8 ms·

TV is not dying

36 points by sbachman 9y ago

hammock 9y ago
This topic comes up a lot and Ad Contrarian has had my favorite takes on it. His latest- http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2015/04/death-of-tv-continues-not-to-happen.html?m=1 http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2015/04/death-of-tv-continu...
- unit91 9y ago
  Whoa! Five hours of TV per day. At first I thought this was hyperbole, but a quick trip to Google confirmed it's an accurate metric. That's an absolutely staggering amount of TV.
  - rimliu 9y ago
    How do they measure that? Is it done by some TVmeters, or just self-reporting? There is a possibility that TV is on for five hours, but nobody really watches it that much.
    - zzalpha 9y ago
      Measuring TV viewership has been going on for 50 years. They're not so dumb as to just measure the time the TV spends emitting photons. 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.
      - Arizhel 9y ago
        They're also only getting metrics from people willing to be Neilsen reporters. What kind of compensation do they offer to do this? How many people refuse, because they can't be bothered with it? Is someone who makes $150k going to have any interest in being a part of this? If not, then the results are skewed because you're only getting the lower-income people. What about people who don't have a TV; how are they measuring that? I posit that viewership numbers have been "robust and consistent" because they're picking people who fit that.
        zzalpha 9y ago
        Possible. 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.
        Godel_unicode 9y ago
        You might wish to consider how many people in the US make "$150k", and then reconsider if excluding them would be representative. 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.
        Arizhel 9y ago
        Making $150k in the US is nothing remarkable, especially if you're a dual-earner family. Good luck affording decent housing in many metro areas if you make less than that.
        scarface74 9y ago
        http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/income-rank/ http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/income-rank/ If you have a household income of $150K you are in the top 13% of earners.
        Arizhel 9y ago
    - pjc50 9y ago
      You're forgetting huge numbers of retired people.
  - joshvm 9y ago
    It is, but it's easy to see where it comes from. When I was a kid, I'd usually catch 30-60 minutes before school, depending on how early I got up. School finished at 3:15, I'd be back by 3:30 in time to watch kid's programming until 5:30. Then there was a dull gap with Neighbours or The Weakest Link. Then the Simpsons had a slot at 6:00... and so on. 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.
    - dhimes 9y ago
      When I was a kid I was allowed 5 hours of TV per week. News was excluded, and a football game only took two hours back then. But, yeah: 5 hours a day is quite a bit.
  - zzalpha 9y ago
    That's an absolutely staggering amount of TV. 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.
    - metaphorm 9y ago
      it sounds absolutely staggering to me that a person would subject their home environment to that level of disruptive noise and advertisement spam. 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.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        Walk into a lot of bars/restaurant, airports, etc. etc. and you'll have TVs in the background. I know a lot of people whose first instinct when they walk into a room is to turn on the TV. Can't stand it myself but it's very common behavior.
      - zzalpha 9y ago
        it sounds absolutely staggering to me that a person would subject their home environment to that level of disruptive noise and advertisement spam. Well, congratulations! You're an outlier. :)
BEEdwards 9y ago
>In the end, the internet is dry and informative but television is magical and entertaining. 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.
webwanderings 9y ago
In the age when humans were able to produce TV shows like Game of Thrones, you cannot kill TV. The TV has only overtaken the Cinema. It will now be a race to topple the expensive shows in the history. No offense to technology but this is all about age old entertainment and story-telling enterprises in human history.
- imron 9y ago
  You cannot kill story-telling, that's for sure, but the medium certainly changes. 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.
  - webwanderings 9y ago
    Yes, that's pretty much what I meant to say as my comment above. I have not watched TV in a decade, but I hear these calls of TV dying all the time. The thing is, TV is not going to die because it is essentially fulfilling the core needs of human urges (that is, to hear and tell stories). The TV may take another shape and form, as it has in the form of Internet videos and video-watching. Who tells and creates stories (the production houses) is also insignificant. 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).
    - ghaff 9y ago
      >Lost was a precursor to Survivor Umm. Lost premiered in 2004. Survivor premiered in 2000.
shubhamjain 9y ago
TV usage may / may not be declining but I find no reason why brands would move away from TV advertising that easily. The internet hasn't yet established any immersive equivalent of traditional media ads. Irrespective of how loathsome they might be, they work. I doubt if a distracting banner ad can be as influential as the one you see on the TV. My TV viewing time is absolutely zero and personally, it has created an interesting dynamic in terms of brand recognition. As I walk into any supermarket store, I can barely recall any ads of products I see displayed. 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.
yAnonymous 9y ago
TV? No. 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.
- zzalpha 9y ago
  Well, this article at least provided data to back their assertions. Where's yours?
libertine 9y ago
Live TV is different from TV - just like LiveStreaming is different from Streaming ... let's just get that out of the way. 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.
- zzalpha 9y ago
  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.
  - libertine 9y ago
    Usually the shifts come when some mediums stop being saturated - Apple uses outdoor media in specific areas for example (something traditional for high end products, like Rolex, Aston Martin, etc). 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.
FussyZeus 9y ago
The only thing I suspect that is dying (or should be) is packaging of TV channels. This day and age with the customization available for nearly every product you buy, being forced to spend hundreds of dollars to get the content you want, usually Sports content, is fucking absurd. * 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.
- Arizhel 9y ago
  I don't think it's absurd at all. In previous years, the sports fans were getting their addiction subsidized by other viewers by having ESPN packaged in with basic cable. Now with more and more people cutting the cord, their subsidy is evaporating, so they're having to pay closer to the true cost of getting that entertainment. If they don't like it, no one's forcing them to stay subscribed to cable TV.
  - FussyZeus 9y ago
    Well yeah and no one forces you to get broadband Internet either, the fact that for most people there's only one option that's often insanely overpriced is the issue.
    - Arizhel 9y ago
      That's a poor analogy. No one forces you to hire an artist to create a commissioned artwork for you, but that doesn't mean that anyone actually needs to do that, and in fact, very few people hire artists on commission, because it's purely a luxury. Similarly, no one forces you to buy a Rolls-Royce, and whining that there's only one (insanely overpriced) Rolls Royce dealer in town isn't going to generate much sympathy, because again it's purely a luxury. 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.
jksmith 9y ago
Feel good piece. When you see consolidation as orchestrated by Tribune and Sinclair, that's a natural step in the evolution of any dinosaur business that is declining. In the immortal words of Danny Devito in the movie "Other People's Money," "Increasing share of a shrinking market. Down the tubes."
empath75 9y ago
Tv isn't dying, it's dead. The only people who watch a lot of live tv are over 50. They aren't going to live forever.
- RmDen 9y ago
  live tv is still needed if you want to watch good quality sport broadcasts. UEFA Champions League semifinals tomorrow and the day after will be watched by a whole lot of people under the age of 50. The streams are usually behind and of inferior quality.. Same is true for EPL and La Liga games
- tzs 9y ago
  A look at the ratings for a current top show (Big Bang Theory) shows that about 2/3 of its viewers are in the 18-49 group. 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-watching-less-tv-24817/ http://www.marketingcharts.com/television/are-young-people-w...
  - tdb7893 9y ago
    18-49 is a huge range. I know people in their 30s and 40s with cable but no one in their 20s. I'm sure some people do but I would be surprised if it wasn't declining
- dhimes 9y ago
  The only people who watch a lot of live tv are over 50. But we're not dead :P
Eridrus 9y ago
The data this article points to is quite surprising. Video on Demand is only 1.1% of TV viewing and 85% of households watch Live TV. 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?
xbmcuser 9y ago
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.
NOSHSHNACKERS 9y ago
my wife and I dont "watch tv" and I dont have a facebook account but we watch a lot of tv shows on hulu netflix and text and use signal with family and friends. We are wierdos..
exelius 9y ago
I work in this industry, and let me assure you: TV is most definitely dying. Or rather, the traditional business model where you subscribe to a huge bundle for pay TV is dying. That's a good thing. 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.
- ghaff 9y ago
  >I mean, we still have land lines a good 2 decades after cell phones made them obsolete... 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.
- davidgerard 9y ago
  I used to be in telly too. We knew last decade that YouTube would soon be a better television than television, and right now it's true. (YouTube, iPlayer, whatever.) I still (proudly) pay my TV license, but all our BBC is over the net; I haven't owned a physical TV for eight or so years. 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-billion-olympics-bet-stumbles-thanks-to-millennials 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.
metaphorm 9y ago
this article seemed woefully bereft of age-breakdowns on the data. a whole lot of averaged out statistics with no drill down. what happens if your project out 10 years from now when there are half as many baby-boomers still alive as there are today?

36 points by sbachman 9y ago

This topic comes up a lot and Ad Contrarian has had my favorite takes on it. His latest- http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2015/04/death-of-tv-continues-not-to-happen.html?m=1 http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2015/04/death-of-tv-continu...

unit91 9y ago
Whoa! Five hours of TV per day. At first I thought this was hyperbole, but a quick trip to Google confirmed it's an accurate metric. That's an absolutely staggering amount of TV.
- rimliu 9y ago
  How do they measure that? Is it done by some TVmeters, or just self-reporting? There is a possibility that TV is on for five hours, but nobody really watches it that much.
  - zzalpha 9y ago
    Measuring TV viewership has been going on for 50 years. They're not so dumb as to just measure the time the TV spends emitting photons. 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.
    - Arizhel 9y ago
      They're also only getting metrics from people willing to be Neilsen reporters. What kind of compensation do they offer to do this? How many people refuse, because they can't be bothered with it? Is someone who makes $150k going to have any interest in being a part of this? If not, then the results are skewed because you're only getting the lower-income people. What about people who don't have a TV; how are they measuring that? I posit that viewership numbers have been "robust and consistent" because they're picking people who fit that.
      - zzalpha 9y ago
        Possible. 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.
      - Godel_unicode 9y ago
        You might wish to consider how many people in the US make "$150k", and then reconsider if excluding them would be representative. 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.
        Arizhel 9y ago
        Making $150k in the US is nothing remarkable, especially if you're a dual-earner family. Good luck affording decent housing in many metro areas if you make less than that.
        scarface74 9y ago
        http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/income-rank/ http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/income-rank/ If you have a household income of $150K you are in the top 13% of earners.
        Arizhel 9y ago
  - pjc50 9y ago
    You're forgetting huge numbers of retired people.
- joshvm 9y ago
  It is, but it's easy to see where it comes from. When I was a kid, I'd usually catch 30-60 minutes before school, depending on how early I got up. School finished at 3:15, I'd be back by 3:30 in time to watch kid's programming until 5:30. Then there was a dull gap with Neighbours or The Weakest Link. Then the Simpsons had a slot at 6:00... and so on. 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.
  - dhimes 9y ago
    When I was a kid I was allowed 5 hours of TV per week. News was excluded, and a football game only took two hours back then. But, yeah: 5 hours a day is quite a bit.
- zzalpha 9y ago
  That's an absolutely staggering amount of TV. 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.
  - metaphorm 9y ago
    it sounds absolutely staggering to me that a person would subject their home environment to that level of disruptive noise and advertisement spam. 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.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      Walk into a lot of bars/restaurant, airports, etc. etc. and you'll have TVs in the background. I know a lot of people whose first instinct when they walk into a room is to turn on the TV. Can't stand it myself but it's very common behavior.
    - zzalpha 9y ago
      it sounds absolutely staggering to me that a person would subject their home environment to that level of disruptive noise and advertisement spam. Well, congratulations! You're an outlier. :)

BEEdwards 9y ago

>In the end, the internet is dry and informative but television is magical and entertaining. 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.

webwanderings 9y ago

In the age when humans were able to produce TV shows like Game of Thrones, you cannot kill TV. The TV has only overtaken the Cinema. It will now be a race to topple the expensive shows in the history. No offense to technology but this is all about age old entertainment and story-telling enterprises in human history.

imron 9y ago
You cannot kill story-telling, that's for sure, but the medium certainly changes. 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.
- webwanderings 9y ago
  Yes, that's pretty much what I meant to say as my comment above. I have not watched TV in a decade, but I hear these calls of TV dying all the time. The thing is, TV is not going to die because it is essentially fulfilling the core needs of human urges (that is, to hear and tell stories). The TV may take another shape and form, as it has in the form of Internet videos and video-watching. Who tells and creates stories (the production houses) is also insignificant. 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).
  - ghaff 9y ago
    >Lost was a precursor to Survivor Umm. Lost premiered in 2004. Survivor premiered in 2000.

shubhamjain 9y ago

TV usage may / may not be declining but I find no reason why brands would move away from TV advertising that easily. The internet hasn't yet established any immersive equivalent of traditional media ads. Irrespective of how loathsome they might be, they work. I doubt if a distracting banner ad can be as influential as the one you see on the TV. My TV viewing time is absolutely zero and personally, it has created an interesting dynamic in terms of brand recognition. As I walk into any supermarket store, I can barely recall any ads of products I see displayed. 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.

yAnonymous 9y ago

TV? No. 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.

zzalpha 9y ago
Well, this article at least provided data to back their assertions. Where's yours?

libertine 9y ago

Live TV is different from TV - just like LiveStreaming is different from Streaming ... let's just get that out of the way. 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.

zzalpha 9y ago
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.
- libertine 9y ago
  Usually the shifts come when some mediums stop being saturated - Apple uses outdoor media in specific areas for example (something traditional for high end products, like Rolex, Aston Martin, etc). 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.

FussyZeus 9y ago

The only thing I suspect that is dying (or should be) is packaging of TV channels. This day and age with the customization available for nearly every product you buy, being forced to spend hundreds of dollars to get the content you want, usually Sports content, is fucking absurd. * 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.

Arizhel 9y ago
I don't think it's absurd at all. In previous years, the sports fans were getting their addiction subsidized by other viewers by having ESPN packaged in with basic cable. Now with more and more people cutting the cord, their subsidy is evaporating, so they're having to pay closer to the true cost of getting that entertainment. If they don't like it, no one's forcing them to stay subscribed to cable TV.
- FussyZeus 9y ago
  Well yeah and no one forces you to get broadband Internet either, the fact that for most people there's only one option that's often insanely overpriced is the issue.
  - Arizhel 9y ago
    That's a poor analogy. No one forces you to hire an artist to create a commissioned artwork for you, but that doesn't mean that anyone actually needs to do that, and in fact, very few people hire artists on commission, because it's purely a luxury. Similarly, no one forces you to buy a Rolls-Royce, and whining that there's only one (insanely overpriced) Rolls Royce dealer in town isn't going to generate much sympathy, because again it's purely a luxury. 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.

jksmith 9y ago

Feel good piece. When you see consolidation as orchestrated by Tribune and Sinclair, that's a natural step in the evolution of any dinosaur business that is declining. In the immortal words of Danny Devito in the movie "Other People's Money," "Increasing share of a shrinking market. Down the tubes."

empath75 9y ago

Tv isn't dying, it's dead. The only people who watch a lot of live tv are over 50. They aren't going to live forever.

RmDen 9y ago
live tv is still needed if you want to watch good quality sport broadcasts. UEFA Champions League semifinals tomorrow and the day after will be watched by a whole lot of people under the age of 50. The streams are usually behind and of inferior quality.. Same is true for EPL and La Liga games
tzs 9y ago
A look at the ratings for a current top show (Big Bang Theory) shows that about 2/3 of its viewers are in the 18-49 group. 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-watching-less-tv-24817/ http://www.marketingcharts.com/television/are-young-people-w...
- tdb7893 9y ago
  18-49 is a huge range. I know people in their 30s and 40s with cable but no one in their 20s. I'm sure some people do but I would be surprised if it wasn't declining
dhimes 9y ago
The only people who watch a lot of live tv are over 50. But we're not dead :P

Eridrus 9y ago

The data this article points to is quite surprising. Video on Demand is only 1.1% of TV viewing and 85% of households watch Live TV. 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?

xbmcuser 9y ago

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.

NOSHSHNACKERS 9y ago

my wife and I dont "watch tv" and I dont have a facebook account but we watch a lot of tv shows on hulu netflix and text and use signal with family and friends. We are wierdos..

exelius 9y ago

I work in this industry, and let me assure you: TV is most definitely dying. Or rather, the traditional business model where you subscribe to a huge bundle for pay TV is dying. That's a good thing. 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.

ghaff 9y ago
>I mean, we still have land lines a good 2 decades after cell phones made them obsolete... 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.
davidgerard 9y ago
I used to be in telly too. We knew last decade that YouTube would soon be a better television than television, and right now it's true. (YouTube, iPlayer, whatever.) I still (proudly) pay my TV license, but all our BBC is over the net; I haven't owned a physical TV for eight or so years. 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-billion-olympics-bet-stumbles-thanks-to-millennials 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.

metaphorm 9y ago

this article seemed woefully bereft of age-breakdowns on the data. a whole lot of averaged out statistics with no drill down. what happens if your project out 10 years from now when there are half as many baby-boomers still alive as there are today?