Have You Seen Me?

From the LA Times:

Where did everybody go?

One month into the new TV season, overall audience levels have taken a hard tumble from those last year. New shows have sputtered, and scores of established series have slipped in the standings. Even some of the biggest hits - "Friends," "ER," "Survivor," "CSI" and "Monday Night Football" - have lost millions of viewers.

Network executives can't explain it.

For the first time ever, overall television viewership is down from one fall season to the next, the biggest shock to hit that industry since the Nielsens showed that cable networks were significantly cutting into the market for the big broadcast networks. But this time, nobody seems to know where they went. Even more troubling, the biggest drop was in the most coveted viewers:

One demographic group, in particular, was noticeably smaller: young men. The industry is fretting as 8% of men ages 18 to 34 have apparently sworn off television this season.

"It's hard to buy into the explanation that all of these young men suddenly decided to stop watching television at the same time," said [Lloyd] Braun [ABC Entertainment Chairman], who speculated that a factor for ABC could have been two lackluster "Monday Night Football" matchups.

18-34 year-old males are the most desirable audience for TV because they are the last, best hope for advertisers wanting to influence brand choices, that demographic controls a disproportionate amount of the disposable income, and if you can "brand" them, they'll likely stay with the same products for the rest of their lives (when they will control an even larger chunk). So this slippage is a deadly threat to TV and advertising's bread and butter, these are the eyeballs they have contracted to deliver. This year alone it may cost them hundreds of millions of dollars in refunds and rebates to the advertisers, if November "Sweeps" fail to deliver the numbers the networks promised.

Hmmm.... Hundreds of thousands of 18-34 year old males stopped watching TV, where have I seen something like that before? Oh yeah, they're over here, the bulk of the customer base for MMO's comes from exactly that segment of the population, putting in 20-25 hours a week in patterns remarkably similar to those of television viewing. That's not to say that our kind of MMO is the sole cause, this year's dip may have as much to do with XBox Live as with EverQuest. But I am morally certain that it is due to online gaming, and it looks like the TV industry may have a hint of that as well:

"They're not putting on a lot of shows that might appeal to a 25-year-old," he [Brad Adgate of Horizon Media Inc.] said. "These guys are probably doing something else - playing video games or surfing the Internet or reading Maxim.

For a long time, TV programmers and the viewers have had a deal: They'd put out shows, and we'd watch them. They'd put out less of it, and we'd still watch it. They'd put in more commercials, and we'd still watch it. "The Honeymooners" actually only ran for a single year, but back then a "season" was 39 episodes. By the time Star Trek ran for three, a "season" was 26 episodes. And this year, a full "season" worth of a show is 13-18 new episodes, the rest of the year will be filled with re-runs and pre-emptions. The episodes are shorter as well, down to a 44 minute "hour" (which may get "stepped on" by local affiliates or cable companies for the loss of another minute). Even by strictly objective measures, the quality of TV programming has been dropping steadily for a long time.

But they've been getting away with it, because TV's real customer isn't the viewers, but the advertisers. Actually producing new shows is an overhead cost in the process of delivering the eyeballs, and every business tries to minimize their overhead. Since how much new entertainment they delivered didn't have much to do with how many eyeballs they could deliver, it was only logical to spend less on it. After all, where were you going to go? There wasn't anything new to watch anywhere else, either. And now the chickens are coming home to roost.

This seems to be my week for playing Chicken Little, but this is a far bigger potential threat than anything academia alone might do. Samuel Clemens advised "Never engage in a war of words with anyone who buys ink by the barrel." We may already be in a fight with an industry that has their own satellite-beamed presence in every living room in America. If TV starts viewing these games as a competitive threat to their bottom line (and I'm pretty certain we are in the long run, those gaming hours have to be coming from somewhere), this will get to be a very bumpy ride. Nobody is "fair and impartial" when they think you're picking their pocket.