By Shirish Nadkarni
Is broadcast television dying?
“Broadcast television is not dead, but it is evolving rapidly and there is a need to transform to avoid becoming irrelevant,” says Rodney Thompson of The Weather Company, an IBM subsidiary.
He explains, “Transforming basically means shifting from serving a TV audience to serving audiences no matter where they are. In a sentence, moving from being a TV broadcaster to an overall broadcaster.
“With the rapid audience shift from television to digital, staying relevant in broadcast media is challenging — but necessary for long-term viability.”
According to the market research agency eMarketer, TV viewing time in 2022 and 2023 will continue to decline. In 2021, the average viewing time of TV was 3 hours and 17 minutes, while it is estimated to backslide to about 2 hours and 51 minutes in 2023.
It must be conceded that 2020 was an anomaly of a year for TV, since people the world over spent more time watching TV news about the pandemic and US elections, thus increasing the amount of time spent watching TV for the first time since 2012.
eMarketer maintains that this trend will reverse as we move forward, where the average adult in the US will spend 15 minutes less on the medium in 2022, and a further 11 minutes less in 2023.
While 2020 was a great year for broadcast, there were also many “cord-cutter households” (households cutting off pay-TV), making the shift toward mobile more important than ever. In 2020 alone, it was estimated that over 6 million US households cut the pay-TV cord. A similar trend was apparent in the Asia-Pacific region.
According to MarketingCharts, data from Nielsen shows that TV households all over the world were spending more time streaming than they were watching broadcast TV. Their data showed that streaming accounted for 26% of the time spent daily with TV, edging past broadcast TV, which accounted for 25% of the total time spent per day.
Younger generations are watching significantly more TV in online forms, such as mobile streaming apps, instead of on a physical television set.
According to Nielsen, the majority of millennials get their news from both TV and digital sources. However, 36% get news only from digital sources, while only 8% get their news from TV alone.
Failing to connect with audiences online could have negative consequences for broadcasters looking to expand their reach.
With streaming and live streaming of content being on the rise, many elite studios are increasing their budgets for TV shows to produce high quality content. Since studios now have many platforms to generate revenues, they are willing to invest in producing high quality content.
For example, Netflix invested about £100million on the TV series The Crown. Thus, the demand for quality content and the availability of multiple VoD (video on demand) platforms, mobile applications and web portals to generate revenues have encouraged studios to allocate bigger budgets to produce compelling TV shows.
“Many TV stations are expanding their news coverage on OTT (over the top) delivery systems like AppleTV and Roku,” says Tim Heller of HellerWeather. “This creates a big opportunity for local TV stations and broadcast meteorologists.
“Just as weather is the reason people still watch local news, it can be one of the reasons people constantly check a TV station’s streaming app.”
The broadcast media industry is changing at a rapid pace. With so much weather and news available to everyone at their fingertips, the focus will likely shift to the quality and timeliness of the information.
“The most successful media outlets will be those who have the ability to deliver accurate, local and up-to-the-minute updates,” says Terry Eliasen of WBZ/CBS Boston. “For instance, weather forecasts that are as much as a few hours old and for areas too broad will likely no longer be relevant. New innovative ways to disseminate information, like CBSN, a 24-hour streaming news service, will become much more valuable.”
A trend that will separate relevant broadcasters from fading ones as the business continues to quickly evolve – making connections for their users and making connections with their users.
“Broadcasters are pumping out more content in both volume and variety, but some have more success than others at having it catch on,” says KCRG’s Justin Gehrts. “It’s not that what the winners are producing is necessarily better than the others. There are a dizzying number of dots to connect in this era of information overload.
“Broadcasters tend to be concerned with delivering the facts perfectly, but stop short of connecting the dots, leaving users wondering, ‘So what?’
“A growing number of broadcasters are distilling weather information into answering questions such as ‘How much will I have to run my air conditioner in the next few days?’ or ‘Will the mosquitoes be bad this weekend?’ or ‘How hard will it be to shovel my driveway in the morning?’
“That shows an understanding of users’ practical needs, which is where broadcasters must go to stay relevant in users’ daily lives.
“Technology that facilitates that relationship between users and broadcasters/talent so that it can scale will be necessary in the coming months and years.”
There is a convergence in new technologies that will force broadcasters to transform themselves. There will be greater use of augmented intelligence with artificially layered automation, as also new delivery technology like ATSC 3.0 and 5G wireless networks which have higher-capacity data delivery. Data with additional IoT (Internet of Things) data will further boost accuracy.
Broadcasters will also have to work into their commercial equations, increasingly powerful consumer smartphones, whose GPU (graphics processing unit) compute cycle is close to the GPU power required to do real-time rendering.
Any one of the above technology shifts represents big changes for broadcasters, but what is even more worrisome is the fact that all these changes are converging at the same time.
Big technology shifts in television used to come in increments of every five to seven years. These big changes will be coming every six to nine months!
Broadcasters need to adapt to these changes to stay relevant. Identifying the key changes and emerging trends in broadcasting will help those in the industry determine how to adjust their media strategies, what tactics will most likely lead to success and how to better prepare for the future.
If you are attending NAB 2022, do not miss the opportunity to listen to Curtis LeGeyt, the President and CEO of NAB, in his first ever state-of-the-broadcast-industry vision of the association’s role in strengthening the future of the broadcasting industry and address the issues impacting radio and television stations.
Question: Will the TV box in the living room become a white elephant in time to come … by 2030?
Do send your prediction to maven@editecintl.com