Viewers Rarely Drawn to Live TV, Yet Upfronts Still Booking Ad Revenue

  • David Carr of The New York Times observes how his own family uses TV, noting a dramatic downturn in the amount of time spent with live broadcasting.
  • He cites TV-related apps (especially for sports), Netflix, Hulu Plus and Apple TV as resources his family uses regularly.
  • “My 15-year-old has a television in her room, but it’s not even on the cable-broadcast grid; it is wired instead to a Web-enabled Wii,” explains Carr. “Like the laptop and smartphone that she never seems to be without, the television is just one more Web-enabled portal for content she controls.”
  • Live TV “seems very last century,” he writes. In fact, live ratings for network programs have declined for 14 consecutive quarters. In contrast, DVRs and video on demand each exist in nearly half of American homes. And online viewing with Netflix, Hulu and others has increased more than 46 percent over the last year.
  • “Outside of the professional football season or some breaking national news event, the television at our house has become uncoupled from the commercial-driven environment that drives the broadcast and cable business,” writes Carr. “We haven’t cut the cord so much as kinked it in a way that commercials rarely sneak through.”
  • Still, the big four broadcast networks and the CW will book some $9 billion in advertising revenue while the cable networks take in more than $9.6 billion during the upfronts. In spite of losing viewers, TV remains the mass medium of choice for advertisers.

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