Last night I was driving home from a homebrew competition at Cocoa Beach and my
phone started pinging like a pin ball machine. Monty was posting articles from
the New York Times special report: TV Transformed.
For some reason Monty missed this article, which contains a bunch of stats that
are highly relevant to recent discussions with Bert. The figures contain much
of the meat, so please click through to read the article and view the figures.
Then come back to see a bit of analysis.
Millennials Reconnect the Cable Cord as Children Arrive
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/03/business/media/changing-media-consumption-millenials-cord-cutters.html
RUBack?
Bert keeps trying to convince us that cord cutting is rampant especially among
Millennials. In the figures under Dropping Cable (After They Move Out) we see
that 75% of Millennials without children subscribe to cable; that increases to
80% when they have kids. And 89% living at home or "other homes" have cable.
Not quite the sky is falling scenario Bert paints.
In the figure Cable: Will They or Won't They, the graphic "How People Without
Cable Get their TV Programming" tells us that Internet only TV is less than 10%
in homes that have a TV, and across all age groups only 10% use antennas.
More validation that streaming is nowhere close to half of all TV viewing in
the U.S.
In the figure "Getting TV Their Way" we learn that 54% of Millennials watch
their favorite shows when they are broadcast (i.e. live), which dovetails
nicely with the article that tells us that social media is contributing to
increased viewing of the live broadcasts AND audience growth for the time
shifted viewing windows.
Perhaps the most interesting factoid is the very high percentage of people who
listen to radio. No doubt a huge percentage of this takes place in vehicles...
Whether or not the Millennial is texting.
;-(
All in all, the NYTimes info dump was very interesting. But this paragraph may
be the most revealing and important:
The telephone gave us a long-distance voice. Radio took away the wires;
television added pictures. But the real revolution occurred well before all
of that: In one fell swoop, the telegraph allowed messages to travel not at
the pace of a man on a pony or a speeding locomotive but at the velocity of
an electron. In like fashion, the colossal library of Netflix may be
impressive, but the videocassette recorder was a revolution. The rest, which
a reeling industry is still trying to sort out, is digital gravy.
