Fall Preview

Back in the Paleolithic Era when network TV still ruled the roost, there were few things quite as eagerly anticipated as the Fall Preview edition of TV Guide.

TV Guide, for those of you under 40, was, as the name implies, a printed out program guide for local TV channels, and, eventually, cable channels as well.

There were articles in there too, mostly puff pieces about the various shows and stars. But their Fall Preview issue was the one you checked your mailbox for, coming, as it did, just before Labor Day, which, in the NYC of my youth, marked the start of the school year.

The networks all premiered their series that first week of September, both new and old. The Fall Preview issue gave you a fairly in-depth look at all the new series before they aired, explaining plot lines and casts, while also disclosing the not-all-that-uncommon changes to existing series. (Cousin Oliver, anyone?)

My favorite piece though was the one where they predicted which network would win each night and zeroed in on programming decisions—why did ABC move Charlie’s Angels to Tuesday at 9pm and all that.

Time slots, to refresh your memories (or create new ones) were everything in those days. A “hammock” slot between two hits meant that the network had a lot of faith in the show and assumed it would be a hit, whereas a slot up against another network’s powerhouse was largely assumed to be a vote of no-confidence and the guarantee of a single season only. 

The uber strategy of a hammock slot was to create a show that became a hit in its own right, at which point the network could move that show to anchor a different night as a move against a weaker show on another network.

This strategy did not always work though— back in the 90s, NBC had stuck the Jonathan Silverman vehicle The Single Guy between Friends and Seinfeld in its Thursday night “Must See TV” line-up. While the show’s ratings were high—viewers were not going to turn away for just those 30 minutes—the show never really caught on and was canceled after just two seasons. 

With all that in mind, here are some macro trends we will be looking at this fall:

The Art Of The Churn:

The art of programming—and it really was an art, with far more strategy than a chess match—pretty much disappeared with the move to streaming, where viewing no longer happens en masse.

Instead, we have the dawning of a different sort of strategic skill, the art of preventing churn. 

Churn is the number one issue confronting streaming services right now as they attempt to carve out a clear consumer positioning at a time of massive uncertainty and change.

Is their pitch that they’re ad-free? Ad-supported and cheap? Have lots of hot new shows? A really deep library?

And what types of shows are they going to be known for—HBO-like “peak TV” shows, mass appeal shows? Youth oriented shows? A little bit of everything?

All that makes a difference in keeping people on board.

So does when you release your new series. Is it to counter your rival’s new series? A week before? A week after?

Do you release everything weekly? All at once? In two or three strategic drops?

How do you market your new shows, and to whom?

Do you set up linear channels like Disney to highlight your library programming? Do viewers stay put because they like your library shows? Does having exclusives in your library help reduce churn?

There’s never going to be a single right answer, but the people who know how to tweak those knobs most effectively are going to become the next generation of Fred Silvermans. And we definitely need more of those to keep the industry afloat.

Let’s Play Ball:

Sports on TV is a massive multi-part drama with spinoffs and spinoffs of the spinoffs. Kind of like how All In The Family begot Maude which begat Good Times. 

Only different.

On the main stage, we’ve got Venu getting taken down by Fubo and WBD trying to get a judge to force the NBA to play nice with them. (The two storylines intersect with the notion of a Venu without NBA basketball.)

There are the various NCAA conferences all trying to strike deals with different streaming services, both FAST and SVOD… and a growing interest in sports outside of the Big Four.

There is the Regional Sports Network spin-off, where poor Diamond Sports is not only facing bankruptcy, but they’ve just learned that Amazon is pulling out of underwriting them.

Speaking of pulling out, there are all the MLB and NHL teams pulling out of their RSN agreements and throwing their lot in with a local broadcast station. Or, as the Anaheim Ducks just did, launching their own free streaming service.

There’s consolidation among RSNs and paid streaming services too, at least in New York, where the Mets-Knicks-Rangers-Islanders-Devils MSG app is merging with the Yankees-Nets YES app to form “GAME” (Gotham Advanced Media + Entertainment) to hit all the NYC sports fans in your life for the same $42/month that Venu was going to be charging.

And that’s before you get to the cliffhangers about what the NBA, MLB and NHL are going to do about streaming, whether they will let the teams fend for themselves or whether they’ll step in and decide to follow the NFL’s lead and run the show from on high.

Don’t forget the fans either. It seems the fans are decidedly unhappy about how hard streaming services have made it for them to find games period, let alone the games they want to watch. That was the problem Venu was ostensibly trying to solve. Can anyone else step in?

The Ad Maze:

Advertising on streaming TV—or CTV—or OTT—or AVOD—take your pick from the array of acronyms various people insist on using with little to no consistency—is not easy.

That was, perhaps, to be expected back in the day when the industry was new and everyone was still figuring everything out.

But now we’re a good 10 years in and well, the inmates are getting restless.

There’s a growing sense of frustration at the entire ad community for its utter and total inability to make any progress in cleaning up the ecosystem.

Or, to give you a frequently heard quote “I’ve been going to the same conferences and hearing the same people say the same things since 2018 and nothing is any different.”

That frustration is due to the strongly-held belief that ad dollars are not making their way to streaming at the pace they should be, and that if the current clusterfuck continues, they never will—brands will just take their money and spend it on search and digital display and YouTube and podcasts.

Here again, there are all sorts of spinoffs and mini-series.

Take measurement. Will Nielsen reveal a system that the entire industry can get behind, thus reclaiming their monopoly? Will one of the challengers—iSpot, VideoAmp, Comscore or Samba get the industry’s “we’re all in” nod? What about persons-based measurement—is there someone out there (Telly? TVision? Hyphametrics?) who can solve this? What about ACR data—what happens once Walmart officially takes over VIZIO?

There’s the drama over privacy and ID resolution and the accuracy of data sets. Along with the Return of Contextual as a way to make all those concerns go away. (Look for our TVREV Special Report on contextual targeting this fall.)

There’s an ongoing subplot about watermarking and how to use it as a way to provide better measurement and greater transparency.

And one about the benefits of buying linear and streaming together and selling them jointly—using direct sales for premium inventory on both fronts and automated sales for the rest. (Check out our Webinar on that topic here.)

The final spinoff here is the Is YouTube Really TV show, a series that’s been given new life by the service’s ability to crack 10% of all streaming viewing last month as per Nielsen’s The Gauge.

I’ll just throw this log onto the fire: when you’re looking to watch a 90 second video, having to sit through an ad first, even a very short ad, is annoying AF and makes me think less of the brand behind it. In a way that an ad during a 30 minute TV show does not.

So there’s that too.

What You Need To Do About It

These are the three biggest issues we’re seeing right now, all of them back for a new season and none of them heading towards a series finale either.

Keep your eyes glued to TVREV this fall (figuratively, not literally) as we continue to explore how this is all playing out and analyze the latest plot twists for you.

Happy Fall!