36
votes
Is TV advertising still relevant? Does anybody under 60 even watch traditional TV anymore?
I saw a video about the failure of a product, and they mentioned TV advertising, which got me to wondering… do people still even watch traditional TV anymore? It seems to me that everybody that I can think of that isn’t 70 or older just streams everything. How is the old business plan still operating?
My household went streaming-only more than a decade ago. It’s all my kids know. On the rare occasions they encounter cable TV, the experience is so lackluster they view it as a quaint novelty. Between the atrocious picture quality (why do so many channels look like horribly compressed 480p?), the mind-numbing LOUD ads every few minutes, and the overwhelming glut of generic channels that still manage to have nothing interesting to watch, cable isn’t exactly converting any of us to its benefits. I can’t picture my kids giving it a second thought once they’re grown.
I grew up with cable and the decline is palpable. The last time I was on vacation and had cable TV in the room, it was such a depressing hellscape I was more entertained just turning it off and staring at the wall.
To the topic at hand (advertising) I’m the last person to defend any form of it. I exert a tremendous effort just to keep ads out of every corner of my life. But I will say at least the ads of my youth — in the ‘90s — were subversive and fun. When I do see what’s being pushed these days it’s incredibly milquetoast. Just bland and soulless. I’m on the fence about whether that’s actually a step backward for consumers, at least it’s more honest now I guess.
I remember ads being things that could be fun and edgy depending on the product in the 90s and early 00s. Many had personality and actually tried to stand out. I'm not advocating for ads. It's just astounding how ads have become more pervasive yet wildly less interesting at the same time.
I haven't had broadcast TV of any form since around 2013 so idk what it's like now, but even then it was all very bland commercials with nothing memorable happening. If we they have to show ads I wish they would at least put in a little effort.
This is the natural result of attempting to appeal to the broadest audience possible, though it ironically produces an end result that struggles to appeal to anybody.
Not just low resolution, but distorted too. I recall seeing Golden Girls at a hotel and Hallmark had stretched the 4:3 video to 16:9. The lower third graphics looked correct, so it wasn't the TV.
Honestly, every time I've been at a hotel in the past couple of years, it's not been hard to predict what will be on after 8:00. Basically Golden Girls, Frasier, South Park and The Office on Hallmark and Comedy Central, and the rest is reality TV fluff, movies that streaming services don't want to pay for, and sportsball.
I just hope more hotels will get with the times and have TVs that support AirPlay. It's kind of pointless as things stand.
I have some insider knowledge here having worked within the beast specifically with the encodes at an operational level. The answer is that often the channels just are compressed 480p nonsense, even as late as 2022 when I was last involved with this stuff. We'd did the best that we could with the signals we got, but they're usually not great to start with and a second round of encoding to get them suitable for transmission through the system is not doing it any favors, while the bandwidth to transmit isn't limitless so sometimes you have to do less than your best just to be able to fit everything in.
Going IPTV has its own ups and downs where you have to aim towards all those aging Americans who think their 5Mbps connection is "good enough" so you have to make players that prioritize consistency over bandwidth which will often result in lower quality bitrates being selected if the player logic thinks for even a moment that it might interrupt playback to run a higher quality. Which is all to say that while the compression can be better, it's still the same original source, ISPs in this country generally suck, and the dictates of catering to them and their customers makes it so that the best case scenario is usually not going to be the theoretical best case.
I think your prediction is pretty likely. My peers and I actually did grow up with cable TV, but we certainly don't watch it now. My parents cut the cord when I was a teenager some time in the early 00s, and while I remember being a bit bummed at the time, I didn't actually miss it. We got Netflix DVDs by mail instead, and that was already way better.
I do have fond memories of watching TV that can't really be re-created with streaming — like excitedly watching some beloved show, and then going to school and everyone was talking about the episode — but by the time my parents cut cable, the quality of broadcast television had already fallen off a cliff and hardly any of my peers were watching anymore.
Since then, I have never lived in any place where there was a TV set up to receive any type of broadcast. When I visit my friends who are my age or younger, none of them have broadcast TV. Even amongst people around my parents' and grandparents', I only know a handful who still have broadcast TV — and when I sit with them and they have the TV on, I find it tedious. It kind of seems like they do as well because, apart from a couple of specific shows or sports, they mostly just watch DVDs or streaming.
Long story short, I just bought a new internet package that included TV. The sole reason I got TV is because it extended the "pay only xyz amount for the first 6 months" to 12 months, offsetting the cost I'd be making in year 2 at which point I can cancel it.
I haven't had tv in years otherwise.
For what it's worth you can usually keep those promos going if you call and make a stink about it. I did it one year, saved $30, and it just hurt my soul being a Karen like that so I don't bother anymore.
I don't ask for an extension of the signing bonus, I agreed on that timeframe already, but usually at the end of my contract I reach out to their retention team and ask them what they can offer me to stay. I always have to point out that the signing bonus is better so I'll consider leaving anyway until voila, they suddenly have that offer on the table.
Live events like sports, news, and award shows. Not as much coverage as the past, but still enough to be notable.
Yeah the only time I watch traditional TV is live sports which is also the only time I watch ads and I'm 40. It's just a matter of time better sports moves from primarily on liner TV to primarily on a streaming service. That's the big question for ESPN right now.
My FIL is pushing 80 and he cut the cord. He’s a big football fan and he decided to subscribe to the NFL streaming service to watch the games. He says he’s saving over $100 a month not paying for cable when the only thing he actually watched was sports anyway.
Yeah at this point I only have Fibe TV for sports, which costs me $15 a month and is basically streamed cable which I'll probably cut once the hockey season is over.
Up front, I'm not a sports person so I have no horse in the race.
I'm not so sure how sports on streaming will look. What does the NFL charge for their rights, just as an example? Google ... something like eight billion a year? Maybe I'm looking that up wrong. Anyway, it's a lot. Even "small" sports like baseball or hockey are not cheap.
Is a streaming service going to pay that much? And the real question, are they going to pay that much and not recoup from advertisers? Better question; what streaming service can afford to pay that and not get the money back in some way? Because, and just as an example, even Netflix can't afford to pay billions a year without basically rearranging themselves into SportsFlix due to cost.
And how are the non-sports fans gonna feel if they know their subscription could be funding series and movies ... or sports they don't watch. I'd be irked. A billion dollars funds a lot of content. I don't necessarily mind they fund movies and shows I won't watch, but those are things I might. Sports ... not interested. Sure sports are popular, but it's not like the non-sports fans are this vanishingly small segment.
Some of the streamers might buy in as a loss-leader, to build subs, sure. They've already been trying that though. Part of the industry's issue right now is they've been spending borrowed money and aren't getting it back from consumers. Hoping to build up to a critical mass like Netflix has so they can cash in, but only Netflix really has that critical mass. The loan payments are coming due, and interest rates are up; who could afford to keep loss-leading even on content, much less start doing it in a major way with sports?
I can see the services adding a special subscription option, similar to what the sports leagues have been running a while now (NFL Sunday Ticket, etc...), but how many subscriptions do they need to recoup shelling out billions annually on sports?
The whole thing seems like a big "hmmm ... we'll see" situation to me. Because there's just a lot of money involved, and a lot of ways it could go since one way or another they're gonna want their money back if they keep shelling out the leagues' asking prices.
To be clear, I'm not saying sports doesn't turn up on streaming. I am saying I don't really think we're going to see a future where Netflix or one of the presumably three to five services that survive after all the failures and merges we're going to see over the next handful of years just add sports without modifying their pricing somehow.
Maybe it'll be ads, maybe it'll be a rider subscription, maybe it'll be a spin-off subscription, but I doubt it'll just be "new to your monthly subscription: every game, included for free along with everything else you've come to expect and love from us!"
The answer, for ESPN at least, is ESPN+. They already have 25 million subs while regular ESPN is somewhere around 80-90 million I believe and dropping. So the question for ESPN is when to flip the focus. At some point linear TV will drop enough that it makes sense to go all in on ESPN+, at which point they will increase the cost but also increase the amount of content they stream.
Yes, there will definitely be ads, but sports fans are used to that.
And yes it will definitely be a mess until everything gets figured out including other streams signing deals to stream sports, which they already are doing.
Here's a personal tale of how traditional television is killing its own future:
I was a previous user of the ill-fated Locast free broadcast streaming service, which I mostly used to watch Late Night TV (e.g. Colbert, Seth Meyers) because I couldn't access the content via any over-the-air broadcasts on my digital antenna (my apartment windows faced the wrong way).
It seemed, at the time, totally fair to me that I should be able to watch the otherwise-free content while being simulcast online, at basically no cost to me. Yes, there were uninterruptible ads trying to convince you to donate $5 to keep the service running (and to stop the ads begging for $5...i.e. the Spotify model of converting customers), but those ads were in addition to the ads from the original broadcast feed. Ultimately $5 was a more reasonable deal than paying $100+ for multiple subscription services to access Live TV that I occasionally used for an hour or two during late night. This wasn't piracy, it was publicly accessible with the equipment I already owned.
Unfortunately, Locast suffered the same fate as its predecessor, Aereo, and got shutdown by US courts on behalf of the TV networks. Aereo's fatal flaw was trying to profit off of a re-broadcast of local TV stations without giving the station owners a cut. Locast attempted to work around that established case law by streaming local broadcasts as a non-profit organization, which was legally protected at that point. Locast even geolocated your IP address to ensure you only viewed your local station's broadcast. This, again, felt fair to ensure that the local advertisers (who only get 2 minutes each hour) were only seen by the relevant locals they purchased ads for.
The app was a little janky at times, but I could still cast the service to a TV from my phone, which powered multi-viewer experiences like watching celebrity hosted-SNL at apartment parties, or impromptu watching football games with my fantasy league. This should have been the empowering technology to finally connect the decentralized (yet massive) Internet audience with the centralized (and human-scale) media industry.
Instead, our only legal option is a reinvention of the cable bundle. I'm sure there's plenty of families today in America without access to any other live news sources than what their phones can currently provide (which usually defaults to social media). The reason I discovered Locast initially was because the broadcast stations I had were sparse! The only major networks I had access to were ABC and FOX...I couldn't get NBC and see the Olympics at home despite that same station being played at every single bar in my city.
Live/Linear TV is arguably the most highly valued content there is (hence why sports are the last holdout to transition to digital streaming). Despite this fact, I think Live TV's active hindrance to its own accessibility will ultimately be to its own chagrin. Regular people's time is limited, and so users will migrate to the most available free sources (i.e. YouTube) to spend what little time that could have been otherwise watched on live network TV.
It seems ridiculous today that people once watched the Seinfeld finale live in Times Square...at this point, even Game of Thrones watch parties feel anachronistic. We seem to have lost the cultural touchstone of watching live events altogether, and perhaps that lack of a collective experience is contributing to some of the current friction and strife we're seeing all around these days.
I was there for the advent of what Linear television likes to call OTT (Over The Top) Linear TV, that is basically just cable that runs on top of the Internet. The original iteration of the product had a full 30 days of playback for EVERY channel. You never had to DVR anything so long as you wanted to watch it within 30 days of broadcast (Which we knew from analytics is when most DVR watching occurs, people either get to something they recorded in the first 30 days or they never watch it) you could just go back (to the left) in the channel guide and find the original airing of anything and queue it right up for play on demand. For reasons that I'll never understand, the content providers hated this and had it contractually either eliminated from their channels or limited to 7, sometimes 14, days of "lookback" viewing.
That decision and their continual efforts to stop people from seeing content via Aereo and Locast made me truly hate the content industry. I just can't understand for the life of me how an industry that largely pays their bills by having eyeballs on content, doesn't want anyone to be able to watch that content except at one point in time that they choose and only via mediums that they also choose. You'd think they'd want their content playing inside of everyone's eyelids if they could arrange it, but nope, if it wasn't some very narrow interpretation of live linear television they just weren't interested.
Excepting my friends still in the technical operations part of all of it, I'm frankly glad their industry is dying. Couldn't happen to a worse group of idiots.
I can also shed some light on this as an insider. Nielsen ratings for linear TV dominated the broadcast industry due to the dinosaur executives running media corps not understanding how to monetize OTT/CTV. Those Nielsen ratings are called C3 and C7 ratings, basically content viewed within 3 or 7 days, respectively. After 7 days, there's essentially no more money to make off the original ads baked into the broadcast feed. The ads themselves are being sold around this time of year during what's called "upfronts" because the deals commit millions of dollars upfront in the Spring, but are actually applied to the following Fall season and beyond. Media corps can expect to make 50-80% of their annual revenue in these massive upfront deals, which hinge on the viewership captured in C3/C7 measurement.
After 7 days, the worthless ads can be stripped and replaced with remnant inventory (often called "scatter" as it's often used to fill in gaps), which is priced far lower than the upfront inventory. The kicker is that the C3/C7 ratings often do not account for digital distribution, despite that being a growing audience. Media execs effectively see the content itself as worthless outside of C7 ratings, which is also partly why Aereo/Locast were killed by the industry: networks didn't make more money off of it. Rather than band together and create an easy method for consumers to access Live TV content, all these companies have siloed their live broadcasts into their digital fiefdoms where they can nickel and dime the consumer for access.
All of that just makes me angrier now that I know it was not because of some technical limitation or anything real, it was just a lack of imagination that anything might ever be different.
Yeah, for all its faults, in retrospect old-style broadcast TV served an important purpose as a cultural unifier. Pretty much everybody watched All in the Family or Laugh-In or whatever, and even people who didn't were familiar enough with the top shows to talk about them.
I work in television production and it's still huge, but it is dying.
Every broadcaster worth their salt has a streaming platform because people are migrating. This quote from almost 2 years ago says it all "the proportion of viewers who tune in to traditional broadcast TV each week has seen the sharpest ever annual fall – from 83% in 2021 to 79% in 2022.[1] BBC One remains the only channel to reach more than half of the viewing population every week."
People still turn on their TVs for background noise and like another poster said, live events and broadcast first shows that you cannot wait for. Other than the older people or the absolute poor, everyone else streams.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/news-centre/2023/media-nations-2023-latest-uk-viewing-and-listening-trends-revealed
I am a person under 60 and I watch broadcast tv.
But I feel like a big outlier and I don't know anyone else under 60 that really does, everyone else is just straight to streaming.
I mostly do it for sports and rerun channels, the sports you can't really get away from and its still the same commercials as on regular TV. The rerun channels I really feel the over 60 thing, most of the commercials are about medicare and medical products, I might literally be the only person under 60 watching the "Heroes & Icons" TV channel (they show a lot of Star Trek, ok, don't judge me).
That Star Trek block on H&I is solid gold. The only other broadcast channels I watch is whichever channel plays In The Heat Of The Night and MeTV (mainly for Svengoolie). I'm 39 for reference.
The current ad model makes TV unwatchable for me and the last time I was subjected to broadcast/satellite programming, it felt like they packed a 15min volley of AI generated ad copy for every 10 seconds of show.
I used to love cleaver advertising. All the way through to the late 2000s I'd follow the industry news and trends. Still catch myself humming some of the big jingles and repeating old catch phrases. It was good balance of programming to ads and there used to be legitimate competition between brands and agencies. Because we don't allow direct comparative ads here (like the coke vs. Pepsi challenge) people would need to get creative with one-upping the competition.
So please forgive me while I nerd out about a fun part of South African advertising history:
Back in the late 1980s, a guy dozed off behind the wheel of his Mercedes. He was driving along Chapman's Peak Drive, a winding scenic drive where you're on a narrow strip between a cliff and the ocean. Thankfully the man did not go into the water and survived with barely a scratch. This miraculous fortune was attributed to two things: he was wearing a seat belt and he was driving a Merc.
Of course Mercedes made this story the subject of an ad campaign. A one minute recreation of the incident, showcasing the protection you will have in such an event. Wildly successful ad and made for fun water cooler talk.
Fast forward a few weeks and this ad appears on prime time TV, in near the same spot that the Mercedes ad would play. Same road, same lighting; but it's a BMW driving along. And the moment the car is supposed to go over the edge, it doesn't. "Because you'd want a car... that can beat the bends."
Fast forward 30 years and I'm subjected to 4 different spots betting sites flashing big numbers on the screen for 100 seconds, t's and c's apply.
Broadcast TV is pretty much garbage to me now. The balance of programming to advertisements has gotten noticeably worse over the past few decades and now it seems like the programming is way worse than it used to be, so it’s certainly not worth watching now.
I'm 30 and watch Food Network (mostly the early morning shows and Triple D/G), Toonami, and very rarely another channel on a whim. I grew up without cable until I was 12, so it's a blend of quaint and refreshing. I'm also the type of person to just constantly listen to music on shuffle or seek a specific song out, so watching pre-programmed channels and occasionally going for a specific show/movie feels natural to me.
Warning: pointless rant ahead. It adds nothing, so turn back now!
I miss being able to watch hockey. I used to be able to find free streams online to watch it, but it seems like the NHL has cracked down on that (or I'm just out of touch and don't know where to look), so I simply can't watch.
This is the only thing I miss about the traditional TV model, and I don't even come close to missing it enough to put up with cable. When I moved out of my parents' house 20-ish years ago, I quit cable, and have never looked back. I guess this was the advent of TV shows being on DVD, and that showed me how terrible cable seemed. If I wanted to watch something, I had to gear my life to the TV networks' schedule, and not only that, I had to pay for cable and watch commercials. As an adult that has always seemed ridiculous. I hate advertisements and avoid them as much as I can.
Unfortunately for corporate America, I've grown out of streaming services, too. There are too many and not enough interesting things to watch on any one in particular. So I guess I pirate almost everything I watch. I'm willing to pay small creators for things, but when it comes to corporate America, I feel like I deserve that money far more than they do. I don't have a lot of it, and they do--anything I'd pay them is a drop in their bucket yet a significant amount out of mine.
Anyway. I guess this was little more than me ranting. Sorry about that. I've added a warning at the start so you won't waste your time, but for some reason I will submit it rather than deleting. I usually just delete comments like these, but I guess I wrote enough to fool myself into thinking this was worthwhile, so here I go!
I remember years ago, there was a paid streaming site called hockeystreams.com and it was what the NHL legal streaming should have been. HD games, both feeds, no blackouts, no arbitrary 30+ second delay on the games. It eventually even had an android app. It was something like $120/yr which was completely worth it, even though it wasn't technically legal. Meanwhile, the legal streaming option (NHL center ice or something) was $250, had delayed streams, blacked out all local or national games, and was jankier than the illegal stream. It was a sad day when Hockeystreams got shut down, because it was actually a great product. Its what sports streaming should be. Reasonably priced with no blackouts. Until sports get around the blackout issues, it's always going to be a terrible deal.
Yep, I paid for Hockeystreams for a year or two. It was awesome. If I remember right, I think it even had a Roku app, so it was just like watching regular TV (ya know, sans commercials). I've also paid for NHL's official streaming option, but when the playoffs came around and I was blacked out from watching anything, I knew what a joke it was and gave up on it.
I get the impression that cable TV revenue is just too good for the NHL to give it up, but there's no way I'm spending $100/month just to watch a few games a month.
There's probably a lot of selection bias going on in the discussion here.
I think there's still a fairly vast audience of people who rely on OTA and cable TV for news and entertainment (due to limited internet access, for example) and there's significant value in advertising to that audience.
Even by the mid 2000s I was torrenting most of my TV. I didn't feel like watching it at a particular time and it was simple to hop on demonoid the next day and grab the latest episode. Or wait till a season was over do I could binge it.
I have an older relative who watches old school TV and tends to just leave it running a lot of the day. It's all home reno shows and Judge Judy style court shows. Just terrible stuff.
Last time I really remember getting excited for TV was when everyone was still really into 24. Prisonbreak and 24 came on back to back and my friends would all gather to watch the new episodes together.
Weirdly the one thing I kinda miss is movie ads. Used to be that everyone knew every movie coming out since you'd see constant ads for them. Now I never know what's playing or coming out. Can't remember the last time a best picture nomination was a movie I had even heard of.
I do, I usually leave cnn or msnbc running in the background. I use a service called IPTV (internet protocol tv) and it's extremely cheap for what you get. I just have a vlc window open and select what channels i want to watch and put them in a playlist
Sometimes I watch antenna TV from Syracuse, maybe 50 miles away.
You can watch many of the same programs you would watch on broadcast TV or cable (say reruns of Alf or Hell's Kitchen) not to mention things you wouldn't like Korean anime and South American soccer, nightly news from distant cities, etc on "FAST" services like Pluto, Plex, Haystack News and Tubi which work with a phone, game console, PC, streaming box, whatever.
These have a completely different advertising economy than traditional and right now the ad load seems much less than on antenna TV. That could change. For now, services like that don't even require that you register.
See also https://tildes.net/~tv/1fxp/into_the_tubi_verse
FAST viewership is rapidly rising, here are some statistics and projections for the industry:
https://decenterads.com/blog-fast-channels-the-growth-trajectory/
I've been using Pluto for a long time when I wanted to just have something on in the background -- it is reminiscent of old broadcast TV, but in a better way than modern broadcast TV IMO.