Puppies and the gatekeepers of misery

Show number 233 of This American Life has an interesting segment about Dan FitzSimmonds who tries to set up his own cable network. (You can listen to it from the site – it starts 7 minutes in and lasts for 15 minutes.) It’s interesting because the show was first broadcast in 2003 and is talking about an era way before the notion of DIY media online was remotely understood, let alone the explosion of online video.

Here’s his pitch:

The initial idea was All Puppies All The Time. You’d turn to The Puppy Channel and you’d see 24 hours a day, seven days a week, footage of puppies fooling around like puppies do, the natural comedians and cuties that they are, with no people, no talk, accompanied only by relaxing instrumental music.

Sound familiar?

Here’s Wikipedia on the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam (my emphasis):

The webcam [...] by a San Francisco, California, couple to monitor their Shiba Inu puppies while they were at work. The live streaming website showed the puppies interacting with each other in a variety of ways; sleeping, playing with toys, tearing up wee pads, and occasionally snuggling with their mother, Kika. [...] By October 13, 2008, three million viewers had spent 1.2 million hours watching the puppies via the Internet.

I remember when this hit the big time last year. Someone on my Twitter stream would flip it on and post “aw, they’re doing [something cute]!!” and others would check it out. It was a real social thing. Back to the TAL episode, here’s FitzSimons talking about the genesis of the idea:

I recalled [...] walking into a building where the Animal Protection League had puppies up for adoption. And the crowd of people standing around these puppies included men in three piece suits, women in fancy outfits and shoppers, moms with kids in strollers, the UPS man, and they stood together, smiling and chuckling and even sometimes addressing one another in the middle of a big city building all because there were puppies. The puppies made them feel better.

He’d previously been stuck at home watching daytime TV and, being somewhat sentient, thinking about how it could be so much better. Why not simply show puppies instead? So he and his wife went about the process of getting a cable TV channel. Despite good press and a sound business model (the funding would come from product placement and ads scrolling across the screen so as not to interrupt the puppies) those controlling the cable networks – Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch and scant few others – didn’t see the potential and turned it down.

In his mission statement he said the Puppy Channel was there “to help people relax and feel better” and he did this because he thought television wasn’t helping people relax or feel better. As his daughter Molly, the presenter of the TAL segment, concludes:

My father conceived of The Puppy Channel as a refuge from regular TV. But implicit in this notion is the idea that regular TV is something you need a refuge from. And that’s a tough sell to the people who make it.

The interesting thing here is that this man saw something that was obviously broken and figured out a way to fix it. But the people who owned the thing that was broken didn’t think it was broken. But happens when you remove those people from the equation? 3 million people watching for an average of 24 minutes.

More interestingly is how the Puppy Cam differs from the Puppy Channel. Unsurprisingly, once online video became the norm, FitzSimmonds turned his idea into a website at thepuppychannel.com but this was the first time it had come onto my radar and I’m something of an aficionado of this stuff. Cute Overload is probably the big winner here for photos but with video it all tends to take place on the subject-neutral YouTube where there is no mediator and no curator other than the viewer and YouTube’s “related videos” algorithm. While FitzSimmonds might have been a radical back in the 90s today his site looks quite antiquated and restrictive. We don’t need a puppy “channel” – puppies are everywhere.

Meanwhile TV audiences are shrinking and advertising budgets are going elsewhere. It seems people like watching things that make them happy and relaxed. Who knew? Dan FitzSimmonds had an inkling…