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YouTube, Gaming and Social Networking Busting TV's Chops
splitenz writes "A TV executive told a major Australian broadband conference that television audiences are slipping away into social media, gaming and other online subscription spaces. YouTube and online gaming is taking the traditional TV audience online and TV is struggling to fight back."
If there was some generational effect going on (the article does note that the elderly watch more than the average) it would be somewhat mitigated by the Economist's finding that
US numbers show a similar trend -
Those who are interested should check out the American Time Use Survey - it has some rather interesting content (for instance: 15 to 19 read for an average of 5 minutes per weekend day while spending 1.0 hour playing games or using a computer for leisure. )
Taking the two pieces together it would seem we're watching more TV in general, and when we're online we have the TV on anyway. Hardly seems worth pounding the drums of the apocalypse over.
People aren't happy with passive entertainment like they once were. They want to be engaged.
Some good TV shows can do that, but most of them do not.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
If they actually WERE serious about competing, they would make TV easy to watch on the viewer's terms. But they fight every attempt of that happening by continuously putting blocks between the customer and the shows.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Personally, I am going to blame the messenger, i.e. Nielsen. Shows that trend towards tech savvy types will always struggle and die if the only emphasis is going to be on boxes that measure appointment viewing. I don’t have a box, so I don’t matter. If I don’t matter, why subject myself to appointment viewing commercials ALONG with the obvious product placement?
If modern HD TVs are are just another computer screen, what is in store for appointment viewing as we undergo generational attrition?
For me, modern television is going through the same death spiral that modern commercial music is going through. My music interests have gone entirely independent of the big music labels because of the crap they pull and produce. The more they dumb down, the less of my attention they get. Viewing numbers will distribute across the hundreds of channels of reality programming and the few die hards will congregate around the few bright spots of fictional storytelling while they last. (You should prepare for vastly smaller seasons of shows, like the British models.)
I don’t matter, so why even try to make it through these endless show hiatuses that kill anything serialized? Why endlessly pine and dread if the uncounted just don’t matter?
Screw off Nielsen. Take your appointment viewing system and burn in hell for killing too many of my loved ones. I for one am finding it too painful to play with your stacked deck.
Yes it is nice to get someone that has an open mind as to what the problems with TV are. I like watching TV shows, however I don't watch many anymore. I don't like shows coming out 6 months to a year later, I don't like time slots being moved around so much that its hard to record them without a Tivo-esque device (or with the 5 - 10 minute schedule drift many of the major channels employ). I don't like ads that blast the room with sound when they employ their volume shifting bastardry.
What I like is watching the shows when I want to watch them, scheduling them into my life rather than having to schedule my life around them. What all content providers have to get their head around is that these technologies are empowering users to live a social and interactive life their way and if you don't want to keep up with that or embrace it then there is going to be problems.
With you in spirit, but your statements are tinged with hyperbole. The major networks air more than 2 good shows a week, and more and more "cable channels" like AMC, USA, TNT, etc have begun airing some quality original programming. However, for every show like 30 Rock or The Closer, we get ten Real Worlds, Survivors, or Dancing with the Stars.
Premium channels have been booming with original content in recent years. Maybe it's just because I did not have access to them much before BT trackers and release groups got into them, but I think there are more original shows on HBO, Showtime, etc than there used to be. Sure, you had things like 1st and Ten, Dream On, and the Red Shoe Diaries on HBO and Showtime 15-25 years ago, but now you have so much more. A lot of great shows in recent times have come form these networks (Deadwood, Weeds, Dexter, The Sopranos), along with a great deal more entertaining ones (The Tudors, Rome, Secret Diary of a Call Girl (not original, I know)).
As someone else has stated, the real problem is that TV providers have made it an increasingly hostile environment to watch their content.
- More commercial time per hour. The average 1-hour show is under 44 minutes now.
- Channel identifier logos on constantly. In the beginning these were semi-transparent line-art, now they are colorful and often animated.
- Squashed and sped-up credit sequences. Sure, few people want to see them, but sometimes we do, and without commercial/news at 10 hype
- Pop-up in-show ads "New Episode of Dancing With the Stars NEXT" at the bottom of the screen, blocking this show
- Time-shifting to screw up DVR users
- Loudness tricks to make commercials seem louder than the show. Gotta crank up the movie because it's so quiet, then WHAM! "BUY ZEST SOAP!"
- Constant schedule changes
I gave up cable TV about 8-9 years ago. I was heavy into anime at the time, had just moved, so I went with internet and substantial DVD purchases (back when DVDs were still $30 each, though you could get them for ~33-50% off online). I found out I just did not need to veg out in front of TV shows I didn;t care about every evening. I read more books, was online more, had other things to do.
It was liberating. ^_^
I've built up so much character I have an alter-ego
And when they go into reruns part way through the season, or they stop broadcasting entirely for a couple of weeks or more and then come back on. And what is it with the short season lengths? TV seasons used to last 25 to 30 weeks. Now they're 12 weeks???? To say TV is getting more lame as time goes on is like saying Ci Lo is just chunky. Maybe if they provided something worth watching instead of 'reality tv' they wouldn't be so far behind. It's all for the shareholders.
Create something cheap to produce to maximize revenue for the shareholders, instead of worrying about good product for the customers and long term stability for the employees. Instead of win, win, win, it is win for a short time, get fucked, get fucked. And then eventually the customers get tired of the crap product and it is lose lose lose. End of story.
Over emphasize of the shareholders so the already overpaid CEO can get bigger bonuses for a short time then out the door with a gold parachute. Same bullshit that plagues the financial industry plagues every other industry in North America and Europe lately. Sure, the shareholders should get paid, but not to the exclusion of long term viability. Businesses like these have adopted the parasitic self-cannibalization strategy since around 1990.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.