More Angst Over Declining Network TV Ratings

Posted on May 12, 2008

The Associated Press on the story of disappearing audiences for television shows. The writers' strike is long over, but things aren't rebounding.

"The strike had a number of impacts," said Alan Wurtzel, NBC Universal research chief, "but as with everything it's never very clear or direct or black and white." ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC had nearly 9 percent fewer viewers in April and May so far than during the same period a year ago, according to Nielsen Media Research.
Yet viewership declines are sadly typical for the big networks. Take the same period a year earlier, and the drop was more than 5 percent over 2006. People didn't watch less TV while the strike was on, they just watched cable more, said Steve Sternberg, an analyst for Magna Global. Shows with ongoing stories seemed to lose the most momentum from the strike; ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" on May 1 had its smallest audience since moving to Thursday night. Decisions by NBC to keep "Heroes" for next fall and Fox to delay "24" until next season may prove prescient, unless people forget about the characters altogether.
Comedies were hurt least by the strike. CBS was so buoyed by the performance of their Monday night comedies that the network is considering adding comedies on another night. CBS' rack of procedural dramas had done relatively well, at least until a week ago: "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" had its second least-watched episode for a Thursday original, and "CSI: Miami" hit a series low for an original.
"There's no question that it could have been a lot worse," said David Poltrack, CBS' top researcher. CBS' strategy was to make as many new episodes of existing shows as possible until the season ends later this month so people got back in the habit of watching again. The explosive growth of digital video recorders, now available in 25 million homes, means more people are setting their own schedules.

We think that viewership is actually up, not down. It's just that people aren't watching network tv at the time that the shows are first broadcast. They are setting their TIVOs, downloading episodes off of iTunes and watching cable. Until the ratings systems evolve to track the actual habits of viewers, there will continue to be these doom and gloom stories.

The reality is that people love their tv shows, but they want to watch them on their own schedules with less commercial interruptions. With current technolgies, there is no excuse for the networks not to adapt to these new viewing habits. Adapt or die, we say.