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The digital video market, being nascent, promising and hot, is the equivalent of a precocious young celebrity. They both attract a lot of attention, press coverage, and debate concerning which projects and relationships are worth pursuing. Of course, I have my own opinion, but just about digital video and not celebrities. If you divide the digital video market by delivery methods (streaming or downloaded) and business models (consumer paid or ad supported), four sectors emerge.
Yesterday TiVo released the results of an examination of how political party affiliation differs among top rated news and primetime programs. The results are based on viewership for July, fed by TiVo’s Stopwatch ratings service, which compiles from a consumer panel of 35,000 volunteer households. Most of the information released is categorized by either Republican or Democrat partisanship, so it is difficult to compare how a particular program performed across party lines. The full press release detailing the viewership of 40 programs between the two parties can found here. The partisanship strength for the shows is indicated by an “index,” which I roughly equated to being the 18-49 rating divided by the rating of how many Democrat or Republican households watched the program. The following graph lays out all the results with the 18-49 rating on the horizontal axis and the partisanship index on the vertical axis. The news programs, with their relatively low ratings form a cluster on the upper left while the primetime shows form a file in the lower right.
Unsurprisingly, given current polarization, the news programs as a whole had much higher partisanship indexes than the primetime programs. What was unexpected was to see the CBS Morning News have the highest index among any of the programs. Equally unexpected was to see Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell, a program on HLN (Headline News) to have a higher ratio of Republicans in its audience than any program on Fox News, although Glenn Beck was very close behind. Among the primetime programming two shows made it into the top ten of both the Democrat and Republican indexes: The Closer and Raising the Bar, both on TNT. Perhaps TNT’s new motto should be “Where America comes together.” Most of the new broadcast television shows have premiered during the past three weeks and I thought it was time to draw a comparison among the top performers. The number one show in terms of overall viewers was NCIS, with a total audience of 18.9 million. Unsurprisingly, NCIS‘s lead-out and spin-off, NCIS: Los Angeles, also had a strong premiere with 1.74 million viewers and placed in third. In between at second place The Jay Leno Show drew 17.7 million viewers. ABC placed two shows in fourth and fifth place (Dancing With the Stars and Grey’s Anatomy), but CBS nabbed by far the most spots in this list with six spots.
The 18-49 demo ratings tell a much different and more important story. CBS loses its top position, placing half as many shows. The top spots here are for Grey’s Anatomy, House, The Jay Leno Show, Family Guy and The Cleveland Show. That’s three out of the top five for Fox.
In terms of overall performance I don’t have enough data to draw much information. TVbytheNumbers.com does have an excellent post comparing the broadcast network performance during the first week of this Fall season to last year. The only networks that are showing positive growth in overall viewership and within the 18-49 demo are MyNetworkTV and CBS. I did draw a comparison between the network ratings by averaging out results within three time slots. While not indicating that a particular network is leading, these results do show that the highest ratings were drawn around 9:00 p.m.
This result probably has a lot to do with DVR viewership. These ratings are Live+SD (same day) meaning that time-shifted viewing before 3:00 a.m. the same “night” is included. Furthermore, it has also been reported that during this Fall season DVR viewing increased from two hours to four or five per night and given that shows in the 9:00 p.m. time slot have normally been the most popular for DVR use, these heightened ratings at 9:00 p.m. make sense. The downside is that shows at 10:00 p.m. suffer, competing not only with shows in their own time slot but also with time-shifted programming from 8 or 9:00 p.m. There might be an exception to this trends and it’s The Jay Leno Show‘s whose timely content may stave the DVR push from earlier time periods and attract audiences for live viewing. The Jay Leno Show has lowered DVR viewing within its time slot from 70% to 46%. A higher proportion of live viewing may also mean that the show’s audience is opting away from watching other timeshifted programming, but that could only be proven by measuring overall timeshifted viewing at 10:00 p.m. I recently attended Advertising Week in New York City and had a lot to hear from some very eloquent speakers. Here are the top 10 moments that I found to be inspiring, provocative or at least original. (10) Changing Roles: It seemed to me that change was a prevalent theme at the conference and that all participants expressed a willingness to reconsider what roles their companies should be playing.
Everywhere the status quo is being questioned and resources are being redirected. Still, the norm is established for a reason and as Rob Norman CEO of GroupM put it, agencies exist for the creation, distribution and measurement of brands and messages across various media, and it seems to me that this is value that marketers will need for some time to come. (9) Ad Spending: Subsequently, despite the economic downturn and cuts in certain media overall ad spending can still be expected to grow roughly along with the GDP at 1 to 2% per year. Ad spending will fragment however among more media platforms and channels, and this increased competition will yield a greater “purchasing power” for advertisers; a “bigger bang for their buck” in other words. For the past few years the home video industry has been undergoing some traumatic changes. Although there was an almost seamless transition from the VHS to the DVD format, the shift to a high definition disc format has been stifled as a result of the format battle between HD and Blue-Ray. It’s also possible that consumers haven’t been convinced by a high-definition format will bring significant new benefits. In any case, it seems that the overall market has several challenges ahead.
NOTE: This posting has been updated with the slightly higher final ratings results for the premiere show of The Jay Leno Show. After a long wait and even more publicity The Jay Leno Show premiered last night, attracting a considerable audience of 18.42 million viewers and nabbing a respectable 5.3 rating in the 18-49 demographic. Of course the question remains about how the show will perform in the long term. The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien had a premiere night audience of 7.1 million viewers. The premiere week average was 6.1 million and the season-to-date average for Conan’s two month tenure is around 1.2 million (60.6% less than the premiere night). Based on these relative drop-offs The Jay Leno Show can be expected to averaging just over 7 million viewers within two months.
Last week Nielsen released the most recent version of its Three Screen Report, which measures consumption of television, internet and mobile media. As in releases since 2007 the study demonstrates television’s dominance in terms of time spent with the medium. On average a consumer will watch 278 minutes (4.6 hours) of “traditional” (non time-shifted) television per day.
Last week Nielsen announced the number of Hispanic TV households had increased by 2.3% to a current total of 12.95 million. Among the top 10 Designated Market Areas (DMAs) the average growth was 1.7%. The big standout was the Dallas-Fort Worth market (#5 Hispanic and overall DMA) which grew an incredible 3.7% to 506,020 households.
The summer ended today and it seems to have been a mediocre season for Hollywood. The total U.S. box office gross between Memorial Day and Labor Day was $4.3 billion, which is 1.4% less than 2008 but 4% above 2007 per Variety. At the beginning of the summer the box office was 24% above last year but it now stands less than a third.
Following yesterday’s post regarding the rising in the overall online video market I wanted to focus today on individual site performance. However, I ran into a small problem regarding information availability. Usually online video press releases just delve into unique users or total video streams. These dimensions can be attractive for their simplicity but they don’t paint the whole picture. To truly see how much video activity a site is attracting, three dimensions have to combined:
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