'American Idol’s' demise and traditional TV’s future
The so-called “upfronts” for television are now underway. That’s when networks sell airtime for their upcoming season to advertisers. And this year’s upfronts have already produced a bombshell: Fox (FOX) announcing that American Idol-- one of the most-successful reality shows ever-- is ending after the 2016 season.
Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer calls it a stunner.
“I remember when they said American Idol could run forever,” he says. “It was like a game show.”
Yahoo’s Bianna Golodryga argues Idol’s success since it hit the air more than a decade ago may actually have led to its demise.
“You’ve seen so many competitors pop up since then,” she notes. “I guess that’s an homage to the fact that this is a growing industry.”
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Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Michael Santoli adds the death of Idol points to the reality that traditional TV is struggling to fend off cable and streaming services like Netflix (NFLX). However, he’s not betting the old guard is dead just yet.
“I don’t think it’s going away,” he says. “It’s in flux, but what TV has enjoyed is called the ‘mass premium.’ Even though the audience is declining, you can’t find an audience as big in one place as you can with the networks.”
However, Santoli explains the advertisers are pushing back against the way commercial buys have been made in the past.
“They want to measure things differently. They want to measure it more accurately in terms of time-shifted viewing,” he notes. “And I think it’s a problem for the networks that want to say, 'buy it all up front, give us a full season’s slate worth of ads and we’ll deliver it to you as promised.'”
Santoli adds the growing popularity of streaming services is actually helping the old-line broadcasters battle cable companies.
“Networks are actually at less of a disadvantage against cable than they have in recent years because cable is really losing the advertising to digital,” he says.
Still, Golodryga points out there is plenty of pessimism about the future of TV as we know it.
“Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, basically gave traditional television two decades to live,” she explains. “I don’t think he’s alone in that.”
Serwer has some anecdotal evidence to back up that point.
“A friend of mine has a five-year-old son who says the only thing he likes watching on TV was YouTube (GOOGL),” he says. “So speaks a five-year-old.”
But as Santoli argues maybe the so-called death of television is nothing more than an exercise in semantics.
“There’s going to be a screen, there’s going to be content,” he points out. “So if you don’t want to call that TV, we’re just going to redefine what that is.”
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