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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

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.
- exelius 9y ago
  > 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.

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.

exelius 9y ago
> 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.