Facebook Trending and The Future of Work
A couple of weeks ago this Tweet from Wall Street Journal technology columnist Christopher Mims caught my eye:
I bet kids consume like 50% of the content on Netflix.
It caught my attention because it caused a host of ideas in my head about the future of television to jell. Namely, in all the talk in the industry these days of cord-cutters, and binge viewing, and what ratings Netflix generates, there is still the presumption that the current broadcast model will endure. Sure, cable systems may unbundle a bit and offer a la carte channel choices, but industry thinking is that, by and large, the system will prevail. This idea was highlighted by a television executive at the January 2016 Television Critics Association press tour. Alan Wurtzel, an NBC executive, stated that viewers will come back to network television after bingeing on streaming shows. In a presentation on Netflix viewing numbers, Wurtzel said,
“The reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated. I don’t believe there’s enough stuff on Netflix that is broad enough and consistent enough to affect us in a meaningful way on a consistent basis.”
Fair enough. He’s a network exec and he’s going to bet on his own horse. What he is missing though is the colts, namely: kids. Teens, as one expects, are already abandoning television for other screens. According to this survey, between 2011 and 2015, traditional television viewing time by 18-24-year-olds has fallen off 35%. And these are viewers who were nominally raised on traditional TV, not streaming. Which brings us back to kids and Mims’ tweet.
NBC exec Wurtzel is confident that viewers will come back to traditional broadcast/cable television, but is the industry prepared for viewers who never started there in the first place? Speaking anecdotally, my 6 year-old watches all of her “television” on streaming services, either via iPad apps or streaming apps on the actual television. And—again anecdotally—this seems to be the norm among most kids her age. At the doctors’ office the other day, the doctor encouraged her to get up and move around during commercials and my daughter just gave her a blank look until the doctor amended her statement and said, “While you are waiting for the next episode to start.”
Sure, networks still have content that kids want to watch, but the kids are patient enough to wait until it streams on a service. And while they are waiting for it to show up as an option, they will watch the episodes of some other show for the third or fourth time. These viewers are not “coming back” because they were never there in the first place.
Not everyone has their head in the sand about this. The recent HBO deal for “Sesame Street” indicates that HBO realizes the changes afoot and the importance of getting these new viewers early.
Current execs may believe that there are still reasons for viewers to return, such as live events like sports playoffs, the Super Bowl, the soccer World Cup, or the Olympics. But over the past 15 years these live events have moved from free broadcast TV to cable stations that you need to pay for. Given the desire of owners and organizers of these events to maximize profits, it’s not to far-fetched to think that within 20 years one or more of these will be sold to an Internet streaming service and not a broadcast network. (And I say 20 years to be believable, but I think it will be sooner than that.)
Rather than waiting for viewers to come back, television executives need to focus on how to capture today’s six-year-olds. The phrase that should haunt them is not “cord-cutter” but my daughter’s morning question, “Can you get the iPad down, please?”
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Looking at the long-term of [something something something].
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