It’s tempting, in the era of torrents, and the massive army of local ghost subscribers to Netflix, and the billion dollar acquisition of live play game streamer Twitch, to imagine that the days of network TV are behind us. But they’re not. The old, legacy terrestrial broadcasters can still aggregate mega audiences that advertisers find impossible to forego.
For most viewers, TV is still a passively received experience, not a technical challenge to be tackled like a climb up the north face of the Eiger - with a wet work team from the Copyright Agency in hot pursuit. Most viewers really are just couch potatoes, in spite of the very worst efforts of the networks to push them into actively taking control of their media consumption.
Can it last? There’s a clear demographic shift underway, a generational rejection of the old model. Just as the readership of newspapers is ageing and shrinking, so too the viewer profiles for Seven, Nine and Ten. (The ABC’s audience probably can’t get any older until workable cryogenic technologies come on line).
Why then, do the networks insist on placing the experience of watching them at the extreme edges of the frustrating/enraging spectrum? Their inability to run a show on time is not incompetence. It’s a business model. A flawed and self destructive model to be sure, but one all of the commercial broadcasters have embraced. Scheduling is less an unpredictable clusterfuck than a hostile affront to human decency. And advertising… oh, god, advertising.
Not content with cluttering the screen itself during showtime, Nine and Seven were lobbying recently to expand the 13 minutes of ‘non programming’ material they can air between 6pm and midnight to 20 minutes. And that twenty minutes would not include any time devoted to station IDs and self promotional whoring. With programmers able to ‘average’ the ‘non program’ content it’s not beyond imagining to contemplate a time when some marketing genius actually decides to show more advertising than actual programming during a peak event.
Do they hate us that much? Are they so lethally stupid? Do they really imagine they can survive into the medium term, let alone the long term, by further alienating and atomising their audience. While millions of viewers will grumble and put up with it, there’s only so much money you can make off that demographic. The ad pool for funeral plans and colostomy bags is finite.
Meantime, what’s happening with the rest of the audience?
Well, increasingly they’re not there any more. They’ve deserted the networks for Netflix and iTunes and GooglePlay and Amazon Prime. And that’s if they’re dreadfully old fashioned types who want to pay for their content. Or even more old fashioned types who care about narrative. Twitch didn’t sell out for a lazy billion because Jeff Bezos is an idiot. He may be a genius – an evil genius, to be sure, but you can’t deny him his genius merit badge. The most important small screen stars of the much sought after AB demographic aren’t even on TV anymore. They’re YouTube legends, and the sort of stories they tell are a thousand miles removed from Ramsay Street.
The Ten Network opposed the increase and good for them. But it almost certainly had less to do with a humane interest in the sanity of their dwindling viewer numbers, and more to do with… well… their dwindling viewer numbers. They’re horribly exposed, much further out on the wrong part of the evolutionary curve in media forms. They simply can’t afford to piss people off any more.
Nine and Seven obviously think they can. For now.