Todd VanDerWerff on the declining importance of ratings in
television:
“…The most obvious changes are the invention
of the DVR and the increasing willingness of networks…to take long-range
ratings data (including DVR numbers) into consideration for renewals. Even a
few years ago, networks were hesitant to talk about DVR viewership beyond the
first couple of days after air. Yet at the most recent Television Critics
Association press tour, Fox president Kevin Reilly was talking about
live-plus-30 numbers—that is to say ratings numbers that include the number of
viewers who watch a program over the first 30 days after air—and when asked
whether she thought such an idea was nuts, Nina Tassler, chair of CBS
Entertainment, suggested that she was fine with it, so long as advertisers
would pay up. And increasingly, it would seem, they are…
…Yet DVRs—and online streaming—can’t account
for all of these changes, for the fact that even the biggest networks are more
and more interested in keeping around marginal-to-terrible performers if they
attract even the slightest amount of buzz, critical or otherwise. What’s
happening isn’t that networks have taken leave of their senses or have run out
of options and are just throwing stuff on the air they know will get a certain
number (though some degree of both may be true). What’s happening is that TV
shows increasingly are seen less as immediate performers and more as long-term assets.
The rise of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime in the world of TV has proven to be
comparable to the rise of DVD in the world of film. It’s pumping ridiculous
amounts of money, even for catalog items, into the fragile network economy.
Network TV may no longer occupy the center of the broadcast universe, but it
doesn’t need to. A good show, a show that people will want to binge-watch, can
pop up anywhere, and the potential upside for it, even if it tanks in its first
run, is enormous.”
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for the full article from the AV Club.