TV To Die Soon. Again.

Okay, this time they really mean it. TV is about to die.

Don't believe me? It's right here in Ad Age in black and white, another fucking article entitled "TV May Actually Die Soon." Can you believe this?

I'm just wondering how many Ad Age stories there have been over the past 15 years about TV dying?

Will  they ever figure out that regardless of what the marketing and media geniuses have to say, people like television. How fucking difficult is that to understand?

As we all know, online viewing of video is "killing" traditional TV. "Nobody" watches live TV anymore. Everybody is watching video online.

That's what we've all learned from going to conferences and listening to media, marketing and digital geniuses speak. It's what we read in the trades and in the press every day.

Only problem is, it's all bullshit.

A new study released by comScore shows that of households with both traditional TV and OTT (video delivered over the internet) for every hour spent with online video people spend about 5 1/2 hours with traditional TV.

Even the top 20% of online video users spend twice as much time with traditional TV.

The bottom 50% of online video streamers, watch 98% of their video on traditional TV.

Despite the fact that Netflix has almost as many subscribers as all cable TV companies combined, and more households have Netflix than a DVR, comScore says,  

"Traditional rules the roost in terms of time spent, as OTT continues to act more as supplemental viewing..."

Then there's this. A report by Pivotal Research Group last week said,  

"...despite the significant growth in access to SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand, e.g., Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu) services over the past few years, consumption of traditional TV programming has not been affected to the degree that many might expect...any expectations around the 'death of TV' because of SVOD services are likely overstated."

Meanwhile, viewership of national news programming is surging. Once again, according to Pivotal,

"YTD viewing of all news-related programming on national media properties is now +12%."

 Last week it was up 23%.

As I speculated last year, what's likely to happen is that the internet media companies who don't call themselves media companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple) who have all the money in the world, are likely over time to buy up TV properties. This is starting to raise its head in the recent Amazon-NFL $50 million football deal.

I'm afraid we're all going to be dead long before TV is.