Will viewership return to pre-strike levels?
Cory Bergman February 13th, 2008
Not likely, says this LA Times story. January was a record month for online video, according to Comscore numbers. YouTube traffic grew 12 percent from November to December. Online game playing and social networking surged. Even DVD sales, which had been in a slow decline, increased for the month. “Since the 1980s, every time viewers leave the broadcast networks for a strike, summer reruns or any other cause, they never return in the same numbers, and over the years that gradual erosion has become enormously significant,” said Jeffrey Cole, director of USC’s Center for the Digital Future.
3 Comments Add your own
1. Bill Gorman | February 13th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Household hours of television / day is fairly flat, after having risen until the last year or two.
It’s the viewership of the big broadcast networks that has been inexorably falling for the last 25 years or so.
All that viewing has been going to cable.
The strike will likely accelerate it a bit, but it would have kept falling regardless.
2. Tim | February 14th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Downloadable and streaming video on the Net is Tivo without the monthly fee. Pick the content you want to watch, watch it when you want.
The strike hasn’t changed that, it’s just made it more likely for more people to discover that fact.
As more people adopt cable and DSL connections, more will move away from broadcast as their content source.
This, unfortunately, doesn’t bode well for the deal the writers just struck: sooner or later the big networks will introduce Internet-only shows, which I believe under the terms I’ve heard (note, I have not read the agreement) will not pay the writers nearly as much.
3. coffee | February 17th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Although we’ll have mostly-sucky television for the next year, the jarring break in the production grind (and lets not forget, another one quite possibly coming with SAG) seems to have given the networks an opportunity to break out of an obviously wasteful pilot production/upfront cycle. I suspect we’ll end up with better-budgeted, shorter-seasoned, pre-plotted arc television - much like cable network shows. I like this idea. Or we could get…..supersized seasons of existing show properties. Silly network rabbit.
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