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Micro/macro sociological trends in media
NoisyToyKing
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm fascinated by the sociological trends of media consumption and the impact different channels play in how, what, and when we consume that media.
TL;DR- What media devices do you use, do you find the content appreciably different from it's legacy version, and does the freedom of any-time-consumption change your feelings about the content?
Obviously the sample of the members of this forum who frequent this board and are interested in posting to this thread will be different than the US population, BUT, some background to my point here...
Nielsen data that I've perused from their last 5 years of reports (Total Audience Report, Cross Platform Report, etc) as well as more niche research outlets like Leichtman Research, Kantar Media, and others, point to an obvious trend: More video is being watched than ever before, but less of it is being consumed as Live TV every single year. The stats I have seen show that people 18-24 are watching about 7 hours of live tv less every week than 4 years ago (5 hours 40 minutes less per week for adults 18+). The primary cannibal of these hours are mobile devices and Internet Connected Devices like smart TV's, Roku, ChromeCast, etc. Interesting quote from an article I read, NBCUniversal's CEO Steve Burke has 5 children between 19-28, and "None" subscribe to cable or satellite. YouTube is another huge time sink for young people and claims to have "over a billion users" and "higher ratings among 18-34 and 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the US."
Further, Netflix is aiming to have 50% of it's content be "original" by 2017, which will be accompanied by rate increases as well. YouTube has seen recent changes that are shaking up content creators pretty significantly. Interestingly, the Trump / Pence campaign has opted to not run any TV commercials this election, preferring to let outside groups and PACs do that instead. Lastly, the extinction of the "Unlimited Data Plan" by nearly every mobile carrier is concerning. This, I think, is a huge coup for TeleComs to convince people to bundle TV & Internet.
I know I'm missing a lot of other video services and changes happening in TV-land to get people back. But I also think that media consumed through a mobile device is inherently different than that consumed at a desktop or television. Most of my media consumption is through YouTube, Steam, and Xbox One. I pay for internet and Xbox Gold, but nothing else subscription-wise (I get a free spotify premium account as a starbucks employee). There's the obvious difference of listening to Spotify compared to putting in a CD or vinyl; sound quality, sentimentality, selection size, intent of creator. I know when I put on an album, pull down my Sennheiser HD6 Mix headphones, and just chill on my couch, I'm getting closer to how the artist intended that experience to be appreciated. Then there's the comparison to Spotify and AM/FM radio. But what about the difference between a YouTube channel and regular network programming? Or YouTube vs Netflix or Hulu? Do you sit down on your couch, screencast your favorite youtuber to your tv and eat some Hungry Man until you've binged watched their last entire channel? What are we gaining? What are we losing? And what's next that we maybe haven't seen yet?
TL;DR- What media devices do you use, do you find the content appreciably different from it's legacy version, and does the freedom of any-time-consumption change your feelings about the content?
Obviously the sample of the members of this forum who frequent this board and are interested in posting to this thread will be different than the US population, BUT, some background to my point here...
Nielsen data that I've perused from their last 5 years of reports (Total Audience Report, Cross Platform Report, etc) as well as more niche research outlets like Leichtman Research, Kantar Media, and others, point to an obvious trend: More video is being watched than ever before, but less of it is being consumed as Live TV every single year. The stats I have seen show that people 18-24 are watching about 7 hours of live tv less every week than 4 years ago (5 hours 40 minutes less per week for adults 18+). The primary cannibal of these hours are mobile devices and Internet Connected Devices like smart TV's, Roku, ChromeCast, etc. Interesting quote from an article I read, NBCUniversal's CEO Steve Burke has 5 children between 19-28, and "None" subscribe to cable or satellite. YouTube is another huge time sink for young people and claims to have "over a billion users" and "higher ratings among 18-34 and 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the US."
Further, Netflix is aiming to have 50% of it's content be "original" by 2017, which will be accompanied by rate increases as well. YouTube has seen recent changes that are shaking up content creators pretty significantly. Interestingly, the Trump / Pence campaign has opted to not run any TV commercials this election, preferring to let outside groups and PACs do that instead. Lastly, the extinction of the "Unlimited Data Plan" by nearly every mobile carrier is concerning. This, I think, is a huge coup for TeleComs to convince people to bundle TV & Internet.
I know I'm missing a lot of other video services and changes happening in TV-land to get people back. But I also think that media consumed through a mobile device is inherently different than that consumed at a desktop or television. Most of my media consumption is through YouTube, Steam, and Xbox One. I pay for internet and Xbox Gold, but nothing else subscription-wise (I get a free spotify premium account as a starbucks employee). There's the obvious difference of listening to Spotify compared to putting in a CD or vinyl; sound quality, sentimentality, selection size, intent of creator. I know when I put on an album, pull down my Sennheiser HD6 Mix headphones, and just chill on my couch, I'm getting closer to how the artist intended that experience to be appreciated. Then there's the comparison to Spotify and AM/FM radio. But what about the difference between a YouTube channel and regular network programming? Or YouTube vs Netflix or Hulu? Do you sit down on your couch, screencast your favorite youtuber to your tv and eat some Hungry Man until you've binged watched their last entire channel? What are we gaining? What are we losing? And what's next that we maybe haven't seen yet?
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Anyway, the trend I find interesting in this is that TV esp network TV has become noticeably browner and more female focused in the last few years.
Now there are a couple explanations for this, but I think the most likely is that, outside of sports, the eyeballs of 18-35 year old men are not watching TV shows. Looking at steam charts, basically every day of the week during prime time, about 1.8 million people are in a game on Steam. About 800k of them in Dota2 and another 450k in CS:GO.
League pulls in about 7m a day. Overwatch is pulling pretty close to LoL numbers, and there's always the old reliable time suck of WoW. And these are just PC titles.
Now these are international platforms, so what% of players is US based is hard to tell, although the spike around US prime time means most of them are in the Americas. Twitch pulls about 12.2m uniques a month and 68m views from the US.
https://www.quantcast.com/twitch.tv#/trafficCard
Gives some demo breakdown: 82% male 68% white.
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/this-weeks-broadcast-ratings/
Has some good numbers for ratings stuff.
Big Bang Theory got 5.8m viewers last week. America's Got Talent the highest rated show that wasn't football got an 14.2 and Sunday night football got 22.7m.
If you make the assumption that every one of twitches 67.7m views is someone watching 1h of twitch. It gets about the same monthly viewer time as Big Brother does, which was 16&17 last week.
There's a bit of voodoo in looking at games, but DOTA2 with its 800k a night peak player base is probably grabbing about as much weekly eyetime idk 4-5 big bang theories?
Someone with more time to look up demos and numbers could probably put together a more thorough comparison. But I think there is a pretty strong argument to be made that at every prime time time-slot, the most watched non-sports program is, Video Games. And as video games skew male and white, the audience pool for broadcast TV has been skewing more heavily female and non-white.
I wouldn't be surprised if the non-white part of this trend was intensified by the fact that while A streaming service is cheap. Having Amazon Prime, and Netflix, and Hulu, and HBO Go, and internet that is fast enough for it, is as a total package expensive.