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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1488864
Reset The industry Needs to Pause, Consider the Viewing Public By Andy Marken The artful master of linguistics and baseball legend Yogi Berra has been quoted as saying, “When you come to a fork in the road, Take It!” Great advice … keep moving forward. The problem for the video content industry is that there are too d**n many forks, each has potholes and everyone is certain his fork is the right one. The one thing everyone can agree on is that linear TV is slowly, painfully fading and becoming a niche entertainment service at best. US Pay TV subscriptions have fallen 6.1 percent per year with everyone feeling the pain – cable, satellite, telco – of steady declines. Similar declines were shown in Europe, while developing countries produced slight increases. During the latest period, pay TV lost 2.1M customers; and while the loss might not seem alarming, it has been consistent for the past five years for all of the participants including Sling, DirecTV and Hulu Plus. To balance their P&Ls, Pay TV services shifted from scripted to reality shows which are less expensive to produce and will undoubtedly impact a lot of content creators who relied on TV shows a major portion of their business. Networks and studios moved their best scripted shows to their fledgling streaming services. In addition, linear TV services supplemented their bottom lines by expanding their ad slots.