TV Viewers' Average Age Hits 50

Ant writes "Variety reports on a recent study that says TV viewership's median age is outside the 18-49 years demographic: "The broadcast networks have grown older than ever — if they were a person, they wouldn't even be a part of TV's target demo anymore." These totals exclude DVR users, and apparently the oldest since they started tracking it. Of course you know what the means ... TV is for old people! The internet has confirmed it.

Comments

"The internet has confirmed it"

[Aussenseiter]

Confirmed it? More like caused it.

Re:"The internet has confirmed it"

[dgatwood]

Well, it's not just that. The Internet has helped, sure, but the biggest problem the networks face is declining viewership as cable channels do better and better jobs at hitting more specific niches. You have channels for everything from sci-fi to home improvement. The Internet merely takes that one step farther and creates channels for everything from nude archery to watching people's feet as they walk past aisles of clothing at J.C. Penney.

The point is that as the availability of options increases, the interest in individual options decreases, and younger viewers are far more likely to find those new options and take advantage of them than older viewers simply because they are more connected with other people. You hear about things on TV, the radio, email, around work, etc. Retired people have much more limited ways to find out about these things, and thus are much less likely to end up watching the Smurfs With Green Moustaches Drawn On By Monkeys In Tutus Hour. Therefore, the older demographic will be much slower to transition away from legacy technologies like broadcast TV and towards more niche-oriented content like cable channels, towards more on-demand technologies like iTunes, and towards more peer-generated services like YouTube.

I predicted the death of broadcast TV back in 1995. IIRC, I gave it 10-15 years. It may take a little longer, but I suspect I was a lot closer than the folks who read my essay suspected....

Re:"The internet has confirmed it"

[markov_chain]

I'm impressed with what the big broadcasters did with Hulu.com. Shows stream with no strings attached, and the ads are extremely short and unintrusive.

Plenty of nerds boast about cutting ads out, but the sad truth is that they pay for the content. It's nice to see an ad scheme subtle enough not to cause people to subvert it.

Re:"The internet has confirmed it"

[techno-vampire]

Also, the OMFG crowd didn't come about until sometime in the mid 90s.

Trust me, the kids of the 90s didn't invent that type of person. They just gave them their own name. You'll find people like that in every generation. What else do you think bobby-soxers or teenyboppers were?

Re:"The internet has confirmed it"

[Kristoph]

Netcraft says the daily heroic killed TV (also relationships, pets, and occasionally a small child).

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Re:"The internet has confirmed it"

[DogDude]

Keep in mind that people who pay to watch TV are also paying to watch advertising. I can't really imagine why somebody would want to do that.

Re:"The internet has confirmed it"

[RiotingPacifist]

I pay so I can skip the ads

I torrent so I don't have to

Top heavy population

[MacDork]

Americans are living longer and having fewer kids. Surprised?

Re:Top heavy population

[LostCluster]

Not to mention, retired people don't like to pay for excessive things like extra TV signals. They'll take the channels they can get via rabbit ears and read the newspaper.

Re:Top heavy population

[morgan_greywolf]

Not to mention, retired people don't like to pay for excessive things like extra TV signals. They'll take the channels they can get via rabbit ears and read the newspaper.

You do realize that current 50-somethings and 60-something aren't in that category, right? In the past, older people didn't pay excessive things because they grew up with the Great Depression and World War II, and were taught not to be wasteful.

The 50 and 60 somethings of today are Baby Boomers -- the so-called "me" generation. Most of them are so self-absorbed, that they can't imagine a world without luxuries they've taken for granted for many years, including cable TV and, at least for some, the Internet.

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Re:Top heavy population

[Your.Master]

Are you one of these boomers? Considering these things non-luxury is a bit of a stretch (especially online dating).

So as my parents go off into the good night...

[linzeal]

We will be seeing the advent of decentralized media taking over. I myself use a cable companies DVR to watch some shows like the Venture Brothers and sometimes the Daily show. Honestly though with the lack of interaction for the television I find myself boring of it within an hour or so. I cannot stand news television that they sometimes leave on at the bar I frequent down from where I work. For one I have carefully made sure that my RSS feeds exclude any mention of sports, celebrity gossip or the like as I do not consider them news.

I usually get up in the morning and read news.google.com first to see if the world has blown up and than peruse the RSS feeds from Eureka Alerts before downloading my custom top 50 stories unto my Sony Ebook Reader which I recently upgraded to from my old Palm M500. On the light rail I read the news like people used to read newspapers, completely on most days unless a slew of unwanted stories is downloaded. I find reading things that may not interest me at first can become a pretty enlightening experience and I am now as of a few months ago becoming more familiar with new economic movements such as crowdsourcing and Wikinomics.

Where did the content go?

[LostCluster]

Anybody notice something missing from the broadcast (over-the-air) channels from the last few years?

10-20 years ago... you would find nearly half of your local NBA, MLB, and NHL games on broadcast, and as time went on the other half (mostly home games) would show up on HBO-like pay cable. Now, nearly all the games not on national TV are found on one basic cable network at least partly owned by the team. And cable bills went up a few dollars a month when that network moved from pay to basic status or got started in the first place.

News coverage has been cut back too. The idea of having a studio in every country we had friendly relations with has gone by the wayside. Longform presantations of things like the political conventions have been shifted to basic cable networks.

There used to just be "The People's Court" for court shows. Now there's enough syndicated judge-personality shows on broadcast to fill an entire daytime lineup. Cheapest to produce wins, the only thing cheaper is Jerry Springer and his knockoffs.

It's said what our seniors are getting for television signals these days, no wonder why those of us that can afford it get cable or DBS.

Re:Excellent!

[tomhudson]

... because everyone knows TV is for old people and Koreans.

Actually, I read the article, and I've only seen one of the shows they talk about - Scrubs ... and even that, I haven't watched in a year.

What I found interesting was that Faux News has the oldest viewership - that explains John McCain, in a weird sort of way. they're just serving up material for their target demographic - the Polygrip set.

hope beyond hope

[fermion]

We keep hoping for shows like I Love Lucy, Charlies Angles, and BJ and the Bear. We keep hoping for another powerful women, not child girl, like Erin Grey. Young whipper snappers never saw TV when it was fresh and full of possibilities, after the slate of scripted network time wasting, and before the decline to unscripted networked time wasting. When the ideas were recycled from radio, not cannibalized from itself. It is no wonder that a generation raised on Seinfield and Friends would have no love for the one eyed beast. How could even Buffy engender the mythic loyalty of Bewitched.

TV probably died in the year 2001. It is to be expected that, just like radio, it will hang on with it's one bony hand until it relegated to the backwoods of cheap motel rooms, where internet acess is not available.

Re:We 'retired people' are on the web too.

[markov_chain]

I dunno, have you compared the encoding quality of HDTV OTA channels vs. cable lately?