Wednesday, August 7, 2013

TV is dead. (Pay no attention to the data.)

This weekend's "Barron's" had a cover story called "Don't Touch That Dial," that began this way: "Everyone from Nextflix and Google to Apple and Intel things the television industry looks ripe for the plucking. They're wrong."

While wool-hatted sophisticates are trumpeting their latest esoteric flash in the digital pan, the numbers say otherwise.

"Linear TV," according to Barron's "the traditional sort carried by cable and satellite providers," achieved record numbers this year. "In the U.S., advertisers bought a record $63 billion of TV time...and "cable and satellite took in $97 billion in subscription fees in 2012, or 44 times Netflix streaming revenue...All told, the TV ecosystem brought in a record $160 billion last year..."

(In comparison, according to "eMarketer" Digital spend in 2013 was $42 billion of which $4.4 billion was mobile spend. And surely most of that $42 billion was search.)

I guess about 150 years ago Mark Twain said, "there are lies, damn lies and statistics."

As usual, he had it right.












4 comments:

Sean Peake said...

"Wool-hatted sophisicates." Brilliant as always, George

Anonymous said...


George, do you lump all Millennials together as just a fedora and a pair of unlaced Converse Chuck Taylors? You're smarter than that.

TV is video content. Its going multi platform. Video is king because no one reads. TV as in 30 second spots will die at some point. That's just a monetization model created by networks, cable companies and agencies.

Blow off Netflicks, ChromeCast etc at your peril.

Its not about the channel.

Craig

Rich Siegel said...

I was going to read your blog posting, but then I saw that Duck Dynasty is on.

KL said...

Craig, how are they going to monetize multiplatform tv then?