Commentary
Live, Linear TV Still Lives - Will Pro Sports On Amazon, YouTube Force An Ad-Revenue Shift?
- by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, January 26, 2023
Is linear TV dying? Netflix executives have said this may happen in five to ten years.
However, for all the complaints about live, linear TV -- around the increasing uncertainty of measurement as well as viewership erosion -- it still retains a strong level of national TV advertising dollars, something …
Wayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost. You can reach Wayne at wayne@mediapost.com.
Wayne, Bernstein is overstating the importance of live sports to "linear TV". It's important---of course---but hardly the "last stand" of "linearTV" whose audience is not "collapsing" but is gradually shifting to streaming. But what about national and local news? Isn't that also a pillar of strength for"linear TV"? Of course it is. Indeed, when you combine the two---news and sports----they aggregte somewhere in the vicinity of 25-30% of all linear TV viewing time but attract about 45% of the ad revenues. And let's not forget that the median age of your typical TV sports viewer---in terms of average minute audience---- is about 50-52 years while the corresponding figure for news is more like 60-65 years. Which means theat these kinds of viewers are least likely to dump "linear TV" to get their sports or news fix via streaming unless these program genres are only available via streaming. And we are a long way from that.
So, of course, Amazon may pull away some "linear TV" sports dollars---but not a lot--until it gets its hands on the prime sports features and on an exclusive basis----not out-of-market football games which the league cobbles together to grab some extra viewing time---- and incomes from Amazon.