How To Save The History Channel
The History Channel is dying. The once highly educational TV station of the past has gradually drifted into obscurity. They bet their survival and success on easy-to-digest, reality based shows like Pawn Stars and American Pickers and have basically stopped airing the historical documentaries that made them popular in the first place. While this new form of content is easier for the casual viewer to consume, the lack of good, old-fashioned documentaries caused a void in the educational programming market. With little available on TV to fill this void, consumers took to another option: online video. YouTube became the new frontier for educational videos with popular YouTube Channels like Vsauce, Veritasium, and CrashCourse rising to fill the educational void. Though it’s much too late for the History Channel to enter this online video space and compete with these established channels, they are in a prime position to capitalize on the next big platform: audio.
Podcasts are becoming increasingly popular among young adults. Today many prefer to listen to them instead of music during their commute and while at work. And a large portion of these listeners are indulging in educational podcasts. From interviews that expand one’s mindset like the Joe Rogan Podcast to interesting investigative storytelling like Serial, millions of people are consuming some form of educational podcast every day. And the History Channel is in the perfect position to capitalize on this emerging market.
In order to have a good podcast, all that’s really required is clean audio and engaging content. Luckily for the History Channel, they already have hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of this in storage. Each of their old documentaries from the 1980’s, 1990’s, and early 2000’s has crisp studio-recorded audio and engaging story telling. All that the History Channel really has to do is strip the audio from these documentaries and post them in podcast form. Of course not all of them are suitable as audio-only content because many rely on visuals to help engage the consumer, but there are many viable documentaries that can be effortlessly turned into podcasts.
While these are being uploaded, and the History Channel begins to cultivate their listener base, they can then focus their effort on creating entirely new podcast series with the audio platform in mind. This can be anything from interviews with various historians, archaeologists, and engineers to weekly history series in a similar vein to Band of Brothers or Serial. They could even tap into the startup craze and detail the lives, work, and struggles of various entrepreneurs from the past and present. There’s a lot of opportunity to rebuild the History Channel brand and attract new consumers and, best of all, stripping the audio from old documentaries is an incredibly low-cost and high-value way to begin entering the audio space.
While the History Channel may have missed their opportunity to compete on YouTube, they are in a great position to dominate in the audio space. They have an enormous amount of content that can quickly and cheaply be converted into podcasts and they have the budget to produce new, engaging audio content. It’ll be interesting to see if they decide to capitalize on this great opportunity or fade deeper into obscurity.