Linear TV’s Role Changing, But Still Vital

Despite a drop in the number of consumers who watch television in a traditional way, broadcast TV is far from over, industry watchers say.

“It’s not dead,” Charles Chunn, Graham Media Group’s VP of research, said Thursday. Chunn said that he doesn’t believe consumers consider watching content on, say, a computer or mobile device as abandoning the medium.

“It’s still TV to them,” he said, adding, “It’s all about definition.”

Chunn’s comments were part of a panel discussion assessing the state of linear TV, and its role in the larger media ecosystem, at the CCW-SATCON conference in New York.

Chunn, along with Advertising Digital Identification’s Harold Geller and Assembly’s Catherine Warburton, agreed that linear TV is still a viable (and currently the most popular) means of consuming programming.

The panelists said research from Nielsen’s cross-platform report shows that this year 80% of viewers consumed video content via broadcast TV, versus the remainder who preferred other platforms like OTT or video on demand. However, that number was down from 2011, when 89% of consumers favored linear TV.

In turn, panelists said the industry — from both the broadcast and advertising sides — need to start considering broadcast TV “one part of the mix,” and find the means to capture — and measure — consumers across platforms.

Warburton said that although ad buyers (primarily national advertisers) still consider “linear TV very, very important,” they are more willing now than they used to be put some of the money they spend on broadcast toward advertising on other platforms.

However, she said individuals from both sides of the equation — buyers and sellers (i.e., broadcasters) — need to agree on a means to measure viewers’ cross-platform consumption because “if we don’t have the right measurement we don’t know what the value is.”

She said the “buying community is open to working out some kind of compromise” that gives broadcasters the ability to count viewers across platforms and provide advertisers with what they need to buy more confidently.

“We need to negotiate some sort of currency,” she said. “It’s not going to be perfect, but right now we’re far from perfect.”

Read more CCW-SATCON coverage here.