Brian Stelter writes:
This week, the television upfronts — in which the broadcast networks present their schedules to advertisers — will open with a mystery. Who stole six million viewers?
In the past television season, there has been a sharp increase in time-shifting. As more consumers time-shift their viewing, “there becomes less of a difference between ads in magazines and ads on television.”
Broadcast television remains the dominant medium for advertising, as the $9 billion upfront market attests, but its prime-time audience is gradually shrinking. All three shows are popular among the young, upscale viewers who record and stream shows most often.
Many of the top-rated broadcast shows now have 20 percent to 25 percent ratings gains when DVR viewing is calculated. Some viewers shift their viewing only slightly, overlapping shows scheduled later in the evening.
Of 20 shows time-shifted most often, only one (“Medium”) is on at 10 p.m. “As a result of time-shifting, the biggest shows are getting bigger and some of the smaller shows are getting negatively impacted,” the senior television executive said.
The availability of television shows online has become widespread surprisingly quickly. Some series are viewed millions of times a week via free, advertising-supported streaming Web sites like Hulu, Veoh and Fancast (and the network sites themselves). Comparing television ratings with online streams is imprecise, but the audience for the series soars when on-demand options are factored in. Since the show returned on March 24, premiere episodes have averaged 3.7 million “live” viewers on Monday nights. Almost a million more viewers have watched each episode using DVRs. On the Internet, episodes and excerpts have been streamed another 32 million times. Cable operators offer yet another on-demand option. Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the country’s two largest cable providers, are increasingly promoting their video-on-demand platforms, which are mostly associated with movies and premium programming. One in four American households now uses a digital video recorder to time-shift shows and skip commercials, up from about 15 percent last May. The broadcast networks experienced a 60 percent rise in recorded viewing this season. Last year, in recognition of the growth of DVRs, many television networks converted to a new ratings metric for buying and selling ad time that includes shows watched within three days of the broadcast.
Time Warner is trying a half-measure: letting viewers start an episode anytime during the hour of its broadcast.