewhat a la carte services Netflix Roku Hulu Amazon all of them are coming up with smaller ways for you as a consumer to start cherry picking what you want the ESPN model cannot sustain that so what may happen over the next five to ten years with all of these cable providers that have paid ridiculous fees for the NBA and the NHL and major league baseball and college football and all that stuff something's got to give because the economics say that if a million people stop buying ESPN next month they're losing $8 million a month from that group times 12 is a hundred million dollars a year multiply that by ESPN to and all these other channels that people may opt not to get but the interesting thing is what's happening now especially with the younger people is they're saying I'm not paying $100 a month anymore for cable I'll pay $35 I'll pay $40 I'll get my Netflix I can watch what I want when I want it's got most of what I like go but then there's that Amazon movie thing I'm gonna buy that too and what they're starting to find is people are paying eight bucks here and ten bucks here I mean the most recent figures I have is that Netflix is ten bucks Amazon is $8 Hulu is $8 HBO now is $15 well you start buying this one and this one and this one and guess what suddenly you're paying a hundred dollars a month again so that's gonna be part of the question going forward and the reason these are important questions is if we don't have people paying for product then the networks can't go out and fund shows like Game of Thrones now I'm not a Game of Thrones person I don't get why we continue to have fascination with zombies and and medieval knights I I mean I get it but it's like every five years we seem to have a new werewolf movie and things like that and it's because people like them obviously but I will tell you that Game of Thrones fascinating who's a Game of Thrones fans here I'm sure we have some and and how many episodes are in the new season is it like eight seven okay so all this fuss all this season whatever we in seven so eight so whatever it is is for seven episodes I will tell you historically traditionally a normal broadcast season for all the shows you watch Grey's Anatomy all that 22 to 24 episodes so what you get with a Game of Thrones is you get six months of hype leading up to seven weeks of shows so when people talk about binge watching which is a big deal now it's not hard with Game of Thrones you could sit down at noon on a Saturday and by eight o'clock you could have dinner and be done with the full year of Game of Thrones another great show Sopranos right ten episodes a year curb your enthusiasm ten episodes a year these shows are prohibitively expensive and very difficult and it's a great deal for the people involved in it because they're hugely popular for very short windows of time something else that I find fascinating in the history of broadcasting cable okay now understand how it works shows come out on broadcasts for the most part in the old days Seinfeld friends mash cheers you can go through all your favorite sitcoms and everything and eventually they gravitated toward cable where huge fees were paid by TNT and TBS and USA Network because they needed quality shows so not only did people make money on the original sale to the networks they made a lot more money when it went over to the cable companies in the history of television there is not one cable show that went from cable to broadcast and worked not one that was the first part of John thanks for your remarks at the Harvard Club we hope you enjoyed and learned as much from them as we did we'll present the second part in the weeks to come thanks to John Fink in the Harvard Club for letting us take this memorable event want to know more about John Fink or K5 check out K5thehometeam.com or the website for the Hawaii Association of Broadcasters Hawaii Broadcasters.com and now let's take a look at our think tech schedule of events going forward there's so much happening in Hawaii sometimes things happen under the radar and we don't hear much about them but think tech will take you there remember you can watch think tech on spectrum OC16 several times 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issues and events that affect our lives together in these islands we want to stay in touch with you and we'd like you to stay in touch with us yes let's think together you can call into our talk shows live while you're watching any of our shows you can call into 808 374 2014 and pose a question or make a comment we'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of think tech but first we want to thank our underwriters that wraps up this week's edition of think tech remember you can watch think tech on spectrum OC 16 several times every week can't get enough of it just like Helen does for additional times check out OC 16 dot TV for lots more think tech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on think tech visit think tech Hawaii dot com be a guest or a host a producer or an intern and help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii thanks for being part of our think tech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech energy diversification global awareness in Hawaii and of course events in and affecting the media you can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode I'm Nicole Horry and I'm Helen Hayden Aloha everyone