This morning I read a
McCleans Magazine article on the television watching ratings amongst young men (18-30 IIRC) that have fallen a staggering 17.6% and of the straws the networks are grasping at to save themselves. This is old news, everyone knows it. What was new to me was the networks' desperate efforts to prop up their dying businesses. The reasoning given in this article for their inability to bring back the male audiences is that they are not allowed to show excessive violence or obscenities, whereas cable television stations are allowed to do so. The so called "Free TV" rules are working against them. What a load of rubbish.
The networks are getting desperate as the question of "What is it that men want that we can provide?" can't be happily answered by the television anymore. So what do we want? We want to be experiancing a life and death battle, to jump down 1-1/2 stories off a building at two Axis dynamite-planting sabatoures while riddling them with our machine gun fire and laughing as they desperately try to find their attacker before they die. We want to perform feats of dexterity like disarming their two timed dynamite bombs just half a second before everyone goes up in fire and to know that it saved your team and the game. And when the battle's over and all you can hear is the sound of your heart, and you realize that your'e half standing in your chair, we want to sit back down again before continuing our video game.
Television just can't compete.
In fact, I'd go as far as saying that unless a television program is outrageously funny (like Seinfeld or the classic Simpsons) it just can't stand up at all in the slightest. Good laughs, I think, can match the adrenalin rush of the video game on an interest scale, but, as the television networks know, a show that generates such unqueued-by-the-laugh-track laughter is exceptionally rare (I'd also watch a really solid intellectual show, but then, that type of program depends upon a much smaller demographic than gender, the viewer's personal taste in documentaries).
But Adrenaline is just one of many reasons why television is dead. For instance, video games are available anytime, if I'm in the mood, I could be fighting the Nazi's in central Europe right now. If I want to watch Mash, I'm outta luck, unless I wait till its on, by which time I'll probably be outta the Mash mood. Thats why we channel surf you know, to find a show which matches our mood because we don't like to match our mood to the show.
The BBC has recently announced that they will be starting television on demand (as reported here on /.), allowing the British Public to download, watch, and even burn to DVD any show they want and when they want. The Beeb is and will certainly thrive in the digital age.
Finally if a lack of excitement, no good laughs, and being at the right time and in the right mood to watch a show aren't enough to turn you off, then the advertising will. Without bothering to look up any statistics, theres too much of it, even in Canada, which is nothing compared to the States. If they want a return of their wandering audiences, who are playing games without advertising breaks, they are going to drastically lessen the ads. Perhaps take a que from the forwards-looking Beeb and place them between the shows and not in them.
