The Decline of Television
After years of predictions on the decline of TV, the day may finally be here. According to a report from Bloomberg this week, TV advertising sales fell.
The first commercially produced television sets were based on the mechanical television system — made by John Baird’s television designs. These sets were shown off to the public in September, 1928. The world’s first television remote control was called the TeleZoom, and it can barely even be categorized as a remote control.
The TeleZoom was only used to “zoom in” to the picture on the television. The first television programmed to be aired was Queen’s Messenger was shown in WGRB station in 1928. In India National telecast was introduced in 1982.
In the same year, colour television was introduced in the Indian market. Beltek was the first television manufacturing company in India in 1982 which broadcast the Asian Games held in Delhi.
The first Indian daily soap was Hum Log, it began telecast on Doordarshan, India’s national network on 7 July 1984. Doordarshan, India’s first television provider established on 15 September 1959.
It operates 46 Studios and operates 21 channels: two all-India channels (DD National and DD News), 17 regional satellite channels, 11 state networks, an international channel (DD India), a sports channel (DD Sports), DD Bharati, DD Urdu and DD Kisan. On DD National (DD-1), regional and local programs are carried on a time-sharing basis for terrestrial broadcasting only.
DD News, launched on 3 November 2003 and replacing DD Metro (formerly known as the DD-2 entertainment channel), provides 24-hour news. It’s motto is “Satyam Shivam Sundaram” which translates as: ‘The Truth is The God and The God is Beautiful’.
Television which is considered as one of the greatest achievements of mankind, it’s viewership has been decreasing drastically. It had a remarkable journey from black and white display to 4k display it had a witnessed a considerable amount of change.
Starting from a CRT screen to OLED screen it shows how much fan base television has. In 1990’s-2010’s television controlled nearly all aspects of life be it cooking, dancing, education, etc.
One still remembers how it dominated every aspect of television at that was at it’s peak and became the most important mode of entertainment. It became a hub for brand endorsements and companies earned huge revenue from it as well as it benefited the television channels by giving them funds, specially cosmetics advertisement boomed it’s sales and profit with this aspect.
Of course, cable and satellite TV is still leading the race — some 780 million Indians watch TV, according to a recent estimate. Only a 100 million use streaming platforms but that number is likely to grow, especially given that 65% of India is under the age of 35.
With the advent of smart phones and internet, television shine started to fade and the advent of Jio made it worse as well as internet was redefined, and it opened a lot of platform for showcasing talent and different modes of entertainment. YouTube and Dailymotion dominated such modes.
As most of the entertainment channels were available in YouTube and Dailymotion there was a drastic shift in viewership. One could easily access to YouTube for all sorts of categories like education, news, stand ups. YouTube dominated almost every aspect of life as one could easily find anything.
With news channel like BBC, Al Jazeera provided a significant boost to news category in YouTube. The smart phones destroyed the TV culture as it assured human beings one thing a life full of comfort, with the introduction of apps it made life easier and full of comfort.
As well as with Netflix and Amazon prime Video it changed the whole view of entertainment. TV has now been reduced to an endless loop of daily soap broadcaster. Due to the growing number of users in world wide web the content is now easily available in bulk and can be distributed. Television marked the decline of radio sets.
The price of internet becoming cheap nowadays thus everyone could get benefit of this utility.
Nowadays the TV operators have come with a plan to select those packages which you want to view and as well as some free channels but this also has failed miserably as most of the users can view it on streaming platforms. Thus, buying a TV set for such programme has become costly affair. Moreover, TV dishes are prone to weather conditions and it takes a lot of time for installation procedure.
According to TRAI new tariff order it showed a sharp decline in television industry, leading broadcaster Star India has seen a one per cent decline in viewership share to 30 per cent from 31 per cent in April. It also added that Viacom18 and Sony’s viewership shares have also reduced by 480–540bps year over year to 10 per cent and 8 per cent respectively due to share loss in Hindi GEC and movie segment.
Moreover, South India’s leading broadcaster Sun TV has seen a 140bps decline in viewership share to 10 per cent. TV audience measurement body BARC resumed publishing TV ratings data. Total TV impressions, which were in the range of 27–29 billion per week, fell to 15 billion. Moreover, the decline was majorly seen in the Hindi viewership, especially in the rural areas while regional viewership was less impacted.
Many free-to-air (FTA) channels like Dangal TV befitted highly from the new regulatory framework all these information was based on 13thApril data. According to BARC, youths (in the age group of 15–30) contributes 33 per cent of viewership, whereas adults (31–50 years) have the second highest contribution of 32 per cent in the total viewership.
Children, meanwhile, contribute 20% viewership. When it comes to the trends across weekends and weekdays, the viewership is the highest during prime time. As per the data, viewership starts from 6:00 am in the morning, rises gradually through the day, and peaks between 8.30 and 9.00pm.
While the reach and the impressions peak between 8.30–9.00 pm on both weekdays and weekends, the gap between reach and impressions is marginally higher on weekends, indicating that there are not enough conversions when compared to the weekdays. This may likely be due to other activities competing for the attention of the youth, and hence there is a scope to create compelling content to attract more youth audience here.
At last one can really feel the imagination of the television on action when the whole family reunites together.
