• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, October 13, 2015

Amid all the declining ratings, TV executives cling to hopes that live productions of shows may lead to premium ad inventory.

While prime-time scripted TV programming has toyed -- on and off -- with isolated “live” episodes, NBC has stepped up its efforts. Its comedy on Fridays, “Undateable,” will run an entire season of live episodes.

Turns out  -- at least initially -- what’s live isn’t important to TV viewers. The comedy’s premiere episode this season earned a mild Nielsen 0.8 rating/3 share among 18-49 viewers and 2.5 million overall viewers. NBC efforts earned it a third place spot overall on the night (0.9/3 in the 18-49 demographic) behind ABC (1.3/5) and CBS (1.2/4).

So live programming would still seem to be a risky venture. Millennials, for one demo, may just shrug shoulders: Why would this matter? But older generations might point out the excitement of going to see live theater, and how that is vastly different from a screen/TV experience.

NBC did make some impact two years ago with surprisingly high ratings for  “The Sound of Music Live!” Last year's effort, “Peter Pan Live!,” posted lower results.

Discussion about live TV gets amplified when the subject turns to  sports; football games, in particular,  can dominate other prime-time fare. But it isn’t just about a live transmission of any game; NFL proponents say the content needs to be compelling.

It wasn’t that long ago prime-time TV didn’t necessarily need the live modifier attached to amp up its value. Still, there are silver linings with all that time-shifting of TV programming -- traditional and online.

All this will probably change -- for TV advertisers, anyway -- when Nielsen, comScore/Rentrak or another company can figure out a dynamic, easy-to-recognize way to compute and verify a true total audience measurement.