HIDE THE DECLINE: TV’s awful year.
Congratulations to NBC. It passed CBS last year as the most-watched network on television — because NBC’s viewership fell by only 7%, while CBS lost 8% of its viewers.
45 of the top 50 TV channels and networks lost viewers. Only 3 gained (ESPN, ESPN 2 and the Paramount Network). TV Land and Bounce TV neither gained nor lost viewers.
The drop in viewers came despite an Olympics, a popular war and a federal election.
It is pretty spectacular that people tuned out coverage of a very close election. Fox News viewership dropped 1%, MSNBC dropped 22% and CNN dropped 34%.
You cannot blame the drop in viewers on cable cutting.
How bad is TV’s decline? CNN Lost a Third of Its Primetime Viewers in 2022 – an Election Year.
Related: The Good Times Lasted a Century. “From Herman Mankiewicz’s 1926 telegram [to Ben Hecht, in which he cabled, ‘Millions are to be grabbed out here. And your only competition is idiots.’] to the most recent depressing Warner Brothers Discovery earnings call, the business was doing, as we used to say when there was still a reason to say it, boffo business. Today, the worst thing you can do for young people trying to break into show business is encourage them. The number of movies in release has never been smaller, and studios are still trying to figure out the economics of the feature-film business in the age of streaming. They have only recently discovered that spending $100 million on a feature film that goes directly to streaming is a money-loser—but then so are multi-episode series that sit, unwatched, on the servers of Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, you name it.”