The remarkable resilience of live TV
The linear TV schedule has shown incredible resilience in the face of relentless disruption – and we can learn a lot about the future of media in general if we could understand the reasons why, says David Brennan, Media Native.
I’ve suddenly realised that in more than three years’ worth of blogs for Mediatel, I’ve never directly addressed what is possibly the biggest single WTF? of the digital age; the remarkable resilience of the linear TV schedules.
As I addressed in my one and only book (have I not mentioned that before?), there are many reasons for the schedules’ continued domination of TV viewing – indeed, of all audio-visual entertainment consumption – which, in the face of increasingly ridiculous industry reporting based on wildly inaccurate evidence, need to be regularly repeated.
Until we begin to understand why the vast majority of TV viewers still prefer to watch programming live rather than scour the planner or browse the infinite on-demand options, we will continue to make the same mistakes every time a new replacement technology bobs into view.
Make no mistake about it; the linear broadcast schedules are still the preferred choice and command top position in the average viewer’s selection hierarchy. The ratings data from a wide variety of sources shows that live viewing continues to dominate (85%+ across Europe), followed by planner (c. 10-15%) and then on-demand (less than 5%).
New OTT entrants like Netflix are having an influence on total on-demand, but it has hardly been explosive.
Sceptics will point to the fact that live TV is ‘only’ 85%, when it used to be 100%, as evidence of TV’s decline; the figures over the past two decades will show that is 85% of a much bigger market (e.g. nowadays, much of the old DVD rental market is now migrated to ‘TV’ and all other forms of viewing have grown significantly) and that broadcast viewing levels reached record heights in every single European territory between 2012 and 2013. Commercial impacts have also been remarkably consistent, even as time-shifting has grown in popularity.
The extent of linear TV’s dominance of the ratings can be clearly seen in a recent BBC study that asked a sample of 2,600 UK adults to monitor all of their TV viewing across 48 hours and track how they arrived at each programme choice (and the overwhelming majority were TV programmes); providing purchase journey data on tens of thousands of individual programme selections.
The most remarkable finding was that viewers knew that they wanted to watch on 82% of occasions. We have often assumed concepts like ‘appointment-to-view’ television was a thing of the past but the vast majority of viewers are making those appointments continuously during the average evening.
The journeys they embarked upon, if they did not already know what they wanted to watch, followed a consistent pattern. Live schedules dominated the first search to see what’s on, followed by DVR, followed by on-demand. Most viewers navigated via the EPG and a large majority show a preference for live viewing even when the same content is easily available elsewhere. All of this demonstrates the resilience of the linear schedules despite an unprecedented series of threats from disruptive technologies over the past 20 years.
Of course, as we now know, most of those technologies have been forces for good in terms of improving the TV experience and driving viewing levels upwards. Meanwhile, the forces for consistency have been working quietly away; we don’t see them in the same way we see ultra HD resolution or shiny new mobile devices, because they are at work in the human brain. Overall, they are far more influential in determining TV behaviour (and, indeed, media behaviour in general).
So, the remarkable resilience of the linear schedule is really down to people and choice – how we select our TV content in a world of infinite possibilities. The average household makes these choices dozens of times a day, often without thinking (at a moment when thinking is the last thing they want to do) and – judging by the statistics – they manage it pretty effectively.
They employ emotional shortcuts, intuitive selection strategies and consensus decision-making to manage the choice overload and ensure they are not wasting valuable entertainment time in trying to find the content. All of that leads them back to the linear schedules far more than it does to time-shift or on demand.
What influences those choices also helps us to understand just why the broadcast linear schedule has remained the platform of choice for so many viewers. Thinkbox looked at need states across TV platforms a couple of years ago, and it resonates with the BBC research.
It showed that, even among the technologically advanced viewers, live viewing fulfils a number of need states far more effectively than catch-up or on-demand content. For some, it is the lure of familiarity or habit, for others the buzz of being part of the moment, amplified by the emergence of social TV (and even more by the friends and family sharing the same living room space).
The linear schedule also significantly boosts a programme’s performance on the new time-shift and on-demand platforms. The bulk of this viewing is devoted to catch-up of recent scheduled programmes and the bulk of that viewing is within a couple of days of the original transmission. So, a good performance in the ratings will boost a show’s performance via time-shift and on-demand. It all starts with linear.
We should also pay tribute to the efforts of the broadcasters in maintaining the power of the linear schedule. If they hadn’t responded to the threats, viewers would have eventually migrated.
Instead we have seen investment in better content, more live and event programming, nimbler marketing and more effective online strategies. However, two areas of success that often get lost in the mix are clever scheduling and sharper channel positioning. After all, the power of the schedule and the relevance of the channel brand were expected to be early casualties of the digital revolution; instead, they have become effective tools in its continuing success.
Recent work I’ve been conducting on the influences on viewing behaviour, with media research company NEPA, has shown that the biggest single influence on the viewing choices made was time of day; viewers still have a very clear sense of what they want to watch when they get home from work, when they sit down with the family or when they get the set to themselves.
Their choices differed noticeably from early to late evening. That, I believe, is reflected in the broadcast schedules, carefully planned to reflect the rhythm of those routines and need states at different times of day, week or season. That, in large part, is why 80%+ of viewing decisions lead straight to the schedules.
The second biggest influence – even more than the type of programme – was channel brand. Viewers have a really strong sense of how well the channel can provide the content they want, and this varies significantly by programme type.
Again, as with cinema release of movies, certain channel brands act as a sign of quality or relevance and viewers have clear expectations of what type of content they will provide; but then, in a world of unlimited choice, strong brand positioning will always be an effective way of influencing the consumer journey.
The broadcasters have (belatedly) managed to successfully ride the wave, but it is a wave generated by the stubborn refusal of a vast majority of television viewers to migrate away from the “tyranny of the broadcast schedules“; instead, it is behaviours like these, and the influences that cause them, that have confounded the digital world and left many of the rest of us muttering “I told you so!”