Over the last few years, we have all been spending more time away from or in parallel with the great American institution, the television. Netflix and YouTube have led the way, providing the on demand technology and content that we all want. The internet provides a very long tail of content to consume.
Over the last couple of years, the media companies have been waking up to the realization that they need to think beyond broadcast. They have placed their content online, made it accessible through apps. The cable providers too have finally embraced online fully, providing all the functionality I expect through an app on my ipad.
Linear TV has held up amazingly well, especially from an advertising point of view. It remains the least bad place to get the most reach. But ratings have clearly declined. Every major event seems to drive headlines around ratings...
Grammy Awards draw 19.8 million viewers on CBS, a nine-year low: "The CBS telecast of the 60th Grammy Awards was watched Sunday by 19.8 million viewers, a staggering 24% decline from last year's show.....The rating among viewers ages 18 to 49 — the group important to most advertisers — hit an all-time low, with 5.9% of that audience tuned in compared with 7.8% last year."
The NFL can’t blame Trump anymore: It is facing a ‘structural decline in viewership’ - Recode: "Last year, regular season NFL games and related content accounted for 66 of the 100 most popular shows on TV."
It is important to draw a distinction between the content and the medium. Long form movie and serial content, as well as live sports, continue to be very popular. There is a problem now of achieving an holistic measure of audience when there is so much fragmentation in the delivery. So, while linear TV is clearly in decline, it is less evident that the content itself is. Just look at the billions of dollars Netflix, Amazon and others are paying for original content. That content is generally still in forms we expect to see from TV. Meg Whitman just became CEO of a new venture that seeks to professionalize short form content of the internet age (Meg Whitman Named CEO of Jeffrey Katzenberg Mobile Content Venture – Variety). That will be an interesting development to monitor.
It seems likely that the profits from linear TV and cable distribution are likely to be under pressure, but content is always king.
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