The long, slow death of the TV schedule
Back in 2003, I thought the TV schedule was about to die. Two decades later, its end might finally be in sight.
Back in 2003, when I worked at the BBC, a friend suggested writing scenarios about the future of digital media. This was two decades ago, right at the birth of Web 2.0, a time of huge optimism about digital change, and I was balanced between the old and new worlds, working at the new media dept of the world’s oldest and most respected broadcaster.
I decided to write my scenarios in the form of a set of questions for a Media Studies exam paper in the, then unimaginable, future of 2018. Every now and then I go back to look at it again, and there are a few things in the questions that I think I got kind of right (particularly the ones that talk about identity, privacy and truth). But there’s one question in particular that I keep coming back to, because the future I was imagining through it has taken far longer to arrive than the 15 years I suggested back in 2003. Here’s the question:
3) What was ‘Scheduling’? Discuss giving examples from the major linear media of the late 20th Century.
I remember being really pleased with the use of the past tense in the question, imagining that TV schedules would have receded so far into the past by 2018 that teenagers sitting exam papers would need to write about them as historical objects.
Clearly, I was very wrong, and twenty years on scheduled media is still holding on by its fingertips, the curve of it’s decline over audience attention moving inexorably, but slowly, downwards.
But a couple of things that have happened recently make me feel that we might only see linear scheduled channels around for, maybe, another decade. So my initial prediction of 15 years was perhaps only half right.
The 2023 OFCOM Media Nations report shows that even the most loyal schedule-viewing demographic - over 65s - are now watching less live TV and more streaming. Overall tv/video viewing was down from it’s covid-era peaks of 2020/21, but linear viewing is falling as streaming and other IP viewing takes a bigger share. Live TV has been less than 50% of all video viewing for the last few years, although the traditional PSBs (public service broadcasters) still have 60% of total viewing thanks to their IP platforms:
When you break down this viewing by age cohorts, you can see just how much live scheduled TV viewing is held up by older audiences, as it just a tiny fraction of younger audience’s video viewing:
But it’s not these audience trends that are the potential tipping point I’ve been looking for over the last two decades. The real signs that we’re seeing the end of traditional scheduled TV come not from demographics, but the business models of some of the biggest traditional media companies in the US and UK.
First of all, US cable company Charter released a remarkable investor deck about their spat with Disney on the fees for including ESPN and other linear video channels in their cable bundles. The deck illustrated how the current video ecosystem is broken, as linear video owners tried to keep carriage charges to cable companies artificially high, despite the traditional cable companies losing 25m customers to ‘cord cutting’ in the last 5 years. Its an astonishingly frank and honest deck, laying out how the current business models of linear TV are on a death spiral that could take down both the cable companies and the linear channel owners. That honesty seems to have worked, as the two companies announced a deal shortly afterwards for a hybrid model, with Charter bundling Disney+, their DTC VOD app, along with the linear channels.
Then just yesterday a consortium of the UK Public Service Broadcasters (PSBs) announced a new service called Freely that will deliver live broadcast and VOD via a single app. The project will be run by a new company - Everyone TV - jointly owned by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. All of the PSBs already have their own VOD products, most of which let you stream live TV channels alongside VOD content, so the interesting signal here is why they felt the need to work together on a single app.
The strategy is similar to two previous collaborative projects - Freeview and FreeSat - that were strategic reactions to previous digital change in broadcast TV. In both those cases, the PSBs worked together to provide free alternatives to pay TV channels launched by the then Murdoch-owned Sky TV, and cable networks run by Virgin and other providers.
But the rise of smart TVs and VOD apps from Netflix, Amazon, Disney and others created a much more substantial strategic risk, one in which viewers navigated not through a schedule, but through the different interfaces of the apps they subscribed to. As OFCOM’s Media Nations reports have shown, audiences have quickly moved their TV habits towards VOD viewing, especially in the COVID years of 2020 and 2021, when viewers wanted to escape the doom and gloom of news on scheduled channels to the bright fictional worlds of VOD streamers.
Freely is the PSBs strategic response to this, an attempt to maintain their ‘due prominence’ in a world where regulation cannot mandate audience attention in the way it did in the scheduled TV era. It points to a really interesting insight into what might be the best strategic option for a post-schedule TV world. One of the challenges of the move to VOD has been the ‘unbundling’ of TV into multiple apps and subscriptions. This unbundling particularly affects live sports, one of the few areas of traditional TV schedules that can still attract large audiences, but the PSBs long ago lost the most valuable sporting rights to pay TV competitors. But even outside sport, there are signs that audiences might be reaching peak subscriptions, with newer channels like Lionsgate and Paramount struggling to drive take-up.
This is where a new ‘rebundling’ strategy could work. Both Disney and Charter and the Freely consortium are betting that the final transition from the traditional schedule to a fully internet-delivered broadcast world will not be smooth, and audiences will gravitate to bundles that make this transition less complex. This will be particularly true for older audiences, who might worry more about setting up lots of small monthly payments that are difficult to cancel, learning from their experiences with mobile phone and broadband providers.
Having worked at both Channel 4 and the BBC, I know how hard it is to get multi-stakeholder projects like Freely agreed. In fact, an earlier attempt to create a joint VOD service from the UK PSBs - Project Kangaroo - was killed by the Competition Commission in 2009, clearing the ground for the US-owned VOD platforms to come in and dominate a decade later. The fact that Freely is happening now, and that it appeared fully-formed with little gossip or fanfare, shows that the PSBs know this is their last chance to maintain prominence with audiences as they abandon the schedule.
If I was to update my 2003 scenario, I think I’d kick the date of the exam paper down the road a bit more, maybe to 2033, doubling my initial 15 year prediction to 30 years. And I’d add a bit of optimism, as my core belief in the social good of public sector broadcasting means I really want to see Freely succeed in helping PSBs transition from the era of the schedule to the era of the bundle. So here’s my updated version:
3) What was ‘Scheduling’? Discuss giving examples of how unbundling and rebundling changed the landscape of the TV and Video industries in early 21st century.
Come back in 2043 and we’ll see if I was right.