The Death of the Channel

Reports from the media meas­ure­ment company Nielsen have dropped one of the features with which the company is arguably most asso­ci­ated: the idea of a tele­vi­sion ‘channel’. MediaPost reports:

Nielsen said it had dropped one of its most popular features — data showing how many channels the average TV house­hold receives — because in a digital, time-​​shifted mul­tichannel universe, there no longer is a “con­sistent” meaning for the term “channel.”

People watch their tele­vi­sion time-​​shifted through DVRs, VCRs and VoD, through computer screens and smart­phones, along­side other media such as their laptop screens and they flick with their remotes whenever the momentum drops. They still watch pro­grammes, of course – and Nielsen’s data will measure those audi­ences. But they don’t tune in to channels anymore. The ‘how many channels’ stat­istic, which – as you’d imagine – showed an ever-​​widening number of choices, makes no sense in a world where to answer to that question is effect­ively ‘infinite’:

In 2008, the last year for which Nielsen reported the data, the average U.S. house­hold had 130.1 TV channels avail­able to it, but on average, “tuned” only 17.8 of them, according to Nielsen’s defin­i­tion of channel tuning. That means that the average TV house­holds was only watching about 14% of the channels they had avail­able to them. The per­centage of channels the average TV house­hold tunes to had been declining over the years that Nielsen has been reporting that data.

Long Live the Channel

The last sentence there – ‘The per­centage of channels the average TV house­hold tunes to had been declining over the years that Nielsen has been reporting that data” – is pretty telling. Creating more oppor­tun­ities to watch rubbish doesn’t mean that people will do so. Generally speaking, people only want to watch the good stuff, and that’s what has led the pop­ularity of time-​​shifting and over-​​the-​​web tele­vi­sion like Hulu and iPlayer. At any given moment, it’s entirely likely that there is ‘nothing’ on broad­cast TV but ‘anything you want’ via other means.

That said, the BBC still accounts for 1/​3 of the UK’s TV-​​viewing; it won 13 of the 23 tele­vi­sion BAFTA awards last year, with multiple nom­in­a­tions in almost every category. The BBC iPlayer site gets more than 1.4mn visitors a day. Could it be possible that these stat­istics are related? That a channel that cares about quality and service delivery might actually still mean some­thing as a channel? I think so.

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