You have to hand it to Fox Entertainment. They’re going to try a new experiment with two of their new television dramas this fall – fewer commercials at higher rates. What a concept.
As Peter Liguori, chairman of Fox Entertainment, notes: "It is potentially revolutionary."
If it works, it truly will be revolutionary. Marketed as "Remote-Free TV," the concept is designed to attract new viewers to less over-commercialized shows, while netting essentially the same revenue in the process. Whether new viewers will be attracted to this value proposition and whether advertisers will pay extra for the privilege of running their commercials in a less cluttered environment are key questions.
Radio often debuts new stations commercial-free for a time, but then reality sets in a few weeks later. An exception, of course, is Clear Channel’s WRFF in Philadelphia, now one year-old, and still running only about 6 minutes of advertising an hour. And Cox has long advocated running fewer commercials than most other broadcasters, too.
A lot of folks in the TV community will be watching this Fox experiment very closely. We should, too.
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Fred was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2018.
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I remember one of the business concepts that was kicked around during the 1980’s launch of 100.3 Pirate Radio in L.A. was that the station would run only one unit per hour at premium rate.