On this week’s podcast (which is also this week’s edition of The Addition) we hear from author, journalist and broadcaster Charlotte Henry. She creates and runs The Addition newsletter and podcast; an award-winning publication looking at the crossover between media and technology.
Charlotte has written the Broadcast chapter of our upcoming Media Moments 2023 report, so it was only right and proper that we got her on to discuss all the broadcast trends of the past year. It’s been a big old year for TV — both good and bad — so it was great to get an expert in to chat it all over.
We discuss the role of exclusive content, the doldrums of advertising sales across linear broadcasts, the need to differentiate a streaming service from its competitors, and the longer term impact of the Hollywood actors’ strike. We also explore how streaming platforms like Disney+ and Netflix are faring a year after introducing ad-supported tiers.
The past 12 months’ TV and broadcast trends will be one of the chapters we explore as part of our upcoming Media Moments 2023 report. Find out more and pre-register for the report here.
Here are some highlights from the episode, lightly edited for clarity:
A reappraisal of the value of linear TV
To me, the only thing keeping linear TV in any way relevant is live sport, and to some extent, live news. Sport in particular is just about the only thing you cannot replicate. You can’t binge watch it. You can binge watch it like I do on a Sunday and just turn Sky Sports on all day and not move, but it’s happening live.
Live sport to me is the thing that’s worth a lot of advertising. No doubt we’ll see huge numbers going into the Super Bowl advertising, and we saw big numbers for say, the Lionesses in the World Cup, that kind of thing.
But big drama series that the likes of the BBC or ITV are producing, people are not settling down any more at eight, nine o’clock on a Sunday evening to watch it. Perhaps an example where they did was Succession where we didn’t want spoilers. But it’s not the same. And obviously that’s having an effect on the ad market.
If you look at the numbers, you would see people are not sitting down for the 10 o’clock news every day. As we’re recording this, there has been a massive row about Newsnight. So I don’t think [scheduled viewing] is happening as much. It happens in big moments, so the Queen has died, the King has been coronated; people watch those live news events, or watch bulletins at the end of the day to see what’s happening. But you only have to look at them to see that’s not the real trend any more. People are dipping in and out most of the time during the day.
Changing consumption habits
Ofcom’s Media Nations 2023 report found that 16-24 year olds are now watching less television on average than 4-15 year olds. That’s the first time that’s ever flipped. I’m guessing what it means is 16 to 24 year olds are sitting watching TikTok or YouTube, or watching Chris play games on Twitch as opposed to sitting watching whatever is on at 5 o’clock on BBC One, like maybe we did as kids.
The habits aren’t even being broken. They’re not being formed any more. I’m thinking of knowing that Friends was on e4 every afternoon as a teenager. Now if you’re a teenager, you don’t care whether it’s on Comedy Central or e4. You just put it on Netflix at the moment you want, on the episode you want. Those [linear] habits are not broken, and not coming back.
Increased pressure making less interesting TV
In some ways, this was where Netflix, particularly in the early days, thrived. It could take a risk on writers from different backgrounds, on younger writers, on less ‘tried and tested’ stuff. That gave opportunities to lots of people.
If there’s more [investor] fear in the industry over what they’re making, who’s going to watch it, is it going to work or not, that will make things difficult. That’s one thing the BBC can do; it has no commercial responsibility.
Channel 4 was always the best at this. It made stuff literally no one else would get away with. No one else would have got away with making – I’m going to age myself terribly but I don’t care – no one else would have got away with making Skins apart from Channel 4. Frankly, no one else would get away with making Naked Attraction, apart from Channel 4. But they can take a punt on those things. And that is really important, because it means people feel freer to be able to give opportunities to people from backgrounds who maybe don’t get the opportunities, but have all the talent.
