By Dom Serafini
On April 14, 1998, I wrote in the Italian financial daily, Il Sole 24 Ore, that RAI, Italy’s state-owned broadcaster, should replace each of its three TV channels’ directors with day-part (or time segment) directors, and asked, “What kind of competition is that to cannibalize each other?”
Basically, the article made the case that “RAI should divide the broadcast day into four blocks of time: Morning, afternoon, evening, and night. The same director for all of RAI’s three channels would program each block of time. This way the networks wouldn’t be competing with each other for the available audiences, but would complement each other, increasing the cumulative audience and saving in programming costs [by avoiding counter-programming].”
Finally, in 2021, the politicians who always had control of RAI decided to change the “vertical” structure of the TV channels, wherein each director programmed the whole channel, to a horizontal structure, wherein the same director programmed a time slot across RAI’s three TV channels. Basically, they changed what was called “Direttori di Rete” (Networks’ Directors”) to “Direttori di Genere” (Genres’ Directors), what I had originally called “Direttori di Fasce,” meaning “Time slot or Day-part Directors.”
In my original view, I combined early morning and daytime (reaching stay-at-home parents, retirees, and remote workers up to 4 p.m.); then afternoon, what in the U.S. is called “early fringe” (capturing viewers transitioning from work or school up to 7 p.m.); followed by evening or “primetime” (attracting a broad audience up to 11 p.m.); and night, better yet, “late night” (appealing to night shift workers and young adults).
Yes, one should be grateful that it only took 23 years for RAI not to cannibalize itself, but instead of the four daytime slot directors, RAI appointed two directors: one for primetime, the other for daytime, plus six more directors covering culture, fiction, children, documentary, cinema, and digital content.
While it was originally thought of as a streamlining procedure, like magic, it multiplied the number of executive positions and managed to satisfy every significant Italian political party.
At that time, with TV stations still transmitting with the analog system, the suggestion made sense mostly for state-owned (public) broadcasters, but with the migration to digital television, where commercial stations can operate multiple channels, the concept of daytime slot directors could have applied to commercial TV outlets as well. But unfortunately, this wasn’t the case.
Commented a top European broadcaster’s executive: “I don’t think any other broadcaster in Europe is arranging their senior people in this [time slots] way. There are often heads of daytime who look after the daytime schedules, but they are not equal to the overall heads of programs.
Increasingly, as viewers migrate to on demand and all of the major broadcasters are seeing growth in their streaming platforms, the senior execs are becoming heads of Content or heads of Audiovisual or heads of Video, with genre heads (e.g. heads of Drama, heads of Factual) underneath them.”
Perhaps legacy media, which is looking to reinvent itself –– after surviving cable and home video –– to compete with the more daunting streamers, should consider changing their vertical programming management structure into a horizontal one, especially among public TV services that manage multiple channels.
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