Linear TV falls to new lows in USA
Linear TV usage drop below 50% for the first time in the USA, while Streaming hits new highs.
- Published by David Knox
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- Filed under News
Reports in the US are citing new lows for linear television.
According to Variety, broadcast and cable TV dropped to a new low in July 2023 in terms of total share among US viewers.
That saw linear TV usage drop below 50% for the first time while YouTube and Netflix accounted for a record 38.7% of total US TV usage.
On a year-over-year basis, broadcast viewing was down 5.4% (-1.5 points), and cable viewing was down 12.5% (-4.8 points).
Meanwhile in Ireland the RTE board and management are concerned at a drop in licence fee revenue.
There was a 37% drop in the number of TV licence fee payments in the first week of August compared to the same week last year. Approximately 85% of revenue from TV licence fees goes to RTE to carry out its public service broadcasting commitments.
Last month the Irish was accused of running a slush fund amid undeclared payments being made to former presenter, Ryan Tubridy, described as “undoubtedly the darkest period in RTE’s history” by chairwoman of the organisation’s board, Siún Nà Raghallaigh.
Members of staff from RTÉ took part in protests at the broadcaster’s headquarters in Dublin following revelations around the broadcaster’s finances.
11 Responses
It’s changes in viewing habits because people no longer sit around the lounge room TV that is driving the changes. Youtube is the cat and people falling down videos that people watch on the bus. Cable is still large because a lot of homes in US don’t have aerials, and they carry sport, movies, local news, talk shows and cooking. Cable is going down like the Titanic and FTA is trying to pick up their share with 4k broadcasts of sport. Netflix, Disney and Amazon are what people watch when they want to sit down and concentrate on a good drama or movie. The other category includes Network catch-ups. It used to go on Hulu, but now that it is owned by Disney+ a lot goes up on Peacock, or Paramount+ but some are available on their websites.
Doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Their latest brainfart with FTA terrestrial is to encrypt it. Yes, that’s right with ATSC3 they can encrypt the transmissions and several broadcasters already are and not just for 4K broadcasts either. All the usual excuses are raised to justify it of course but the USA public isn’t stupid enough to fall for it and continue to abandon broadcast TV in general and that includes cable and satellite delivery.
Recall that episode of Star Trek Voyager that quipped broadcast TV was an entertainment that didn’t make it much past early 21st century?
I wrote ‘licence,’ but my grammar checker is American.
The license fee system is dated, and viewers no longer like paying it. Some of the complaints are that the quality of programming isn’t as good as it used to be, and there’s a reluctance to pay for perceived bias in news broadcasting.
Therefore, it might be time to eliminate the fee and find an alternative way of funding. One possibility is through taxes or government funding, similar to the approach used for public broadcasting in Australia.
Countries without license fees do tend to have fewer channels, and in my opinion, the quality of content is still not as good as in countries with TV license fees, despite the reasons for not wanting to pay those fees.
There’s also a notion that TV may be a human right, and that people without access to TV, including children, could be marginalised from society and culture by missing out.
Two articles for the price of one. Surprised YouTube is included in the streaming figures though – that bumps it up a bit.
Yep and that is only part of YouTube, they have YouTube TV+ which is called an vMVPD which includes DIRECTV NOW, Hulu Live, FuboTV, Sling TV and others which they call skinny bungles that have what traditional Cable have plus some broadcast affiliates (FOX, ABC etc). Those are included in Cable Ratings and considered to not be cord cutters just people after a better deal, basically where it is say 74 million Cable Households in the US, around 15 million of those are the vMVPD’s and the rest traditional Cable.
There’s a limit to the on-screen garbage viewers will tolerate. Pop-ups that now cover the screen in gaudy colours, two or three repetitious promos in every break. Commercial breaks of 20+ mins per hour, programs starting at any old time overlapping other channels (but tomorrow night they will overlap your program).
The article was about US TV which has always been worse than ours for the sins you mentioned-also has had cable pay TV much longer than here.
Their linear TV is woeful and filled with pharmaceutical advertising.
Where the disclaimers at the end run longer than the actual advertising.
Not really – they start their programmes on the hour, keep them to the hour (or if longer scheduled correctly) and the pop-up in programme ads are gone within a few seconds of each break. They treat their content and viewers with much more respect and don’t build the entire week around one show, with the networks biggest shows generally not scheduled all at the same time.