Posts filed under 'television'
Buying viewers’ attention
Andrew Curry writes:
The combination of the FA Cup Final - the last for a while on the BBC - and the epically overhyped Champions’ League final on ITV sent me to some recent interesting data (above) from BMRB Sport. They measure both the total interested audience for sport on TV, and also a “passion index” which captures the quality of the audience, assessed by their level of interest in the sport. The passion index seems to me to be a reasonable proxy for ‘attention’ - that increasingly important, but often elusive, quality sought by traditional media owners.
Broadly, the passion index is higher for football, and doesn’t correlate strongly with overall audiences, which leads to the thought that commercial terrestrial broadcasters need both scale and passion to make their rights investment pay off, in terms of advertising and sponsorship revenues, whereas a public service broadcaster can justify its investment by the breadth of the audience. And with next season’s rights to Formula 1 moving to the BBC (ITV couldn’t afford both F1 and the FA Cup), the BBC’s sports properties, if you include the Premiership highlights on Match of the Day, now include five of the top seven sports by breadth of audience, but only one (those Premiership highlights again) by ‘quality’ or interest levels.
And there is some good news for the BBC here. According to BMRB, Formula 1 has climbed steadily in the popularity rankings over the last year, from seventh to fourth, on back of Lewis Hamilton’s successes.
Add comment 23 May 2008
Time as a ’social surplus’
Andrew Curry writes:
The new media analyst Clay Shirky caused a bit of a stir in blogland last week with a compelling talk in which he described leisure time as a ’social surplus’ which had been pretty much wasted over the past fifty years through watching TV. Actually, the argument was a bit more complex than that - his idea was that people had watched TV while we got used to the idea of having more leisure time, and now that we’d got used to it, we were starting to use bits of this time more productively, for example by building socially useful online applications.
There’s some interesting data in the talk. American TV watching (as a whole) takes up about two billion hours of time each year. And he calculates, with a little help, that building the whole of Wikipedia so far has taken about 100 million hours. American TV, in other words, takes up 2,000 Wikipedia projects per year.
Now the notion of time as a currency is one we talk about quite a lot round here. And it’s clear that there are different sorts of time. There’s work time (paid or unpaid); maintenance or ‘chore’ time (what you have to do to maintain your role); there’s recovery time (which is mostly where the TV watching comes in). And then there are the types which take you out of the work-eat-sleep cycle; ‘discovery’ time, or personal exploration time, and ‘identity’ time, which tend to be the places where personal roots are found.
I’m not sure about some of the social history in Clay’s talk, if only because, pre-television, there were rich social activities despite our having less leisure time (the huge 1930s ramblers’ campaign for the right of access to the countryside, for example), but I am persuaded by the underlying idea. It doesn’t take much of a switch from ‘recovery time’ to ‘discovery’ time to change the balance of social energy. This might not be online; book clubs, I think, would also fit the prospectus. But as he says:
It’s better to do something than to do nothing.
Futurismic has a video of Clay making his argument.
Photograph © Peter Curry 2008
Add comment 7 May 2008
But what about Tim?
Holly Moore from Yankelovich writes:
The latest television programming kerfuffle over the U.S. fashion reality TV show Project Runway is telling us something interesting about both the future of the reality genre, and the increasing visibility of life coaching.
For new readers, the kerfuffle goes like this. The producers of Project Runway, now a four seasons-old hit, are trying to move the show from Bravo (the U.S. cable network owned by NBC Universal) to Lifetime Television, a cable network that’s looking to diversify beyond programming that’s often about women in crisis. NBC claims it still has the rights to future seasons, and so, inevitably, is suing the producers.
But viewers are more likely to worry about the future of the person who has become America’s favorite mentor, Tim Gunn. Unlike many reality show stars, Tim’s the compassionate master of constructive criticism and tough love. Gunn is the tutor we all hope to have and the manager all managers should strive to be. (I recall an Echo Boomershow and a big gig as the creative chief at Liz Claiborne. comedian once saying, “I so wish he was my gay dad.”) His popularity and fashion judgment have already earned him his own
We talk a great deal about the importance of coaching in the Yankelovich MONITOR. And in an era in which so many of us under 40 were raised to think that we were unconditionally special, it’s rather remarkable to find a voice who can find the balance between nurturing growth and encouraging exploration while still reinforcing objective standards of excellence.
So while the courts decide where viewers should ultimately tune in, hopefully content creators will notice how quickly Gunn’s brand star rose - and the void he filled in the landscape of back-biting reality programming - to help make Project Runway a TV brand worth fighting for.
(Image from BravoTV.com)
1 comment 17 April 2008
