Big-time live TV broadcasts lately have been delivering the thrills — but not the ratings.
The jaw-dropping finish to last week’s 89th annual Academy Awards — in which “La La Land” was mistakenly announced as best picture — was only watched live by 33 million viewers, the second-lowest tally in Oscar history.
Meanwhile, a catastrophic performance by Mariah Carey on ABC’s Dec. 31 “Primetime New Year’s Rockin Eve” broadcast made headlines worldwide, but drew only 11.43 million viewers — a million and a half fewer than the ball-dropping bash attracted a year earlier.
And then there was the Super Bowl, in which the New England Patriots’ spectacular comeback to defeat the Atlanta Falcons was easily one of the most thrilling finishes in NFL history — yet was watched in real time by 111 million viewers, short of the 114 million record set in 2014.
The live-TV meltdown isn’t going unnoticed by advertisers who, like cord-cutting viewers who have ditched their cable subscriptions, are increasingly feeling the pull of the internet.
“Media fragmentation is causing a splinter,” said Jon Cogan, managing director of investment research at Omnicom Media Group. “Live TV, or your DVR queue, or Netflix queue or on-demand — the choices are enormous compared to recent years. People want to watch what technology has given them an opportunity to watch.”
Indeed, with the big May TV upfront selling period around the corner, and marketers ready to comb the data to figure out how to spend some $70 billion, NBCUniversal said last week it won’t wait around: It set aside $1 billion of inventory to guarantee against digital data rather than Nielsen’s TV ratings.
Among the most disturbing trends, media experts say, is viewers’ increasing willingness to catch clips of live events after they’ve ended.
In the week since Warren Beatty roped Faye Dunaway into the “La La Land” disaster onstage, it is YouTube that has racked up more than 12 million views from three clips of the slow-motion train wreck.
Viewers are also getting into the habit of watching live broadcasts over the Web. In the case of the Super Bowl, broadcaster Fox disclosed that it delivered an average-minute audience of 1.72 million via its internet stream, a 23-percent growth over the previous year and a 224-percent increase since Fox’s last Super Bowl in 2014.
Meanwhile, the NFL’s TV broadcasts — the priciest airtime around — ended the football season down 9 percent. The sheer size of the slump has left media watchers worried that it wasn’t just the chaos of the presidential election that distracted viewers, but the screens of their laptops and smartphones.
The list of casualties goes on. The Emmys hit an all-time low last September, drawing just 11.3 million viewers. MTV’s VMA Awards plummeted 18 percent in August, drawing 6.5 million.
There have been a handful of exceptions to the rule: the Grammys and the Golden Globes both improved ratings.