Stoss Blog

I started thinking about this topic after I watched this Craig Ferguson clip:

By now we have all heard about Conan and Leno dueling it out for the sacred 11:35 slot on NBC. However, the situation brings to light something that hasn’t yet sunk in at most major corporations yet. The public is changing.

Ferguson’s hypothesis is actually quite intuitive. The youth do rule our society. The 18-49 demographic is what all advertising dollars are based on, and that is what makes the big 3 networks all of their money. What Ferguson missed, however, is that that “deification of youth” has continued, but the youth have drastically changed.

The public today want convenience. They want everything now and exactly how they want it. It started slowly with Sunday shopping, and 24 hour supermarkets. Then it grew with super stores that sell everything from perscription drugs to fresh chickens and motor oil. Pay Per View popped up and let us watch movies whenever we wanted without leaving our homes. The web started creeping in and suddenly we could monitor prices of things like flights, toys, books and more to buy when we wanted to at the price we wanted to. Then, in one of the smartest moves of the 21st century, someone put a harddrive into a VCR and PVR (TiVo) was born: So now we could watch TV when we wanted. Bittorrent made a debut about 7 years ago and made data share faster and easier. Pagers and then cellphones became ubiquitous in people of all ages: So now we were always conveniently available and could conveniently contact anyone. We became obsessed with everything being at our fingertips (There’s an app for that™). We started bitching when we were charged for Internet outside of our house, so Free WiFi became synonymous with Café. Undergrounds subways across Asia and Europe starting piping in cellphone signals. TV companies started endevours like Hulu and BBC iPlayer to satisfy the lust for anytime access. LoveFilm and NetFlix popped up so we could stop strolling to Blockbuster and the Kindle changed the way commuters read.

But in the process, what happened, almost by accident, is we started to kill traditional television. Primetime was called such because that is when most people watched tv, and while that is probably still true, it isn’t the 18-49s any more. The ’sacred youth’ are playing XBox or using MSN or any of the other things that can be used to relax our lazy asses that didn’t exist in 50’s when this all started. Prime time is becoming ‘When I Want Time’ and this is what started the demise of such shows as Arrested Development, Jericho, The Fly and probably (sadly) soon to be Chuck. The fan base was there and arguably still is, but the generation of people that watch these shows isn’t watching them when Neilsens is recording the metrics. Suddenly advertisers are saying it isn’t worth their money and the networks are are saying we need to find something better, regardless of the quality. This is why cable shows like Dexter, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos and the like became such big long lasting hits, they don’t rely on ads, because the revenue comes from the cable fees.

Conan/Leno are the same in this regard. The part most people want to see of any late night show is the monologue, and in the case of SNL, Weekend Update. So we PVR that while we watch the prime time shows that we didn’t watch between 8 and 11, then watch the first 15 minutes and hit the sack, or save them up for another time: Convenience.

Mind you, the movie, airline and music industries are much farther behind then the big 3 when it comes to accepting the new technologies, but this doesn’t stiffle the fact that every year dozens of shows go off the air before they get to 6 episodes, because their on air rating are ‘too low’. Eventually the large corporations need to start catering to the desire of convenience. The food industry made the transition years ago with frozen dinners, the microwave etc., and pre-made dinner sales are always on the rise. Eventually the other industries will need to go down this path, because, for better or for worse, this is what their customers are demanding.