TV is not dying
thedrum.com
thedrum.com
The thing is, it's dying in a long-form death: people don't just change media consumption habits overnight; it's more of a generational shift that happens pretty much like the author of this article describes. I don't anticipate TV as we know it today to disappear for another 10-15 years. I mean, we still have land lines a good 2 decades after cell phones made them obsolete...
The author's numbers are garbage (no offense intended to op; good numbers on media consumption are considered confidential and proprietary for most companies so it almost requires working for a large media company with a large customer base). Nielsen in particular is known within the industry for basically only being meaningful in the context of a specific month (i.e. it's a good way to know if show A outdrew show B, but the overall numbers they give you around viewership are wrong). Basically everyone knows Nielsen is wrong, but there aren't any better options because nobody is willing to trust anyone in media measurement.
But however you slice it, medium-form TV content (>15 mins, <60 mins) is not going anywhere. Viewers like this format and I expect it to stay. But look where all the highest quality content is aggregating: for-pay, ad-free services like Netflix , Amazon and Hulu (not entirely ad-free, but close).
Video advertising, however, is about to see an apocalyptic drop in ad rates. There's a 20-30% disparity in CPMs between TV and online, and once advertisers catch on that most of those TVs are probably playing in the background with nobody watching, ad rates will come down. And that will really kill the traditional TV market.
I seriously looked at getting rid of my landline (technically Comcast VoIP but effectively landline). But even with WiFi assist, my cellphone is not as good quality. Neither are videoconferencing systems a lot of the time. So, yes, I good get rid of my landline but it would mean giving up quality which is problematic for me for a few reasons.
The mass media have suffered the effects of the Internet much in the manner of the record industry, as consumers, conclusively sick of their shit, withdraw their attention. Their worry has gone from piracy to ... being ignored.
From https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-19/nbc-s-12-... :
> Back in June, Steve Burke described what he called his Olympics “nightmare.” “We wake up someday and the ratings are down 20 percent,” the chief executive officer of NBCUniversal said at a conference. “If that happens, my prediction would be that millennials had been in a Facebook bubble or a Snapchat bubble and the Olympics have come, and they didn’t know it.”
I'm 50 (Gen X), but this was me. I literally had no idea the Olympics had actually started until occasional posts about it showed up on Tumblr. Nor did I realise it was in Rio until then.
My daughter, now 10, has watched TV entirely on a computer from age 2. (Sysadmin parent = house with lots of spare obsolete boxes.) She spends her life on YouTube. (Watching Let's Play videos. StampyCat and DanTDM rock her world - they are the Saturday morning cartoons of her generation.) I tell her horror stories of my day, when there were three channels and they only showed stuff at a particular time and if you missed it you couldn’t watch it again ... She laughs at me.
The media hegemony broke absolutely the moment we could get the hell away from them. Now people watch TV because they want to, not because there's no other way to get there.
I wouldn't be so sure about that -- I would venture that 95-99% of the stuff on YouTube / Twitter is owned in some form by one of the 10-15 largest media companies (Disney, Comcast, Viacom, Fox, Bertelsmann, etc) . Ownership is hard to verify (top content creators / on screen talent tend to be able to write their own contracts much like top actors can) but I worked in this field long enough to know that if you want to make the jump from 100k subscribers to 10M+ subscribers, you almost have to rely on a content network for cross-promotion (YT's recommendation algorithms really reinforce this). Even if you're an established star in your own right.
But you're right; there's an age cutoff where if you were born after about 1990, the idea of watching TV the way people born before then do is almost totally foreign to you. If it's not available instantly and on-demand, it doesn't exist.
It just points to how much of a bubble I live in. I don't even know anyone who watches live TV.
One of the things that confuses me is why Hulu still runs ads against some content when I've paid for the no ads membership. Obviously it's contractual reasons, but what reason do content companies have for not allowing platforms to stream their content ad-free? Or is this just Hulu lying to consumers about the reason for running ads against this content?
Youtube is the only product that brings anything comparable to the table. But, then again, the number of advertisements I see there is exquisitely low in contrast to the old TV days. Maybe because Youtube is throughly vigilant about not damaging the UX but for the major part, my internet time is mostly spent on other content websites.
I think Internet has a huge advertising problem. Even though it offers every advantage in terms of distribution, there isn't any contender that can replace TV ads.
Young marketers, like myself, if they are good professionals should be media agnostic, and just choose the best media channels for the target audience they are aiming to reach, depending of course of the objectives of the campaign.
Again, depending on the target, the consumer journey makes their attention shift to alot of media touchpoints - the reality is that the media landscape still includes outdoor 8x6, newspappers, etc.
Yet you can't dismiss that what we call ivideo is a cost effective medium. It doesn't depend on huge agency groups deals, with massive minimum investment requirements influenced by rapel. And lately it has become even more expensive... it's not that the audience isn't there - it's the cost of the GRPs.
tl;dr - TV is just another medium. The most expensive one, and marketers sometimes question it's cost effectiveness and shift investment to online video.
And then shift it back again.
The stories are legion of advertisers transitioning to online advertising and back again when they discover it's less effective.
Combine that with increasing awareness of impression fraud, and the difficulty of controlling where media is placed (resulting in brands appearing on... Questionable sites), and it seems the internet advertising hype is deflating a bit.
And rightly so. As you say, it's a weapon in the arsenal, not a wholesale replacement for traditional TV advertising.
I think that one of the main problems of TV is the cost of production is increasing, and they don't want to kill their margins. Even the live content is dropping it's quality - that's why sports are still kings of audiences.
Ad fraud, viewability and brand safety are defintly hot questions atm, but tools are already being set in place to help it (I don't think there's a definite solution) - some brands blew it out of proportion though, other brands are using this to drop down the costs.
But yeah, it's just another weapon - TV is definatly the heavy artillery.
I'm not sure that's necessarily true. Facebook costs .27 per click, google addwords are 1$ and up. an add for the big bang theory is around 250-500k$ for 8-20 million views.
I feel like some companies actually spend too much on online advertisement. I also feel like the sudden pull of advertisements on youtube was more about people starting to question the ROI.
Tv is used usualy for it's powerfull Reach (like you said, it concentrates alot of eyeballs at once), and since it's video is amazing to build awareness.
One spot in the break of BBT may not be enough, because of the Frequency that the message will be displayed to the audience - that one shot spot (Frequency 1) of 250-500k may be good if you have a 100 million budget, else there are more effective ways to reach this audience with a propper TV planning.
But if you want to Reach people on Facebook you can optimize it for Reach and Frequency - but you must have a great creative to gather and retain attention (you'll pay on CPM).
The problem is just what you've said: ROI. Alot of brands don't measure it properly. For some brands online is a gold mine, for others, it's a dump.
http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2015/04/death-of-tv-continu...
Today Neilsen uses multiple techniques. In addition to self-reporting via diaries, local people meters are deployed in measured homes. When a person sits in front of the TV they identify themselves to the LPM by pressing their ID button in order to indicate someone is in front of the TV.
Yes there may be error in this since it's just-in-time self-reporting, but viewership numbers have been robust and consistent for a very long time.
I posit that viewership numbers have been "robust and consistent" because they're picking people who fit that.
It presumes, of course, that there aren't multiple ways that viewership is measured beyond just nielsen, and that in 50 years no one considered this possibility and developed methods to unskew the data.
Possible? Yes. Likely? I struggle to believe it.
Also, all the cable providers sell aggregate/anonymous statistics about TV viewership. Because of SDV, they know what channel your Cable box is tuned to.
If you have a household income of $150K you are in the top 13% of earners.
From what I've seen, the same is true for at least the Dallas/Ft. Worth area.
So that's a good 3-3.5 hours most days of the week. On a Saturday it wouldn't be uncommon to watch morning TV for 2-3 hours. I was brought up as a BBC person, so adverts weren't really a problem, but if you watch another channel there are probably folks who watch an hour of ads a day.
While I was writing up my thesis and I was doing mind-numbing stuff like processing data or making figures, I often put Netflix on in the background and could easily fit in 5-6 episodes a day.
Is it though?
Assuming an adult with a full-time job gets home and has supper on the table by 6pm, we're talking about watching from 6-11pm. That doesn't sound that staggering to me.
And that's not allowing for folks who watch the morning news, or folks who work shifts or stay-at-home parents who watch during the day.
Again, take the article's advice: don't judge the numbers by your experience. While a lot of people on HN might fill their time gaming, coding, watching streaming video, etc, we're not a typical cohort.
I understand that you're suggesting that people having TV on in the background accounts for a lot of this, but to me that just makes it even more surprising and, honestly, disturbing. this kind of thing takes a toll on a person's unconscious mind.
Well, congratulations! You're an outlier. :)
No offense to technology but this is all about age old entertainment and story-telling enterprises in human history.
TV didn't kill radio, and the Internet won't kill TV, but it will lessen its role and importance significantly, with the physical TV essentially being relegated to the role of a large, communal monitor as TV content moves to an Internet first model.
I basically watch zero over-the-air TV these days, and if there is anything of interest it will also be online (either legitimately or not) if I really want to watch something.
However, TV has indeed evolved over the years. It has gone from fictional shows like Lost which made space for semi-fictional reality TV shows era (Lost was a precursor to Survivor), to Cinema-like experience of GoT. TV has also seen itself evolve so fast that fictional shows like House of Cards lost itself to the reality on the ground.
These are human evolution in terms of what we're telling ourselves via our stories. It matters less how we're telling stories (Netflix, Internet, CBS...doesn't matter).
Umm. Lost premiered in 2004. Survivor premiered in 2000.
When people say TV is dying, they don't mean TV shows will stop getting made. They generally mean you'll get all your content over the Internet (legally or illegally) instead of laden-with-ads over-the-air or cable TV.
By your own admission (haven't watched TV in a decade), TV is already dead to you.
If the cinemas all die out, because everyone's renting movies at Redbox or Amazon Prime or using Netflix and watching movies at home, are you going to argue with someone who says "Movies have died!"? If you do, then you're being pedantic and annoying, because they're right: the cinemas in that scenario have died. The format of a ~2-hour story in video hasn't died, but the tradition of going to a business, open to the public, to watch it on a large screen in a room full of strangers has.
Same goes here: when someone says "TV is dead", they mean watching ~50-minute video episodes through an antenna, or from a cable TV provider, with commercials interleaved. That format is dying out.
People won't stop wanting to veg out, but delivery tech changes, new things become possible and older cash cows don't last forever. And similar to how the net enabled new voices in news, fiction, music, etc., TV will fragment as well.
Which is good, at least for me; I never watched TV much until relatively recently. People have always talked about shows, which I've ignored all my life. But some recent ones - mostly serials - have been remarkably appealing to me, and I'm watching more. Over the last year, I've even considered buying a real TV for the first time.
So like many other markets affected by the net, the total market grows, but fragments. Bet against "national moment" television and bet on niche plays.
A few millions watch Game of Thrones on the TV.
A few hundred million watch it on demand, from the internet.
Whether GoT is originally created by a cable network is irrelevant (and mostly the result of a broken business model continuing on).
A good system to monetize those hundred millions would totally obliterate TV networks in the distribution of shows like Game Of Thrones.
Heck, Netflix is going strong with its own shows, and it's far from global or perfect.
* Not even a sports fan, friends tell me how much their cable packages cost when literally the only thing they watch is ESPN and the like. They're getting robbed but there's no way around it.
Internet access these days isn't a luxury, it's a necessity if you're in any kind of non-minimum-wage profession, and it's a necessity to participate in modern culture in many ways. People do banking, pay their bills, look for jobs, read the news, file their taxes, etc. online these days; it's just as necessary as a telephone was 20 years ago.
Cable TV is not a necessity at all; it's a luxury. It's no more necessary than a Ferrari or a Rolex or box seats at a sports game or a meal at a $100/plate restaurant.
No, I can't think of other luxury goods priced this way either, but again, it's irrelevant. They can price things however they want, and you can choose to take it or leave it. It's a luxury, nothing more, and if you don't like the terms, you're free to take your business elsewhere. If they want a weird business model like that, it's their right, and it seems to be working for them since there's so many suckers happily sending them money for this. Perhaps the truth is that the really high-end luxury goods (Rolls, Rolex, etc.) are smarter than the typical cable TV customer and wouldn't put up with that kind of BS.
OK but now you're involving a free market which we've already established doesn't exist in terms of broadband providers in most places.
Here are some charts on the amount of TV viewing by age group over the last several years: http://www.marketingcharts.com/television/are-young-people-w...
But we're not dead :P
Yeah so we should not believe the stastics provided by Google and co but believe in nielson etc that have an incentive to show that TV is not dying. I would get the author if he had chosen sources that were not as biased as the ones he stated the other way.
To me personally TV is not dying the old model of subscription TV is dying if I am going to pay for a subscription I want to control when I want to watch the content and not be dictated to by the channel.Regular TV program? Yes, certainly.
The only people I've heard say the opposite are people who profit from TV programs being popular, mostly because of ads.
Where's yours?
What the literal fudge?
This guy is out of touch with his finger far from the pulse of society.
I'm not saying he's wrong about TV having some life left, but the belief that television is unkillable and the internet a fad is just wacky.