Stowe Boyd

The Days Of TV Are Numbered

Nielsen wants to redefine ‘TV household’ to include those watching TV-ish video on their computers, because TV ownership is down for the first time in 20 years. Yes, part of this trend is due to the transition from analog to digital TV sets and signals, which has left some poor people high and dry: they might not be able to afford digital TV, especially in a down economy.

But the future is lurking in the stats too: young, cord-cutting urbanites who are not buying in:

Brian Stelter, Television Ownership Drops in U.S., Nielsen Reports

For the first time in 20 years, the number of homes in the United States with television sets has dropped.

The Nielsen Company, which takes TV set ownership into account when it produces ratings, will tell television networks and advertisers on Tuesday that 96.7 percent of American households now own sets, down from 98.9 percent previously.

There are two reasons for the decline, according to Nielsen. One is poverty: some low-income households no longer own TV sets, most likely because they cannot afford new digital sets and antennas.

The other is technological wizardry: young people who have grown up with laptops in their hands instead of remote controls are opting not to buy TV sets when they graduate from college or enter the work force, at least not at first. Instead, they are subsisting on a diet of television shows and movies from the Internet.

That second reason is prompting Nielsen to think about a redefinition of the term “television household” to include Internet video viewers.

[…]

Then there are the tech-savvy Americans who once lived in a household with a television, but no longer do. These are either cord-cutters — a term that refers to people who stop paying for cable television — or people who never signed on for cable. Ms. McDonough suggested that these were younger Americans who were moving into new residences and deciding not to buy a TV for themselves, especially if they “don’t have the financial means to get one immediately.”

Nielsen has not yet assessed what proportion of the decline can be attributed to this behavior. But the decline in the percentage of homes with sets is sure to kick off another round of speculation about cord-cutting.

Sensitive to its clients’ concerns, Nielsen explains the trend this way in the report: “While Nielsen data demonstrates that consumers are viewing more video content across all platforms — rather than replacing one medium with another — a small subset of younger, urban consumers seem to be going without paid TV subscriptions for the time being. The long-term effects of this are still unclear, as it is undetermined if this is also an economic issue that will see these individuals entering the TV marketplace once they have the means, or the beginning of a larger shift to online viewing.”

I think Nielsen is misreading the tea leaves here. But they have every incentive to hope that this is an anomaly, that hipsters will switch to conventional TV viewing in a few years, instead of what will happen: they will invent a new way to experience ‘TV’, whatever that comes to mean.

I can guarantee one thing: whatever ‘TV’ comes to mean in the near future, it will be profoundly social, which traditional TV is not. And that doesn’t end with every show having a Facebook page, or celebrities twittering.

Becoming social means that TV will become another sort of liquid media, unbound from network’s and cable companies control, floating in the social stream, just like blog posts, images and music are now. This content will be fractured — we will share snippets of shows and mashups. And the aesthetic of TV will shift to match, as producers wise up to the facts, and see the possibilities.