The Wisdom of Crowds

October 2008

Broadcasting—old media. Linear television—a dinosaur. Couch potatoes—soon to be relics of the past. For a long time now, we’ve been hearing of the impending demise of television as we’ve known it. Top-level broadcasting executives have even been inciting people in the business to start reinventing themselves and find new jobs because in ten years’ time this industry will dry up.

Word on the street has it the Internet and other new media are taking over. This new generation of “wherever, whenever” viewers will reduce the remote control to a fossil.

Well, everything I’ve seen in the past few months points to the contrary. Yes, broadcast networks have to intelligently migrate content to the digital world and all its different platforms in order to capture as many eyeballs as possible, but good old network television is far from dying. When TV offers programming that people want to watch, they come flocking.

We saw it with the EURO 2008 this summer. Not only the final between Spain and Germany, but other matches, as well, got extremely high ratings. The Beijing Olympic Games attracted the largest global TV audience ever—4.7 billion viewers—or 70 percent of the world’s population, according to Nielsen. And in the U.S., the Olympics were the most-viewed event in American TV history, reaching a total audience of 214 million. NBC Universal spread coverage of the games across a number of its networks and used the Internet to stream competitions not shown on TV. (That’s what I was referring to as intelligently migrating content to the digital world.)

And what about the number of American viewers who watched the Democratic and Republican National Conventions? This is widely being touted as the election of a lifetime. Senator Barack Obama’s speech drew 38.4 million viewers and that was topped by the 38.9 million viewers for Senator John McCain’s.

But nowhere was television’s power to gather people together more apparent than during that catastrophic week on Wall Street, when investment banks fell like dominos: Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and then the insurance company AIG. As phrases such as “worse than the crash of 1929,” “global meltdown,” and “financial 9/11” were being bandied about on all media, it was the TV we turned to. And then we saw U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson speaking at a White House press conference, looking more presidential than anyone has in the last eight years. He was in control. He was authoritative. He was what we, as confused and worried viewers, needed to hear and see, and what shell-shocked Wall Street and the world financial community needed to hear and see. And the emphasis here is “hear and see,” and that is what television can deliver—audio and images. Yes, we could check updates throughout the day on various websites, but when we wanted to understand what was happening and why, we turned to the TV. Paulson had the same calming effect that Rudy Giuliani had after September 11. In moments of crisis, TV has gravitas and the ability to reassure—newspapers or websites don’t. We need the human contact; we need to feel part of a larger community. Marshall McLuhan was spot on in his predictions of the global village.

Big, important events—whether sports, news or entertainment—are still able to capture large audiences and create that global village. But in order to pull viewers away from the other forms of media, networks have to offer programming so compelling that we must feel we can’t miss it. Nowadays, networks reach that pot at the end of the rainbow when they create a “megabrand,” a show so successful that it spins off extensions beyond the TV set to the Internet, publishing, mobile phones and more. These tentpole programs run the gamut in genres and target age groups, from American Idol, Planet Earth and CSI to High School Musical, SpongeBob SquarePants and Thomas & Friends. In our main feature, we examine what it takes to create a megabrand and, more importantly, how to keep its momentum going once one takes off.

We also interview Viacom’s Philippe Dauman, Tornante’s Michael Eisner and YouTube’s Chad Hurley, among many others. We check the offerings of DTT platforms in TV Europe, examine the new trend of physical competition shows in TV Formats, explore wildlife programming in TV Real, track the progress of cable and satellite channels in TV Asia Pacific; and examine the European success of novelas in TV Latina, as well as celebrate the tenth anniversary of TV Kids. In short, this is our biggest issue in 23 years.

As the world keeps getting more complicated, bombarding us with all sorts of news, we will stay focused on giving you the information you need, in print and online. (We have already migrated intelligently to the digital world.)