Television isn’t dying, but it needs to adapt: what the rest of TV can learn from NFL Sunday Ticket
Add value.
My sister Alison is a freshman at Lehigh University, and she doesn’t have a TV in her dorm room. She says most of her friends don’t have TVs either. I was surprised to hear this — no, I found it absolutely incomprehensible. When I was in college, just nine years ago, everyone had a TV. It wasn’t even a question. But options change, and habits change. She says she watches whatever she needs on her laptop or on the TV in the dorm’s common room. There aren’t many shows she cares whether she has that shared experience of texting with her friends about right after it airs.
(You could make an argument this bodes poorly for Twitter, in addition to television, but that’s a whole other column.)
This is a long-term problem, but not a short-term problem. Television is doing just fine, making a ton of money and still bringing in significantly more viewers than any other medium. I’ve written about how way more people are actually watching television than you think, and articles spreading around this site using a false premise don’t accurately show the media consumption landscape.
Nielsen ratings show an average number of viewers watching a show, not the total number of viewers, which make comparisons to unique visitors or video views extremely inaccurate. A Nielsen rating is like a more incomplete, underestimated Chartbeat for TV — the language is concurrents, not totals. And TV is currently beating the internet in American eyeballs.
But although there isn’t a short-term problem, there most certainly is a long-term problem. Cord-cutters are slowly moving away from TV, but the looming threat of cord-nevers — those college students like my sister, who, for the first time, have to decide whether they want to pay a cable bill, and are choosing a TV-free path — are the real danger to the television industry.
Big companies that rely on television know this, but it takes more than surface efforts. Comcast recently invested heavily in BuzzFeed and Vox, in an attempt to get younger by proxy. But Comcast wearing BuzzFeed cologne doesn’t trick young prospective suitors, and there’s an argument to be made that BuzzFeed wearing Comcast cologne may actually be a turn off for its current base.
The solution is not trying to jam a round Vox explainer or BuzzFeed list into a large square box on your dresser.
The solution is adapting. Adapt or die. Television’s lifeline for the future is simple — add value. Become important and necessary by doing something unique, that only you, Big Television, can provide.
And television can do this because it already is. Well, some outlets are.
Back in 2009, I interviewed Jimmy Fallon about his new Late Night show. I described it as “the future of broadcast TV,” and for a time it was. It was a start. Fallon and his top producers at the time cared deeply about their website. They cared about finding the audience wherever it was. They cared about how the content of their television program translated for a digital audience. And others, especially in late night, have followed suit. But Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert have become so platform agnostic now that it may be having the reverse effect. Young people know they don’t need to watch Fallon on TV — they can find the best stuff on YouTube or Facebook (or SnapChat, or…). Fallon and his late night team have successfully found that young audience and made their product relevant — but now it’s about getting that generation to see the value in sitting down and watching it on TV.
Which brings us to NFL Sunday Ticket. For those who don’t know, NFL Sunday Ticket is a DIRECTV package that allows subscribers to view every game. Simple enough.
But that’s not all.
- Red Zone Channel: The Red Zone channel is available on cable networks as well as DISH and DIRECTV, and personally channel-flips between all the games to give you the best action as it’s happening. Sometimes it moves to a double-box, sometimes a quad-box, depending on what’s happening at the time. For NFL fans, but really for fantasy football participants, it’s vital and a true value-add. It completely changes the way the NFL is viewed, and is a great combination of technology and a human touch — it involves a TV anchor to guide the experience, and judgement calls on switching to the right game that are very often correct.
- Short Cuts: Perhaps an even more innovative feature that’s part of the package is Short Cuts, available after the completion of all the games. Imagine what watching an NFL game would look like if all the commercials, all the moseying to the line of scrimmage, all the lengthy challenges were eliminated. That’s Short Cuts — a 30-minutes-or-less version of every NFL game, for you to watch, DVR and re-live. This is an incredible feature and something that makes sitting back and watching your television a more worthwhile experience. It has tangible worth — it has real value.
Every television network needs to be thinking about and adjusting for the future without upending its current product. And every television network can be adding value. Here are some ideas:
- Bravo: Let’s say you’re a fan of the Real Housewives. What if I told you I could give you access to every episode of the Real Housewives? Great, but not a game-changer. But what if you had every scene archived, and you had the ability to organize it by cast member. So, let’s say you just want to see Teresa Giudice’s greatest hits, or to trace Vicki Gunvalson’s relationship with Brooks over time? A twist on Bravo On Demand could accomplish this, and is something that true fans would appreciate, and likely, pay for.
- ABC: Broadcast channels already have streaming services for viewers to watch online or on mobile — according to my sister, ABC’s is one of the best (she can watch The Bachelor there). But while content consumption is great, it eliminates the traditional television viewing experience. It used to be that the linear experience related to traditional TV while the non-linear could be achieved online — what if broadcast outlets reverse that? Instead, you can see extra The Bachelor scenes on television, on demand, right after the episode — only available to actual television viewers.
- Fox News: News could be another article altogether, but the archival features that make a website valuable can be translated to television — archive of interviews, of memorable moments. But more importantly, news networks can play the role of a second screen during news events, reversing the trend of only a few years ago, where TV served as first screen, laptop/phone as a second screen. Thinking of the traditional broadcast as a second screen, it can fill out the story being consumed in short bursts on social media or a website, and most importantly, can deliver video incomparably better than any other medium.
Traditional television isn’t dying, but it needs to start thinking about adapting — playing on its strengths and providing value to a generation that doesn’t share the same media consumption habits. Be the bearer of shared experience. Encourage the ‘sit back and watch’ that can only be achieved using a big, high quality screen. Be convenient and reliable. Don’t be BuzzFeed TV.
Smart media thinker Rex Sorgatz and I made a $100 bet over which new media outlets would have traditional TV channels in five years. I don’t think they will. But perhaps more importantly, in five years will my sister and her friends have a TV set to watch any of the channels that already exist? I hope so.
