Skip to main content

TV To Die Soon. Again.


Okay, this time they really mean it. TV is about to die.

Don't believe me? It's right here in Ad Age in black and white, another fucking article entitled "TV May Actually Die Soon." Can you believe this?

I'm just wondering how many Ad Age stories there have been over the past 15 years about TV dying?

Will  they ever figure out that regardless of what the marketing and media geniuses have to say, people like television. How fucking difficult is that to understand?

As we all know, online viewing of video is "killing" traditional TV. "Nobody" watches live TV anymore. Everybody is watching video online.

That's what we've all learned from going to conferences and listening to media, marketing and digital geniuses speak. It's what we read in the trades and in the press every day.

Only problem is, it's all bullshit.

A new study released by comScore shows that of households with both traditional TV and OTT (video delivered over the internet) for every hour spent with online video people spend about 5 1/2 hours with traditional TV.

Even the top 20% of online video users spend twice as much time with traditional TV.

The bottom 50% of online video streamers, watch 98% of their video on traditional TV.

Despite the fact that Netflix has almost as many subscribers as all cable TV companies combined, and more households have Netflix than a DVR, comScore says,  
"Traditional rules the roost in terms of time spent, as OTT continues to act more as supplemental viewing..."
Then there's this. A report by Pivotal Research Group last week said,  
"...despite the significant growth in access to SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand, e.g., Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu) services over the past few years, consumption of traditional TV programming has not been affected to the degree that many might expect...any expectations around the 'death of TV' because of SVOD services are likely overstated."
Meanwhile, viewership of national news programming is surging. Once again, according to Pivotal,
"YTD viewing of all news-related programming on national media properties is now +12%."
 Last week it was up 23%.

As I speculated last year, what's likely to happen is that the internet media companies who don't call themselves media companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple) who have all the money in the world, are likely over time to buy up TV properties. This is starting to raise its head in the recent Amazon-NFL $50 million football deal.

I'm afraid we're all going to be dead long before TV is.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Simple-Minded Guide To Marketing Communication

We marketing people have a dreadful habit of taking the obvious and making it incomprehensible. So today I would like to go against the grain and take the obvious and make it more obvious. If you are someone who has to make decisions about how to spend marketing dollars, here are some principles I believe in for simplifying and clarifying your thinking. The first thing we have to understand about marketing communication is that there are no absolutes. There are just likelihoods and probabilities. When making communication decisions, our job is to assess likelihoods and probabilities. In other words, precision guessing . We need to reckon which of the many alternatives we are faced with has the highest probability of producing the result we are looking for with the budget we have. A second principle is to understand the limits of what we do. We don't have as much power to create business greatness as we think we do. There are too many important aspects of business success that a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Technology, Progress, And Irresponsible Stupidity

The world does not move in straight lines. We expect things to go one way, but they unexpectedly go another. In 2000, when the Prius was introduced, most commentators saw a big future for hybrid vehicles. In 2009, a study by JPMorgan confidently asserted " 20% of all vehicles sold in U.S. to be hybrids by 2020. " In 2010, Consumer Reports said " 39 percent are considering buying a hybrid or plug-in for their next car. " And yet, as of April 2016, hybrid cars represented less than 2% of car sales in the US. Their share of market has dropped by 50% since 2013. A car dealer I know told me "we can't give 'em away." If you think the reason for this is the popularity of electric vehicles, think again. Electric vehicles represent less than 1% of car sales in the US. In the early 1990's the Soviet Union collapsed. We thought "liberal democracy" had become triumphant and would be the model for world governance. Today "liberal democracy...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Ad Industry Destroys Brand Value

The advertising industry prides itself on being brand builders. Building successful brands is supposed to be the essence of what we do. But in recent years the ad industry has been guilty of cheapening some of the most important brands it controls -- its own. I am going to be picking on WPP because it is the biggest offender. But to some degree the same can probably be said about each of the major holding companies. WPP is the owner of some of the most famous and worthy brands in the history of the ad business: JWT, Ogilvy, Y&R and Grey. It has been systematically dismantling the value in these brands. Today they are splinters of what they were. The holding companies have undermined their agencies from the top down and from the bottom up. What a holding company usually does is buy successful brands and manage them at arms length to, presumably, add value to shareholders. Examples of successful holding companies are Berkshire Hathaway and Procter & Gamble. Nobody buys a Berkshir...
Post a Comment
Read more