It’s hard not to remember the great sucking sound of the early internet years as consumers, finding this handy way to get free news and entertainment, began spending more time online and less time reading newspapers and magazines. Advertisers followed, moving more and more of their ad budgets online.

Television and radio escaped. Radio held onto listeners; television actually gained viewers.

And so it was for a number of years. But now that’s beginning to change.
The miracle of the internet, having done a number on print, is beginning to threaten the longstanding advertising model of television and radio, the intrusive ad, the commercial break that interrupts the entertainment to deliver the advertiser’s message.

That ad model has been in place from the early days of radio, even before television.

The challenge is coming from recently emerged entertainment vehicles that carry far less advertising or no advertising at all, most famously Pandora, the online radio site, and Netflix, the provider of movies and TV shows online and via the mail.

Pandora now claims 125 million registered listeners. Netflix claims 24.4 million U.S. subscribers. If Netflix were a TV network, it would rank as the 15th largest. Both appear headed to even more growth.

While Pandora is most noted for its self-programming feature, allowing users to create their own playlist, it also offers far less advertising in a given hour, a couple of minutes versus in the range of 15 on traditional commercial radio.

And it’s that feature that has the commercial radio industry in such a lather these days, expressed almost daily in attacks on Pandora in the trades.

By airing so much less advertising, Pandora threatens the economic lifeblood of commercial radio, which by comparison is clutter-bound.

That doesn’t means that Pandora and sites like it will wipe out traditional commercial radio stations. Those stations still have a lot of advantages, and one is close ties to their communities, radio being the ultimate local medium.

But they will do damage. They will in time take listeners away, and likely in good numbers over time. To compete, traditional radio will feel increasing pressure to dramatically reduce the number of commercials they air.

That will be welcome by listeners and certainly advertisers, who’ve long complained their ads were drowned out in the clutter of other spots. But it will prove a real challenge to stations faced with having to make up for lost revenue.

We’ll see those same pressures in television, thanks again to the internet.
The 30-second spot has long been the workhorse of television, but like the radio spot it’s been a source of complaints from advertisers and viewers. Spots now chew up some 16 minutes of every hour on broadcast.

Bu the challenge to the TV spot is not coming from viewers and advertisers but from the growing universe of alternatives to ad-supported television.

Netflix is certainly one of them, and its appeal is pretty obvious, an evening of entertainment at very little cost with no ads whatsoever, watching first-rate movies that might have cost $10 to see in a movie theater.

But Netflix is only one of many. In just the last several years there’s been an explosion in online video content available at no cost: old movies and TV shows and documentaries but also a growing stream of made-for-the-web entertainment, all ad free or nearly ad free.

The TV set, once exclusively the outlet of broadcast networks, is now an open highway for all manner of entertainment, all competing for viewers’ attention. It will become even more so as more and more video content comes online.

That competing entertainment has notable advantages, in addition to an absence of spots.

One is cost. It’s either free, almost free, or offers real value at comparatively little cost, as in the case of Netflix, which for under $10 a month offers unlimited access to thousands of movies and TV shows.

Another is quality. While there’s a ton of junk video online, there’s also a lot on entertainment that certainly competes with much of what’s on broadcast TV, and that’s growing.

But probably most critical is the element of choice, the offer of content on demand, being able to find entertainment one wants to watch at his or her convenience.

Looking back, that choice, content on demand, was what really did the number of print. Going online, one suddenly found a whole sea of information against which no single newspaper or magazine could compete.

For sure, the TV spot will not be going away, and certainly not anytime soon. It will remain television’s workhorse for years to come.

But as with radio, television executives will feel pressure to reduce the number of spots they run per hour. They’ll also be under increasing challenge to provide advertisers alternatives to the spot that engage viewers in new ways.