An essential part of my posts on “StribTV” is that the disintegration of the basic business model for newspapers is a harbinger of a similar breakdown of TV news. Once any source of news is available on the same screen via the same clicker as KARE and WCCO whatever “exclusiveness” those business can claim starts to melt off pretty quickly.
And it has begun.
Witness the ratings just released for the May sweeps — Nielsen’s “all important” ratings period — since the May numbers have an out-sized effect on setting ad rates for next fall’s Christmas buying season.
Every station in the Twin Cities market, with the exception of Fox 9’s 10 pm news, saw erosion in audience share (the percentage of viewers out of all local TVs in use) compared with May of 2006. KARE lost 14%, WCCO lost 15%. KSTP stayed even in share, but its ratings (percentage of viewers from all possible TVs) declined 6% over the past year.
The same trend is seen nationally, with steep dips in viewing not only of network news, but also for previously monolithic entertainment programming like “American Idol”, “CSI” and “Lost” (which, in my opinion, rallied quite nicely in dramatic terms). The Hollywood Reporter provides an analysis here.
For those of you not quite interested enough to click through, the gist is that we have arrived at that moment in the future when time-shifting by TiVo and other digital video recorders has met the video explosion on the internet with the result being a serious erosion in the way Americans’ make “appointments” with network and cable television.
Put another way, the great shift has already begun and TV is losing viewers at least as fast as newspapers are losing readers.
Jeanine Socha is a reliable TV audience analyst having tracked ratings for WCCO-TV for years before shifting across town to Comcast cable.
Her look into how what I’ll sloppily refer to as the “TiVo revolution” (the TiVo company would kill to be able to corner the market on digital recording), effects local news tells her that, “most network programming, shows like “American Idol”, “CSI”, are watched within one hour of when they were recorded, 75% within one day and 90% within two days.”
The “within one hour” part hits late local news particularly hard, and, if I’m following her correctly, there is no indication of any significant interest in TiVo-ing the local news.
Net effect? Significantly fewer viewers for KARE, WCCO, KSTP, etc.
There is some migration going on, with more viewers shifting over to cable programming (“The Daily Show” increased slightly from a 1.4 to a 1.6 share), but far more significantly, viewers have begun to use technology to rearrange their TV watching schedules to their convenience and appear to be making a value judgment on creating “special time” for the local news.
Here are the actual numbers for May ’07 vs. May ’06
WCCO…………..11.5/22…………14.3/26
KARE…………..9.5/18………….11.5/21
KSTP…………..6.4/12…………..6.8/12
KMSP…………..2.8/8……………2.8/5
Another interesting bit, also from the Hollywood Reporter, is this list of ratings for every primetime show the networks ran during the just wrapped ’06-’07 season.
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