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Broadcast: Phooey.
Numbers fly like bullets over market-share tiff
By Elizabeth White
When thinking of the long battle between broadcast and cable for the hearts, minds and eyeballs of Americans, think of trench warfare, with numbers as bullets and words as mud to throw when the bullets run out.
Skirmishes break out whenever either side has something to brag about.
This week cable led with a report that it is approaching the 50 household share mark, which is to say it owns just about half of America's TV eyeballs.
According to the report from the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau, primetime cable viewership reached its highest point ever last week, with a collective delivery of 27.2 million homes, a 26.6 household rating and a 49.6 percent household share.
Those numbers were up 11 percent, 10 percent and 11 percent from the same week last year.
At the same time, the report says that the seven broadcast networks dropped more than 15 percent in primetime household delivery, rating and share, versus the same week one year ago.
Folks at the CAB like to think of these numbers as an early indication, like an early earthquake tremor, of another big erosion of broadcast’s viewership to cable.
"On one level, one can say we’re really getting into the summer now and broadcast is getting into repeats," says Jonathan Sims, vice president of research at the CAB.
"On the other hand, the year-ago levels were five share points lower. Cable made a five-share-point gain over one year."
That gain from year to year is big enough to suggest that broadcast’s recent renaissance with ABC’s "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" and CBS’s "Survivor" might be coming to an end.
"There’s a pattern we have noticed in the past," says Sims. "Broadcast will seem to stabilize for a while, and then it drops. We saw this in 1994 after the Olympics. It was stable in '92-'93, then the bottom dropped out and it was ugly for a while. Then in 1998-99 and 1999-2000 we saw marginal erosion."
"Broadcast can stop itself from falling, but you can only keep your finger in the dike so long. This week was particularly gruesome," says Sims.
No surprise, but the Television Bureau of Advertising disputes the CAB’s broadcast numbers, as well as the CAB’s methodology.
It suggests some sleight-of-hand numbers-juggling, moreover.
"They say they delivered 27.2 million homes and beat us by 4.9 million homes, but when we add in the Hispanic and independent broadcasters, we come in with 27.9 million homes, which slightly beats them," says Harold Simpson, vice president of research and development at the TVB.
"Of the top 75 programs, there’s only one cable show, and it’s a wrestling show."
Perhaps the biggest point of contention by the TVB is the exclusion of Hispanic broadcast networks in the CAB’s numbers.
"The Hispanic broadcasts have been growing at a higher rate than the rest of broadcast," says Gary Belis, vice president of communications at the TVB. "It’s a significant omission."
Aside from the exclusion of smaller broadcasters, the TVB, which monitors cable and broadcast shares on a monthly basis during the broadcast season, questions the CAB’s weekly approach.
"They are comparing a rather high week against last year, when there was ‘Survivor’ fever," says Simpson. "One of the things that was a factor on our side last year is that one of the ‘Survivor’ programs [during the measured week] scored a 15 household rating."
Something the CAB and TVB do agree on is that the real test of cable’s newfound share will come at the end of the summer, when the broadcasters begin showing full slates of original programming.
Cable’s share has dropped in recent years around four to five share points from the last week of the Nielsen year to the new year that begins the following week, when broadcasters debut their fall seasons.
Depending on what cable’s share was during the season, the drop typically represents a nine to 13 percent loss in household share.
"There’s still a long part of the summer to go, but the first week was a good one," says Sims.
"The broadcasters have less and less opportunity to promote. A bad summer for broadcast bodes poorly for the start of the 2001-02 season. That’s happened historically. Those viewers that go to cable don’t magically return in the fall."
June 29, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Elizabeth White is a staff writer for Media Life.
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