Last week, Paul Asay talked about the incredible proliferation of niche programming in our ever-expanding media universe in his blog post “Coming Soon: The Atheist Channel.” And today I’d like to riff on a related theme, albeit one that contains a paradoxical twist from some of the comments Paul made in his article.
Here’s the paradox in nutshell: Despite more television options than ever, the number of channels we actually watch is barely more than it was when we had far fewer options.
Nielsen reports that the average American household had access to 189.1 television channels at the end of 2013, up from 129.3 back in 2008. That’s an increase of nearly 60 channels. Now, you’d think with that many more options, the number of channels we’d actually be watching would have risen significantly as well.
But it hasn’t. In fact, it’s barely budged at all.
Nielsen says that in 2008, the average viewer watched 17.3 channels. Adding 60 more options since then? Well, that bumped things up a mere two-tenths of a percent, to 17.5 channels. To put it in percentage terms, the number of channels available to Joe Television Watcher has expanded 46%, while the channels he actually watches has increased about 1%.
Nielsen’s media experts said, “This data is significant in that it substantiates the notion that more content does not necessarily equate to more channel consumption. And that means quality is imperative—for both content creators and advertisers. So the best way to reach consumers in a world with myriad options is to be the best option.”
While I won’t disagree with Nielsen’s interpretation that quality programming is critically important in such a fiercely competitive market, I wonder if there’s a more basic observation to make here: Culturally, we seem to have reached a threshold (at least when it comes to television) regarding how much we can realistically consume. We’re apparently approaching a limit of sorts. And dumping more and more options on channel-surfing consumers isn’t changing their habits much.
I’d further hypothesize that even if every channel on TV had more quality content, the number of channels we’d actually watch wouldn’t rise much at all. That idea is supported by the fact that many of the shows professional television critics rave about—Mad Men, The Americans, House of Cards and Girls, to name but a few—are actually watched by a fairly small number of viewers. Thus there’s not necessarily any correlation between aesthetic “quality” (at least as mainstream critics define such a thing) and viewership.
No, I think what these numbers really indicate is a fatigue with the entire enterprise, regardless of whether all those channels feature content that’s great, awful or lurking somewhere in the mediocre middle. Perhaps because our attention spans are already too fragmented, perhaps because we can only take in so much screen time, perhaps because we can only keep so many channels on our internal speed dial, more doesn’t really mean more when it comes to TV anymore.
Recent Comments