Broadcast television may be now facing a similar, scary phase shift. Netflix has been making inroads among U.S. consumers for years, but its impact on the key 18-to-49-year-old demographic has so far been limited. Old habits die hard and many viewers have remained mostly loyal to habit of gorging on linear television on Thursday nights.
But the most recent numbers have some scary elements that point to a possibly massive disruption in the near term. Broadcast TV consumption among 18-to-34-year-old Americans plunged by 11% in the Christmas quarter. Ominously, audiences of young-skewing cable channels like Nickelodeon and MTV are now sliding by 14 to 17% year-on-year.
I’ll be honest, I’m more excited about a new Netflix series than I am about anything on one of the big networks.
What’s broadcast TV? Is that like a rotary phone?
The last live tv broadcast we watched in our living room was 2009’s PBS premiere of David Tennant’s “Hamlet.” I had to figure out how to rig the over-the-air antenna all over again.
So, you are more interested in the content, not the actual delivery of that. And it seems that the big networks are bad in producing new, interesting content. If they had good content, would you mind seeing it on their network? I suppose not…
You know, when I compare broadcast TV and a rotary phone in my head the rotary phone ends up seeming superior. While it’s probably associated with a party line, that requires just a little coordination. You don’t have to build your whole schedule around it.
I still have the 1980s rotary phone from my first apartment. Bell handed off the equipment to lease through AT&T or some equivalent, and I eventually just bought the thing. Kept it around as an extension phone for awhile, but had a tech friend disable the bell.
The first clue is they used the Christmas quarter as evidence. All of the broadcast shows have wrapped for hiatus at that time, so there’s really nothing on except re-runs and holiday specials.
A local coffee shop has a classic rotary phone as part of the ambience. Not only does it still ring, but apparently they can still (or again?) dial from it.
And yes, they use it to answer calls. 🙂
Nice. Mine started losing handset/cord connection at some point, so it became less reliable and eventually got demoted to living-room-decoration. Before that, I’d fitted it with the longest cords I could find.
That said, it’s one of two POTS devices we’re glad to have in the house in case of another post-storm blackout.
I tell ya, when a rotary rings you @#$%ing know it rang. 🙂
Boy howdy, we sure did. Even turning its nominal “volume” down wasn’t enough.
Why not be more excited. Companies like Netflix don’t use the ratings so they don’t design shows to chase the ratings. They don’t have to look at the stats that say that shows on this or that day get more viewers. They don’t have to look at stats that say that shows on at 7 pm get better ratings than shows at 9pm so they don’t have to care about the FCC rules about what can or can’t be shown in the earlier slot, so no watering down to fit rules. That’s a great creative freedom.
And folks are starting to get a clue about how wacked the whole ratings system is. They’re starting to get an education about how Nielsen creates those numbers. When Fox claims fhat a show like Empire got 14 million viewers they don’t really KNOW that. They know that something like 4k sample viewers watched and who really knows about the other 99.5 million viewers that aren’t counted. But when Netflix says 14 million viewers have watched the new season of House of Cards, they actually counted that many folks. That excites viewers who are getting sick of the shows they like getting cancelled.
Good point. Context does matter.
I don’t think that anyone would not watch something of quality just because it’s on TV. Trouble is that the networks tend to not produce quality over quantity. They are in this for making money and that trumps basically very other factor. Which is why shows like Firefly got canned and shows like Survivor are around. Reality TV is cheap to make and gets ratings. It’s fluff that equals tons of profits. Whereas a show Firefly is lucky to balance its budget
Real metrics. Meanwhile, Neilsen is probably still reassuring the networks that there’s no need to worry.
Basically yes. The sad thing is that it’s probably going to take someone having giant brass balls and suing Nielsen, though I don’t know what for, to get any change to the system. A lawsuit wouldn’t likely win but the press from something that insane might get the ball rolling. And better than the buzz ratings that Nielsen added a couple of years ago to try to act like they were with the times with social media. But they restrict even that, counting only Twitter, only a few hours right when an episode airs and limited hashtags. Plus the advertisers still only count the viewer ratings
It’s not entirely unlike the business of providing other high-priced sector-specific analysis by mostly telling subscribers what they want to hear.