As if there’s really been anything worth watching in over 10 years.
Ratings over all for broadcast networks continue to decline, making it harder for them to justify their high prices for advertising. Cable channels are spending more on original shows, which bring in new viewers and dampen their appetites for buying repeats of broadcast shows.
For the networks, the crisis is twofold: cultural and financial. For viewers, the result is more low-cost reality shows, prime-time talk and news programs and sports…
I think TV is doing just as well as ever, just the use of a flawed ratings system doesn’t count the way most people watch TV. The Nielsen’s have much of the data for those of us that time-shift, but the networks don’t use it yet and their advertisers don’t want them to.
TV is no longer about having the family gather around the idiot box for 20 minutes of commercials and 40 minutes of a brain-dead pop culture show. It’s about selective, almost custom programming. It’s about time-shifting to put programming on the viewer’s own schedule, not the broadcasters. It’s about being able to watch the same thing whether you’re in your living room, at your desk, or sitting around a laundromat with just an iPod.
You only need to look at the myriad devices that enable people to carry their programming with them. As soon as “Big TV” figures out that their viewers are still there, just not on the couch, and take advantage of the tremendous number of hardware platforms out there, they’ll continue to make money hand over fist.
Anybody with Google can figure out how to record something with TiVo, dump it to their hard drive to watch at their desk or stretched out with their netbook, convert it to MPEG to burn it to DVD, convert it to 3G2 for their phone, convert it to MP4 for their iPods, etc. Of course, if anybody is to go to the trouble, they will most likely take an extra 5 minutes to cut out the commercials.
If the studios would just offer these common files of their shows available for download, commercials intact, their current business model would still work. Viewers are the same. But the hardware, the time slot, and the conventional venues have changed.